[coldtea]

>As a single, insignificant data point: I just bought my first Windows laptop after 2008. I kept waiting for Apple to release Skylake professional machines. Just gave up waiting for them.

The Skylake processors meant for the MacBook Pros have not yet made available by Intel. They were announced last year but are still either not available at all (TBD) or available at small quantities.

The PC competitors rushed to put out PCs with whatever Skylake models Intels put out, models that have marginal gais (or sometimes even worse performance) compared to earlier Haswell.

The worst one can say about Apple is not about them not rushing to adopt the BS early Skylake models that are unfit for the MBP, but that they held the prices of MBPr with older processors high while people are waiting for the refresh.

That said, Apple has already put out Skylake Macbook and Skylake iMacs.

[jwatte]

Meanwhile, it is literally impossible to buy a Mac that has a GPU good enough for VR.

[wlesieutre]

It's not just VR where Macs are having trouble. Blizzard has historically been a bastion of Mac game development even when it was a niche platform, but Overwatch is Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation. For a bit of history, here are their Mac titles:

• Blackthorne

• Warcraft

• Diablo

• Starcraft + Brood War

• Warcraft II

• Diablo II + Lord of Destruction

• Warcraft III + Frozen Throne

• World of Warcraft + Burning Crusade + Wrath of the Lich King + Cataclysm + Mists of Panderia + Warlords of Draenor + Legion

• Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty + Heart of the Swarm + Legacy of the Void

• Diablo III + Reaper of Souls

• Hearthstone

• Heroes of the Storm

And here's what they have to say about their latest blockbuster title, Overwatch:

> Currently with the technology behind Macs and the way Overwatch runs it's just too challenging for us at this point to support it. Our focus right now is entirely on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. [1]

Mac marketshare has grown by leaps and bounds over what it was in the 90's, and Blizzard drops Mac support for the first time ever. Their last (well, only) game that shipped on PCs and didn't make it to Mac was The Lost Vikings in 1992 on MS-DOS. Overwatch is the only one to see a Windows release without Mac.

Bummer. Hopefully a port is eventually in the cards.

[1] http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/6/9686370/overwatch-mac-os-x-...

[astrodust]

Overwatch is probably the most challenging in that list to properly port. Hearthstone isn't performance sensitive, frames per second and such doesn't matter, lag isn't an issue so long as it's not perceptible. In an FPS you're always slave to the clock, every millisecond counts, and the OpenGL support isn't there to squeeze what they need out of the mid-range GPUs.

Presumably this means Bizzard isn't interested in porting to Metal.

[oddevan]

Last I heard, Blizzard ported World of Warcraft over to Metal with significant improvements. It wouldn't surprise me, though, if the relative age of the current Mac hardware is to blame.

[coldtea]

Well, 99% of PC laptops sold don't have one either.

It's a niche field, and it concerns all of a few million (if that). When it becomes actually mainstream, it would be catered by mainstream oriented companies.

Heck, Apple doesn't even care about gaming, and that's quite a larger niche compared to VR, but still not people who appreciate the kind of details Apple focuses on (lightweight, thin, power efficient, etc). Gamers would rather build a custom rig. Plus, they're a demographic that fades off quickly after 25 or so.

[beamso]

>The Skylake processors meant for the MacBook Pros have not yet made available by Intel. They were announced last year but are still either not available at all (TBD) or available at small quantities.

>The worst one can say about Apple is not about them not rushing to adopt the BS early Skylake models that are unfit for the MBP, but that they held the prices of MBPr with older processors high while people are waiting for the refresh.

The 15" models still use Haswell processors, not Broadwell like the 13".

[sjwright]

Haswell vs Broadwell is a very incremental change. Pick any metric you like and it'll be better by at most 10 percent. In most practical metrics it's a lot less than that.

[beamso]

It's not about it being an incremental change.

Come this Friday, the same CPUs have been shipping in the 15" retina MacBook Pros for 2 years. Last spec bump was May 2015, but the change to Haswell processors was in late July 2014.