[tonygrue]

As the article alludes, lack of a build your own, flexible yet affordable desktop option seems to be a pretty deadly aspect.

Pretty much Mac owners are on laptops. Even in the PC world few laptops can power VR. Those that do tend to be bulky for cooling and have nVidia GPUs; both things which MacBooks seem unwilling to have.

Having a extensible desktop at 1k that supports nVidia would probably go a long way.

[chongli]

lack of a build your own, flexible yet affordable desktop option

From Apple's perspective, that's a machine with razor-thin margins. Why would they want to sell that when all of their other products have enviable margins?

Moreover, such a machine would cannibalize their high-end Mac Pro sales. After all the money they spent to develop it, having your pro customers scoop up the thin margin gaming machines seems like a poor strategy.

[rleigh]

I'm unconvinced that it would cannibalise Mac Pro sales. The Mac Pro is so unnecessarily expensive that it has to exclude all but the richest companies and individuals. It's for people who have money to blow on £600 novelty chrome wheels as an afterthought. Apple have clearly noticed that there's a market for people with more money than sense, but it's a small niche.

The market for mid- to high-end desktops is indeed lower margin, but it's a much bigger market overall. The old Mac Pro was at the high end of this market. Expensive, but justifiable if you needed it. If Apple had the will, they could be profitable in this space. They have chosen to exclude themselves from it.

Back in the mid '00s, I saw Mac Pros in use in scientific research settings, because they allowed use of lots of RAM compared to equivalent PC mainboards of the time, could take lots of storage, and had lots of horsepower to throw at bioinformatics and modelling problems. We had compute clusters as well, but for some problems these were a better fit. Today, Macs are banned. The academic funding bodies don't consider them good value for money. And they are not wrong in that assessment.

[baby]

That doesn't convince me, I use to run windows with bootcamp on a macbook pro and play there. It worked.

[sysbin]

As a gamer with a macbook pro. I just use shadow to play games over the cloud. Otherwise I would invest in a eGPU. So it's not like apple gamers are missing out if they want to game with good graphics.

[deadbunny]

> Otherwise I would invest in a eGPU. So it's not like apple gamers are missing out if they want to game with good graphics.

You're not going to get very far without drivers an you'll be stuck on OpenGL 4.1 and Metal. That and you'll have the problem that there are less games built for MacOS than Windows an Linux + Proton.

Investing in a GPU for MacOS for gaming would be a huge waste of money IMO.

[sysbin]

People can bootcamp if they want to run windows with a good gpu on their laptop. You're also missing the cloud gaming part.

[iphone_elegance]

I'm not sold on cloud gaming yet, I gave pubg on stadia a whirl today (on my google fiber) and it was somewhat laggy and blurry compared to even my not-highend rx580 which only cost me about what a year or so of stadia would (not including the games)

[fortran77]

What? You'll run an unsupported card over 4 slow PCIe lanes over thunderbolt in some third party box? That's a terrible experience.

[sysbin]

See other comment and it hasn't been a bad experience for me. Have you personally tried it? I used to have a windows desktop just for gaming and before I decided to limit what I own.

[numpad0]

Having to purchase overpriced box on top of already costly GPU and wiring all up including one power adapter each for laptop and eGPU is already a bad experience.

Already a terrible experience.

[yellowapple]

At least in theory (going off marketing materials¹ for one such device, though I personally lack first-hand experience here, and said device doesn't advertise itself as Mac-compatible), the eGPU should function as the power source for the laptop, so you'd only need one power adapter (for the eGPU).

Really, this experience actually sounds pretty pleasant.

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¹: https://www.asus.com/Graphics-Cards-Accessories/ROG-XG-STATI...