It looks like the local-LLM enthusiasts will want to use Apple computers. This is funny to me for some reason, like if the most cost-effective work boot of 2025 is produced by Gucci.
Local LLMs do best on big GPUs, which aren’t an option on Macs.
What Apple has done with the M-series silicon is really impressive, but it’s not as fast as big, dedicated GPU silicon.
> like if the most cost-effective work boot of 2025 is produced by Gucci.
Apple M-silicon laptops are high quality, but they’re not the same as overpriced luxury goods. The price of entry level M1/M2 Macs is extremely reasonable, IMO.
> Local LLMs do best on big GPUs, which aren’t an option on Macs.
For processing speed, Ms are fast but I agree not anywhere near a top Nvdia chip.
For memory size, the memory on an M chip can be used as graphics memory, so a person could get an M2 today with 128GB of graphics memory for ~ $5k. Not bad considering an Nvidia chip approaching that memory size is several times that much.
> Local LLMs do best on big GPUs, which aren’t an option on Macs. What Apple has done with the M-series silicon is really impressive, but it’s not as fast as big, dedicated GPU silicon.
It'd be pretty silly for Apple to cram in big, dedicated GPU when 99.9% of their customers don't care and don't want to pay for it, especially considering that anyone that does want big, dedicated GPU can outboard as much GPU as they want.[1] And many seem to think that the onboard GPU along with Neural Engine should be adequate for local LLM.
1) Apple Silicon won't support PCIe.
2) Apple doesn't want it to.
#2 means Apple is taking nVidia and AMD head on in the GPU space. Apple wants to control everything, and allowing these competitors on their platform is giving away too much. Because Apple Silicon scales better than competitors' hw, the desire for third party GPU is probably going to evaporate within a few generations of Apple Silicon. I mean, we'll see, but that is my best guess, because it seems like that was an intentional decision rather than oversight.
To suggest it is merely lack of drivers is an oversimplification. There is a chip errata that prevents PCIe GPUs from working properly on Apple Silicon: the architectures are not compatible. Apple Silicon GPU drivers are deeply integrated into the system. Due to this integration, only graphics cards that use the same GPU architecture as Apple Silicon could be supported, and there just aren't any, and I don't see how there could be unless Apple developed one and released it.
> It could be that Apple does away with it entirely and the Mac Studio is the new Pro.
Or the Mac Pro will be released without PCIe GPU support, and Apple will be able to leverage increases in Apple Silicon GPU performance to eliminate any need or desire for PCIe GPU, drawing away high end GPU customers from nVidia and AMD and locking them into Apple Silicon and the Apple ecosystem.
There is no cheaper way to have 50gb of memory allocated to your GPU compute pipeline (buy a 64gb macbook pro or studio). So yes big, only the fast aspect remains a reason to buy expensive dedicated gpu's
It's not yet. Apples combined memory architecture enables them to significantly cut the cost of bundling more memory for various GPU, Neural or other domain specific cores. I believe they will catch up or even overtake Nvidia as the leading AI platform.
Desktop AI class GPUs are hell expensive. If Apple can get something 50% as performant, but in an iPhone Pro or MacBook Air, thats going to change so very much.
It's so funny to see Apple's "combined memory architecture" praised. When Intel did this a decade+ ago with its integrated GPUs, it was roundly slated.
Well, the difference is that compared to a baseline where GPUs typically get faster RAM than CPUs, Apple is providing fast RAM to both, whereas Intel provided slow RAM to both. Of course, that’s hardly Intel’s fault given that their integrated GPUs are aimed at the low end and are usually paired with external socketed RAM.
but AI class GPUs are expensive because NVidia can pretty much ask whatever it wants as it has no competition. If Apple were to become competitive in the area, things can change.
> The price of entry level M1/M2 Macs is extremely reasonable, IMO.
Caveats: In the US, with low ram and low storage.
Without these caveats you look at about 2000€ or so (m2 macbook air with 16gb of ram and non-halved storage performance in Germany). That can still be a decent deal for what you get, but "extremely reasonable" -- not quite.
It is a little funny... but the combination of pretty good integrated graphics and (potentially) large amounts of on package ram mean that macs are actually a pretty inexpensive way to get access to a GPU with lots of graphics memory.
A lot of people will likely blame APIs etc, but that’s just an easy scapegoat for people outside the game dev industry.
The reality is likely just market share, hardware and the makeup of that market share.
Macs used to actually be a big gaming platform once upon a time. Myst was a Mac exclusive (built with HyperCard) and Bungie used to make games for macs first before getting bought by Microsoft.
But windows got the upper edge:
1. Much larger slice of the market
2. More of the market is made up of gaming enthusiasts than Macs which are usually either targeting light use, education or professional.
3. You can make affordable gaming PCs with windows. You can’t really do it with any kind of Mac because there’s no product for that market between the Mac Mini and iMac (which were targeted at more casual users) up to the Mac Pro and iMac Pro (which were targeted at professional users)
It’s easier to target the biggest piece of the pie and the one that will buy your products.
That’s why the “API” reason never makes sense, because iOS is THE dominant gaming platform despite having the same APIs as a mac. Game engines often need to support multiple graphics APIs anyway.
So Mac gaming did take off, but it fumbled and never recovered. Part of that is that Apple themselves fumbled as a company, on the verge of bankruptcy before the return of Jobs. What made them successful post his return is also what killed gaming on their platforms: they targeted a different audience.
Before Metal, macOS used to ship with old OpenGL versions. I remember around the Tiger days (10.4) OpenGL was 4-5 years old compared to the version shipped in Windows. And with DirectX, Windows had a better API about two decades before Metal for macOS was released.
I do agree with your other points. Macs are expensive so they are always going to be a niche market. And in most countries, Apple products are luxury products.
Another point is really that Windows GPUs have always been more powerful. If you wanted to play the latest AAA games at good quality and fps you had to be on Windows.
And there's also an ouroboros vicious circle. Devs don't put effort into the Mac because there aren't many gamers on it, and there aren't many gamers on it because dev don't put too much effort. And it doesn't help the decisions that Apple has taken to further ostracize themselves form the desktop gaming market.
> iOS is THE dominant gaming platform
In the US. Worldwide iOS has like 28% market share I believe.
Nevertheless, Apple could really become a gaming powerhouse outside of mobile. If they released an AppleTV with a gamepad and an M3 chip, they bought or partnered with a couple of good console/desktop game studios (not mobile game studios).
The AppleTV already has games but there's not a lot of good content and Apple doesn't even provide an official gamepad. It's clear Apple doesn't care much about gaming outside of iOS.
They are making such a device. It’s called a Mac mini.
Seriously though, one hiccup for gaming in macs is the screen resolution: it’s not until recently you could get good performance at such high dpis in games, especially on a laptop. Now that gpus can push those pixels better than before, it will start being more viable to make games for macs
Also, macs are all about being premium while enabling ecosystem lock in. When they have to compete with diy desktops with hot swappable, upgradeable hardware, how can apple possibly charge such a premium for their gaming machines? How can they differentiate via software when gamers don’t care about their os — they want their os to get out of the way so they can game? Apple can’t. So they don’t even try. It would hurt their brand to be seen struggling like that
They won’t compete until they see a way to use their playbooks to gain a platform advantage. Eg, ar/vr with m3 chips
I just don’t think API matters if the capabilities are there. Look at Linux gaming, OpenGL was up to date and prevalent, but the majority of games are actually translating DirectX to Vulkan and using WINE.
Most games are using off the shelf engines that support Metal anyway, so I think api would only matter for the small subset of games using custom engines.
Regarding your point of the US, I should clarify that I didn’t mean by market share, though I suppose that’s also true in the US. I meant by profit.
According to the WSJ , Apple makes more from gaming than Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Activision combined worldwide.
> iOS is THE dominant gaming platform despite having the same APIs as a mac
The problem with OpenGL ES AIUI (especially in the early days) is that it exposes lots of hardware specific weirdness. The reason this works for iOS is the same reason it works for Nintendo etc. Millions of devices with identical hardware.
I don't think the race is over yet, but it is really entirely up to developers, not Apple. Apple Silicon isn't quite 3yo yet, and it is hard to say right now what the gaming landscape will look like in another five years. Technically, however, though it is somewhat of a cheat, as soon as Apple released the first M1 Mac, the new platform instantly had nearly an order of magnitude more games than PC. While there are something like 50K games available through Steam, and x86 Macs only had like 7K, as soon as the M1 was released, early Apple Silicon Mac users had access to something like 450K AppStore games from iOS and iPadOS. Plus, Steam was ported to macOS, and Rosetta 2 allows many x86 PC games to run adequately in emulation (virtualized + emulation). This may not be satisfactory for hard core gamers than need massive fps, but I don't think it can be honestly claimed anymore that Macs suck for gaming. At the very least, they're competitive, and that's only going to get better, though how much better is, again, up to developers.
I don't know, but if I had to guess it would that Apple was never really interested in it or in supporting it. I fondly remember some companies (like Blizzard) who would always support Macs, until they stopped (looking at you, Diablo 4).
I think it might be a chicken/egg problem. Most Macs of don't come with hardware that's good for games. That doesn't matter though because no consumer asks for better gaming hardware in new Macs because there aren't many games. People who care about games, know they don't get it on Macs and thus have either a console or a gaming PC in addition. I play games, but generally it's just a nice surprise if I see that a Steam game supports macOS. It's so far away from being a viable primary gaming system that it's just accepted at this point.
The list of games that directly support Vulkan is incredibly small. As much as it gets bandied about as the solution, it’s not really used all that much without translation layers.
If you care about the combination of portability, battery life, performance, and display+audio quality, then Apple’s laptops have been price competitive for quite a while now. People who think they are overpriced usually don’t care about at least one of these things.
Plenty of non-Apple laptops support 64GB RAM. For example, both the AMD and Intel variants of the Framework Laptop can take 64GB. All of of the large vendors have laptops that support a 64GB configuration too (HP, Dell, Lenovo).
What Apple has done with the M-series silicon is really impressive, but it’s not as fast as big, dedicated GPU silicon.
> like if the most cost-effective work boot of 2025 is produced by Gucci.
Apple M-silicon laptops are high quality, but they’re not the same as overpriced luxury goods. The price of entry level M1/M2 Macs is extremely reasonable, IMO.