| You can't ignore API reasons though. 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. |
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