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I don't really understand the positive opinion around this. Isn't the break from the Windows and Linux default architecture and thus software too high here? Lik

by onli 6y ago

I don't really understand the positive opinion around this. Isn't the break from the Windows and Linux default architecture and thus software too high here? Like in gaming - are Apple users really okay with not having access to a single Steam game? Okay, the ones using this only for ~~work~~ office work, the browser and Netflix won't mind, but for the rest this presents a huge separation from what is available elsewhere. I must miss something.

_bxg1 6y ago
Very few people use Macs for gaming, and many of those that do probably just play Apple Arcade games (which I'm sure will have a smooth upgrade path). And most of the games people play that are on Steam are (these days) built with either Unity or Unreal, which will no doubt have 1-click-rebuilds for the new architecture. In Unity your game logic doesn't even need to compile to native code. Even beyond games, the thing is that nearly every development platform these days is an abstraction above the hardware - be it the JVM, the web browser, etc - and the rest (of the new ones coming out) are built to be cross-platform from the get go. Just look at how smoothly Rust/Cargo can target different architectures. I'm sure the same is true for Go.
- onli 6y ago
  > And most of the games people play that are on Steam are (these days) built with either Unity or Unreal, which will no doubt have 1-click-rebuilds for the new architecture. I highly doubt that. The architecture difference is too big, and gaming studios are not known to press that button even if it's available. The native Linux gaming support story speaks to that. That they will port existing games is even more unlikely. Will be funny to re-read that comment in the future, be it right or wrong.
  - xigency 6y ago
    The entire draw of Unity and Unreal is that they target all platforms. With regards to Linux, Epic Games has released their games for Linux in the past. There is no commercial incentive to release games for Linux, though. The game engines will support Mac ARM if game developers require that feature, and game developers will target Mac ARM if there is a commercial case for it. The existence of gaming on Mac I think is largely due to companies that support it by choice, like Blizzard, and I don't see why they would abandon the platform due to a CPU architecture change.
    - onli 6y ago
      I disagree with almost everything in this comment. Unity and Unreal do not only exist for their multiplatform target, but because they are premade engines to make games with in general. Many games made with them support one single platform. There is absolutely a commercial incentive to release Linux games. Developers would not do it otherwise, or at least they would have stopped after one try. They did not. I highly doubt that Blizzard supports MacOS out of goodwill, and I doubt even more that if it was based on that, they could easily continue doing so after a cpu architecture change. They'd have to port whole custom engines plus middleware. That would not happen in that case. One thing I assume is correct: If there is money to be made here engine developers and game developers will make it happen. But I don't see why it would be that easy.
- simion314 6y ago
  Just giving you some data points, there are many people that play older games on their laptops, one such community is the Sims3 players, they got screwed when 32 bits support was dropped, some still hope EA will make a 64 bit soon (IMO it makes no sense for the devs to do the work for free for this old game). So the people the play games on Mac are not the same group that play latest AAA shooters or arcade games, they are people that play some casual games or retro games on their laptops so no "hardcore gamers"
  - sutterbomb 6y ago
    That’s not really “data points” in any useful sense of the word. The sim3 community could be a few thousand people - still large enough to be a community where this came up as a noticed issue, but not meaningfully large in any real sense as far as Apple is concerned.
    - simion314 6y ago
      Sure, I don't say that Apple should do X op Y. I just wanted to present some example of people that game on Mac, because some people in this HN forum would think that gaming means only latest AAA games or console gaming. There are people that don't have a dedicated gaming device, they are not that many as percentages but they exist and they are affected by the 32 bit drop and other backward incompatibility updates. So it is possible that this people when they buy a new laptop would not buy an ARM Mac buy a Windows one to continue playing the casual or old games - sure Apple can ignore them because as percentages is nothing for their giant vault of money.
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    The story is admittedly different when we're talking about legacy games that are no longer supported. Even if pushing the button is easy, if there's nobody there to do it, that doesn't help. But the good news it that game life cycles have gotten much longer; where in the past a game was seen as a fire-and-forget project, these days a game may get active updates for five or more years after launch. And not just AAA, but indies too.
cwhiz 6y ago
Gaming on Apple hardware is dead. Apple killed it when they killed 32 bit support. But I have had a pretty nice experience with GeForce Now. I don’t see why that would have to change with macOS ARM.
- onli 6y ago
  Good point, streaming games would continue to work.
xigency 6y ago
> That means that the next version of the MacBook Air, for example, could be cheaper even as it has better battery life and far better performance As someone who does web development work on a MacBook Air and plays games on a Windows Desktop it’s good news for me. I think the fraction of Mac users that play games on Mac is pretty slim.
epistasis 6y ago
I'm totally fine without having a single Steam game. Most Mac users didn't have access for many years, and I'm not sure that gaming is a big use case for Macs, at least historically. I would be interested to see if this has changed. And most software that I depend upon is either 1) open source, or 2) developed for Mac first and foremost with a solid backup app that is open source. The one exception is Microsoft Office, whose Mac versions are second thoughts and second rate software, but necessary for collaboration with a world that has locked itself into closed formats. Office would likely get an Arm version for Mac too, I would think.
- georgeecollins 6y ago
  People always underestimate how important games are to PC sales, and Apple is traditionally the worst about this given their bicycle for the mind rhetoric. I don't think it is a coincidence that Apple laptops became very popular after you started being able to boot them in Windows to play a game. You got the benefit of MacOS, Apple hardware and PC game libraries.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    I know a lot of people wi Th Macs, but they are all developers or scientists, and I've never known anybody to install Windows via boot camp! So I'm clearly not in this demographic. However I do wonder how large it is compared to the rest of the Mac userbase.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    I doubt very many people are buying Macs to run Windows games. Mac hardware doesn’t exactly come with the greatest GPUs.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      "How many people buy Macs to run Windows games" is the wrong question. I don't buy computers just to read websites (I can do that more comfortably on an iPad), or just to write documents (ever heard of the FreeWrite[1]?), or just to play games (I'd rather use a game console). Rather, I buy a computer because it's a single device that can do all of those things. I almost added "and switch between them seamlessly" to the end of the last sentence, but of course on a Mac with Bootcamp, that's the one exception—you have to reboot in order to play a game. Still, on a laptop, I consider the ability quite valuable—I don't want to carry around a second computer just to play a quick game of Spelunky from time to time. If I couldn't do that at all on a Mac, it would be a point in favor of Windows. --- 1: https://getfreewrite.com/ https://getfreewrite.com/
mcspiff 6y ago
Assuming this is targeting the lower end of the Apple line up, AAA gaming wasn't really much of a thing to begin with. In general though, iOS/iPadOS has a pretty expansive gaming lineup. I’d expect that library to mostly end up working on any hypothetical ARM-based macOS machines. Especially considering the iPads are already adding keyboard and mouse support.
tpush 6y ago
> [...] are Apple users really okay with not having access to a single Steam game? The fraction of people using Macs that care about gaming is tiny, and among them those who care about Steam even more so.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pier25 6y ago
  I agree. I do care about gaming but I have a dedicated PC for that. OTOH would Mac users have cared more about gaming if the platform hadn't shipped with obsolete versions of OpenGL and Metal had been introduced much sooner? Before Metal was introduced in macOS the included OpenGL version was like 4-5 years behind.
akmarinov 6y ago
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... Only 4% of people using Steam are using a Mac, gaming isn't that popular on macOS, unfortunately. And it's getting worse with the OpenGL deprecation.
- onli 6y ago
  That's still about 5 million users. Looks huge to me. Well, maybe that's tiny from some perspective.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    Negligible compared to the 738 million iPhone users.
    - onli 6y ago
      But we are talking about the MacOS users, not iPhone users... They won't be affected by this.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Apple sells about 20-25 million Macs a year. That’s negligible to Apple to lose some small percentage of a segment that’s only 10% of it revenue. Think about how many games died when they dropped 32 bit support.
        onli 6y ago
        There are many good arguments in this thread and I honestly appreciate to see the many perspectives, also this one. But I can't get behind that argument. If all you sell is 20-25 million, to possibly lose 5 million of that is huge. Think about how much they would have to save with the processor move (or how much performance they'd have to gain to make up for it in new sales) to make it worth it. Also, the effort will be huge to make the transition work. All while there is the easy alternative to just use AMD processors if they wanted a performance boost? I mean, I'm happy about this. It will probably further cement Linux as the only relevant gaming OS next to Windows. But I'm still surprised. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if it happens.
burlesona 6y ago
I game on Mac, and I’m not excited about losing access to Steam. But I have a 2018 MBP and I probably wouldn’t upgrade for a few years yet anyway. Depending on how the announcement and rollout goes I could see myself buying one of the last intel 16” MacBooks, or just being content with my 2018, and either way not upgrading for a while. I suspect that if the transition is “successful,” the first year or two on ARM will include a few noticeable trade offs, but those will quickly be “washed away” by a substantial performance gap where Apple’s hardware is just a LOT better than everyone else. And if the transition is “unsuccessful,” well, I may end up finally buying a gaming PC... or just deciding I don’t care about the small handful of PC games I play and sticking to console. Gaming on Mac has been second class for.... ever, so I would say anyone who really cares already has a windows machine. But one last thought, keep in mind that while the quality of games is somewhat lower, the quantity on iOS is off the charts, including many games with high end graphics. In a weird twist of fate, it’s possible that Apple’s decision to merge its desktops and laptops into the same architecture as its mobile phones actually increases the total addressable market so much that game makers are _more_ interested in doing the small amount of extra work it would take to make a game work on Mac as well as iOS. This happened when Firaxis started making Civ for iOS and then ended up updating the Mac version to use Metal, and when they did the performance was worlds better.
samcat116 6y ago
Here's a counter point to this argument: take Fortnite for example. Its arguably the most popular game on the world. The current Mac version runs fine but not great. They could modify the iPad version (probably pretty easily) and get better performance on these new ARM Macs than the x86 version was ever going to be due to Apple refusing to put in great gaming GPUs.
dannyw 6y ago
Intel has been stagnating and dropping the ball for years. AMD is catching up but still just caught up to Intel, more or less. I welcome competition. I want CPUs to get faster again.
tobyhinloopen 6y ago
I don’t care about steam on mac - i have a gaming PC. Companies that still care will compile an ARM version just as easily.
klohto 6y ago
1) Let’s take the latest amount of active steam players per month, which is 90MM. That is a number for 2019, I will assume that it grew a little per the usual percentage it does (accounting for Covid) to 100MM. 4% is 4MM. 2) Macbook Pro & Macbook Air have a total share of 78%. I’m ignoring other models, since we are talking about ARM on notebooks, not towers. That brings the number of players to 3,1MM 3) We can assume that most people still rock macbooks since 2012. But let’s start counting from 2013. (We don’t have unit sales, but only the total amount, so I work with the amount that most websites quote) Apple, on average, sells 18MM Macs per fiscal year. Till today, that is 135MM Macs the market. 4) We need to estimate the amount of Macbooks vs Macs, but I cannot find a single stat on this. I’m gonna pull this out of my ass and say that it’s around 90%. The Macs have always been supplemental to Macbooks and Apple has been “forgetting” about them a lot. This brings the total to 121,5MM 5) That is 2,56% of people who game on Macbook. I would say Apple doesn’t care about ~3%. This stat also doesn’t account for hardcore vs casual players. Eq. Those who won’t care vs those who will switch platforms.
Leherenn 6y ago
Didn't they drop most of the games already with Catalina, since most of them are 32-bits?
thewebcount 6y ago
I have about 35 Mac games on my Steam account. I avoid Steam like the plague because its interface is awful and the experience of using it is awful compared to most other software. I love Apple Arcade's subscription model, but it's still coming up to speed. The offerings it has aren't great yet, but I suspect they will be with time. If Apple can improve its offerings on Arcade, I'll never look back. I don't need to play the latest FPS and I suspect other Mac users also don't fit that demographic. If Valve doesn't want to port Steam to an ARM-based macOS, I'll simply drop Steam. It's that easy because Steam offers very little of value for me, personally. I've heard from others that they feel the same, though I can't say how prevalent that feeling is among Mac gamers.

by onli 6y ago

_bxg1 6y ago

Very few people use Macs for gaming, and many of those that do probably just play Apple Arcade games (which I'm sure will have a smooth upgrade path). And most of the games people play that are on Steam are (these days) built with either Unity or Unreal, which will no doubt have 1-click-rebuilds for the new architecture. In Unity your game logic doesn't even need to compile to native code. Even beyond games, the thing is that nearly every development platform these days is an abstraction above the hardware - be it the JVM, the web browser, etc - and the rest (of the new ones coming out) are built to be cross-platform from the get go. Just look at how smoothly Rust/Cargo can target different architectures. I'm sure the same is true for Go.

onli 6y ago
> And most of the games people play that are on Steam are (these days) built with either Unity or Unreal, which will no doubt have 1-click-rebuilds for the new architecture. I highly doubt that. The architecture difference is too big, and gaming studios are not known to press that button even if it's available. The native Linux gaming support story speaks to that. That they will port existing games is even more unlikely. Will be funny to re-read that comment in the future, be it right or wrong.
- xigency 6y ago
  The entire draw of Unity and Unreal is that they target all platforms. With regards to Linux, Epic Games has released their games for Linux in the past. There is no commercial incentive to release games for Linux, though. The game engines will support Mac ARM if game developers require that feature, and game developers will target Mac ARM if there is a commercial case for it. The existence of gaming on Mac I think is largely due to companies that support it by choice, like Blizzard, and I don't see why they would abandon the platform due to a CPU architecture change.
  - onli 6y ago
    I disagree with almost everything in this comment. Unity and Unreal do not only exist for their multiplatform target, but because they are premade engines to make games with in general. Many games made with them support one single platform. There is absolutely a commercial incentive to release Linux games. Developers would not do it otherwise, or at least they would have stopped after one try. They did not. I highly doubt that Blizzard supports MacOS out of goodwill, and I doubt even more that if it was based on that, they could easily continue doing so after a cpu architecture change. They'd have to port whole custom engines plus middleware. That would not happen in that case. One thing I assume is correct: If there is money to be made here engine developers and game developers will make it happen. But I don't see why it would be that easy.
simion314 6y ago
Just giving you some data points, there are many people that play older games on their laptops, one such community is the Sims3 players, they got screwed when 32 bits support was dropped, some still hope EA will make a 64 bit soon (IMO it makes no sense for the devs to do the work for free for this old game). So the people the play games on Mac are not the same group that play latest AAA shooters or arcade games, they are people that play some casual games or retro games on their laptops so no "hardcore gamers"
- sutterbomb 6y ago
  That’s not really “data points” in any useful sense of the word. The sim3 community could be a few thousand people - still large enough to be a community where this came up as a noticed issue, but not meaningfully large in any real sense as far as Apple is concerned.
  - simion314 6y ago
    Sure, I don't say that Apple should do X op Y. I just wanted to present some example of people that game on Mac, because some people in this HN forum would think that gaming means only latest AAA games or console gaming. There are people that don't have a dedicated gaming device, they are not that many as percentages but they exist and they are affected by the 32 bit drop and other backward incompatibility updates. So it is possible that this people when they buy a new laptop would not buy an ARM Mac buy a Windows one to continue playing the casual or old games - sure Apple can ignore them because as percentages is nothing for their giant vault of money.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  The story is admittedly different when we're talking about legacy games that are no longer supported. Even if pushing the button is easy, if there's nobody there to do it, that doesn't help. But the good news it that game life cycles have gotten much longer; where in the past a game was seen as a fire-and-forget project, these days a game may get active updates for five or more years after launch. And not just AAA, but indies too.

cwhiz 6y ago

Gaming on Apple hardware is dead. Apple killed it when they killed 32 bit support. But I have had a pretty nice experience with GeForce Now. I don’t see why that would have to change with macOS ARM.

onli 6y ago
Good point, streaming games would continue to work.

xigency 6y ago

> That means that the next version of the MacBook Air, for example, could be cheaper even as it has better battery life and far better performance As someone who does web development work on a MacBook Air and plays games on a Windows Desktop it’s good news for me. I think the fraction of Mac users that play games on Mac is pretty slim.

epistasis 6y ago

I'm totally fine without having a single Steam game. Most Mac users didn't have access for many years, and I'm not sure that gaming is a big use case for Macs, at least historically. I would be interested to see if this has changed. And most software that I depend upon is either 1) open source, or 2) developed for Mac first and foremost with a solid backup app that is open source. The one exception is Microsoft Office, whose Mac versions are second thoughts and second rate software, but necessary for collaboration with a world that has locked itself into closed formats. Office would likely get an Arm version for Mac too, I would think.

georgeecollins 6y ago
People always underestimate how important games are to PC sales, and Apple is traditionally the worst about this given their bicycle for the mind rhetoric. I don't think it is a coincidence that Apple laptops became very popular after you started being able to boot them in Windows to play a game. You got the benefit of MacOS, Apple hardware and PC game libraries.
- epistasis 6y ago
  I know a lot of people wi Th Macs, but they are all developers or scientists, and I've never known anybody to install Windows via boot camp! So I'm clearly not in this demographic. However I do wonder how large it is compared to the rest of the Mac userbase.
- scarface74 6y ago
  I doubt very many people are buying Macs to run Windows games. Mac hardware doesn’t exactly come with the greatest GPUs.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    "How many people buy Macs to run Windows games" is the wrong question. I don't buy computers just to read websites (I can do that more comfortably on an iPad), or just to write documents (ever heard of the FreeWrite[1]?), or just to play games (I'd rather use a game console). Rather, I buy a computer because it's a single device that can do all of those things. I almost added "and switch between them seamlessly" to the end of the last sentence, but of course on a Mac with Bootcamp, that's the one exception—you have to reboot in order to play a game. Still, on a laptop, I consider the ability quite valuable—I don't want to carry around a second computer just to play a quick game of Spelunky from time to time. If I couldn't do that at all on a Mac, it would be a point in favor of Windows. --- 1: https://getfreewrite.com/ https://getfreewrite.com/

mcspiff 6y ago

Assuming this is targeting the lower end of the Apple line up, AAA gaming wasn't really much of a thing to begin with. In general though, iOS/iPadOS has a pretty expansive gaming lineup. I’d expect that library to mostly end up working on any hypothetical ARM-based macOS machines. Especially considering the iPads are already adding keyboard and mouse support.

tpush 6y ago

> [...] are Apple users really okay with not having access to a single Steam game? The fraction of people using Macs that care about gaming is tiny, and among them those who care about Steam even more so.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pier25 6y ago
I agree. I do care about gaming but I have a dedicated PC for that. OTOH would Mac users have cared more about gaming if the platform hadn't shipped with obsolete versions of OpenGL and Metal had been introduced much sooner? Before Metal was introduced in macOS the included OpenGL version was like 4-5 years behind.

akmarinov 6y ago

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... Only 4% of people using Steam are using a Mac, gaming isn't that popular on macOS, unfortunately. And it's getting worse with the OpenGL deprecation.

onli 6y ago
That's still about 5 million users. Looks huge to me. Well, maybe that's tiny from some perspective.
- user5994461 6y ago
  Negligible compared to the 738 million iPhone users.
  - onli 6y ago
    But we are talking about the MacOS users, not iPhone users... They won't be affected by this.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Apple sells about 20-25 million Macs a year. That’s negligible to Apple to lose some small percentage of a segment that’s only 10% of it revenue. Think about how many games died when they dropped 32 bit support.
      - onli 6y ago
        There are many good arguments in this thread and I honestly appreciate to see the many perspectives, also this one. But I can't get behind that argument. If all you sell is 20-25 million, to possibly lose 5 million of that is huge. Think about how much they would have to save with the processor move (or how much performance they'd have to gain to make up for it in new sales) to make it worth it. Also, the effort will be huge to make the transition work. All while there is the easy alternative to just use AMD processors if they wanted a performance boost? I mean, I'm happy about this. It will probably further cement Linux as the only relevant gaming OS next to Windows. But I'm still surprised. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if it happens.

burlesona 6y ago

I game on Mac, and I’m not excited about losing access to Steam. But I have a 2018 MBP and I probably wouldn’t upgrade for a few years yet anyway. Depending on how the announcement and rollout goes I could see myself buying one of the last intel 16” MacBooks, or just being content with my 2018, and either way not upgrading for a while. I suspect that if the transition is “successful,” the first year or two on ARM will include a few noticeable trade offs, but those will quickly be “washed away” by a substantial performance gap where Apple’s hardware is just a LOT better than everyone else. And if the transition is “unsuccessful,” well, I may end up finally buying a gaming PC... or just deciding I don’t care about the small handful of PC games I play and sticking to console. Gaming on Mac has been second class for.... ever, so I would say anyone who really cares already has a windows machine. But one last thought, keep in mind that while the quality of games is somewhat lower, the quantity on iOS is off the charts, including many games with high end graphics. In a weird twist of fate, it’s possible that Apple’s decision to merge its desktops and laptops into the same architecture as its mobile phones actually increases the total addressable market so much that game makers are _more_ interested in doing the small amount of extra work it would take to make a game work on Mac as well as iOS. This happened when Firaxis started making Civ for iOS and then ended up updating the Mac version to use Metal, and when they did the performance was worlds better.

samcat116 6y ago

Here's a counter point to this argument: take Fortnite for example. Its arguably the most popular game on the world. The current Mac version runs fine but not great. They could modify the iPad version (probably pretty easily) and get better performance on these new ARM Macs than the x86 version was ever going to be due to Apple refusing to put in great gaming GPUs.

dannyw 6y ago

Intel has been stagnating and dropping the ball for years. AMD is catching up but still just caught up to Intel, more or less. I welcome competition. I want CPUs to get faster again.

tobyhinloopen 6y ago

I don’t care about steam on mac - i have a gaming PC. Companies that still care will compile an ARM version just as easily.

klohto 6y ago

1) Let’s take the latest amount of active steam players per month, which is 90MM. That is a number for 2019, I will assume that it grew a little per the usual percentage it does (accounting for Covid) to 100MM. 4% is 4MM. 2) Macbook Pro & Macbook Air have a total share of 78%. I’m ignoring other models, since we are talking about ARM on notebooks, not towers. That brings the number of players to 3,1MM 3) We can assume that most people still rock macbooks since 2012. But let’s start counting from 2013. (We don’t have unit sales, but only the total amount, so I work with the amount that most websites quote) Apple, on average, sells 18MM Macs per fiscal year. Till today, that is 135MM Macs the market. 4) We need to estimate the amount of Macbooks vs Macs, but I cannot find a single stat on this. I’m gonna pull this out of my ass and say that it’s around 90%. The Macs have always been supplemental to Macbooks and Apple has been “forgetting” about them a lot. This brings the total to 121,5MM 5) That is 2,56% of people who game on Macbook. I would say Apple doesn’t care about ~3%. This stat also doesn’t account for hardcore vs casual players. Eq. Those who won’t care vs those who will switch platforms.

Leherenn 6y ago

Didn't they drop most of the games already with Catalina, since most of them are 32-bits?

thewebcount 6y ago

I have about 35 Mac games on my Steam account. I avoid Steam like the plague because its interface is awful and the experience of using it is awful compared to most other software. I love Apple Arcade's subscription model, but it's still coming up to speed. The offerings it has aren't great yet, but I suspect they will be with time. If Apple can improve its offerings on Arcade, I'll never look back. I don't need to play the latest FPS and I suspect other Mac users also don't fit that demographic. If Valve doesn't want to port Steam to an ARM-based macOS, I'll simply drop Steam. It's that easy because Steam offers very little of value for me, personally. I've heard from others that they feel the same, though I can't say how prevalent that feeling is among Mac gamers.