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That's neat and impressive, but that's all they have. They don't have a high end. For $3000 you can get a top end gaming PC. There's no amount of money you can

That's neat and impressive, but that's all they have. They don't have a high end. For $3000 you can get a top end gaming PC. There's no amount of money you can spend on a Mac to equal that. I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough to court "triple A" game developers to their platforms, despite them creating and maintaining Metal and this 20k-line WINE patch. There's this weird mismatch of Apple dedicating a non-trival amount of time in their keynote to "Mac Gaming" as if it's supposed to be impressive to finally play a 4 year old game on a Mac because they don't ship high-end graphics devices.

notSupplied 3y ago
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/?sort=pct https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/?sort=pct The most popular GPUs in use TODAY are 1650, 1060, 3060, 2060. If Apple can get the M2 Macbook Air to run like one of these, it essentially makes the most popular laptop also the equivalent to the most popular gaming rig.
wlesieutre 3y ago
Two days ago we could speculate that maybe the $6000+ Mac Pro would bring better graphics performance, but now we know it's a $7000 Mac Studio with PCIe slots. And as far as we know you can't put a GPU in those slots. Not that it would've been in my price range anyway, but it could've indicated that thunderbolt eGPU support would make a return. Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform.
- musicale 3y ago
  > Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform. Apple has a huge gaming platform, and it isn't the Mac. https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-sony-xbox https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-s... However, I imagine that they'd still like to sell more games in the Mac App Store (in addition to iOS ports, iPad games that can run on Apple Silicon, and Apple Arcade subscriptions) and this might help. It might also make it easier to port games to Apple Arcade.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Apple silicon wins on performance per watt but not in performance outright and suddenly everyone cares about power consumption. Whichever spec everyone's favorite fruit company excels at gets put on a pedestal.
- philistine 3y ago
  The PC industry is no longer driven by desktops; laptops have taken over long ago. There is a gaming PC crowd, but that is a small captured audience who wants performance, wattage be damned. Apple is selling around 80% laptops versus desktops, and the rest of the industry is something like 77%. The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race doesn't mean it should automatically be entered into the desktop GPU race, where it is not winning.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race Fact? Which Apple chips are outperforming the laptop 3070, much less the current-gen mobile 4090?
    - npunt 3y ago
      I would take a guess that Apple is shipping (far) more TFlops of GPU power than Nvidia or anyone else in the mobile GPU market. Few people are buying laptops with 80-150w TDP GPUs, as those start to stretch the definition of both 'laptop' and 'battery powered'. Big gaming laptops with an hour of battery life are more akin to the luggables of yore.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        That's fair. Nvidia has issues scaling their full systems down to laptop spec, and Apple almost has the opposite problem. They're both impressive in their own right, but right now Nvidia has both the performance and performance-per-watt crown in this space. The disparity in 3D applications (like gaming and Blender[0]) so ugly it's not even close. And in all fairness - Apple's products might not need more GPU power. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring appear to be CPU-bottlenecked, if people are comfortable upscaling they could get a pretty comfortable Retina experience. The 2D optimization and media accelerators are a good focus for mobile hardware. For more demanding applications though, it looks like Apple's current approach is not scaling well. [0] https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
abujazar 3y ago
For $3000 you can get a top end GPU, not a whole gaming PC. Most gamers have mid-range GPUs like those in the M2 Max.
- samspenc 3y ago
  Actually you can get NVidia's top consumer GPU today, the RTX 4090, for $1500-1600. Go back one generation and you can get a RTX 3090 for $750 which still packs a punch. So it's quite possible to build a well-performing gaming PC for sub-$2000 with RTX 3090 which is still significantly more performant than Apple's latest Mac, in terms of GPU throughput. I snapped myself a gaming PC for $1300 at last year's Thanksgiving sales, came with a AMD Ryzen, RTX 3080 (10 GB VRAM model) and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, no way I could have gotten a Mac with that performance for anything close in terms of price.
  - abujazar 3y ago
    Yea, that’s true as of today in the US. There’s no way you could get such a deal where I live (Norway) due to our weak currency, and it used to be the other way around just a few years ago
- reroute22 3y ago
  This is wildly false, see https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/jnc201m/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/j... as a real world example of a gaming PC you can buy right now for $2,600 which is the top of the crop and an absolutely wild gaming machine that's vastly better at gaming than $5,000 M2 Ultra Mac Studio even if the comparisons are done only in games that actually work and work well on the Mac. If you were after a comparable experience with the fastest Macs on Earth you could configure a PC that's another $1,000 cheaper than that ($1,600).
  - abujazar 3y ago
    You’re right and my knowledge was outdated about the prices.

notSupplied 3y ago

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/?sort=pct https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/?sort=pct The most popular GPUs in use TODAY are 1650, 1060, 3060, 2060. If Apple can get the M2 Macbook Air to run like one of these, it essentially makes the most popular laptop also the equivalent to the most popular gaming rig.

wlesieutre 3y ago

Two days ago we could speculate that maybe the $6000+ Mac Pro would bring better graphics performance, but now we know it's a $7000 Mac Studio with PCIe slots. And as far as we know you can't put a GPU in those slots. Not that it would've been in my price range anyway, but it could've indicated that thunderbolt eGPU support would make a return. Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform.

musicale 3y ago
> Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform. Apple has a huge gaming platform, and it isn't the Mac. https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-sony-xbox https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-s... However, I imagine that they'd still like to sell more games in the Mac App Store (in addition to iOS ports, iPad games that can run on Apple Silicon, and Apple Arcade subscriptions) and this might help. It might also make it easier to port games to Apple Arcade.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Apple silicon wins on performance per watt but not in performance outright and suddenly everyone cares about power consumption. Whichever spec everyone's favorite fruit company excels at gets put on a pedestal.

philistine 3y ago
The PC industry is no longer driven by desktops; laptops have taken over long ago. There is a gaming PC crowd, but that is a small captured audience who wants performance, wattage be damned. Apple is selling around 80% laptops versus desktops, and the rest of the industry is something like 77%. The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race doesn't mean it should automatically be entered into the desktop GPU race, where it is not winning.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race Fact? Which Apple chips are outperforming the laptop 3070, much less the current-gen mobile 4090?
  - npunt 3y ago
    I would take a guess that Apple is shipping (far) more TFlops of GPU power than Nvidia or anyone else in the mobile GPU market. Few people are buying laptops with 80-150w TDP GPUs, as those start to stretch the definition of both 'laptop' and 'battery powered'. Big gaming laptops with an hour of battery life are more akin to the luggables of yore.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      That's fair. Nvidia has issues scaling their full systems down to laptop spec, and Apple almost has the opposite problem. They're both impressive in their own right, but right now Nvidia has both the performance and performance-per-watt crown in this space. The disparity in 3D applications (like gaming and Blender[0]) so ugly it's not even close. And in all fairness - Apple's products might not need more GPU power. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring appear to be CPU-bottlenecked, if people are comfortable upscaling they could get a pretty comfortable Retina experience. The 2D optimization and media accelerators are a good focus for mobile hardware. For more demanding applications though, it looks like Apple's current approach is not scaling well. [0] https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

abujazar 3y ago

For $3000 you can get a top end GPU, not a whole gaming PC. Most gamers have mid-range GPUs like those in the M2 Max.

samspenc 3y ago
Actually you can get NVidia's top consumer GPU today, the RTX 4090, for $1500-1600. Go back one generation and you can get a RTX 3090 for $750 which still packs a punch. So it's quite possible to build a well-performing gaming PC for sub-$2000 with RTX 3090 which is still significantly more performant than Apple's latest Mac, in terms of GPU throughput. I snapped myself a gaming PC for $1300 at last year's Thanksgiving sales, came with a AMD Ryzen, RTX 3080 (10 GB VRAM model) and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, no way I could have gotten a Mac with that performance for anything close in terms of price.
- abujazar 3y ago
  Yea, that’s true as of today in the US. There’s no way you could get such a deal where I live (Norway) due to our weak currency, and it used to be the other way around just a few years ago
reroute22 3y ago
This is wildly false, see https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/jnc201m/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/j... as a real world example of a gaming PC you can buy right now for $2,600 which is the top of the crop and an absolutely wild gaming machine that's vastly better at gaming than $5,000 M2 Ultra Mac Studio even if the comparisons are done only in games that actually work and work well on the Mac. If you were after a comparable experience with the fastest Macs on Earth you could configure a PC that's another $1,000 cheaper than that ($1,600).
- abujazar 3y ago
  You’re right and my knowledge was outdated about the prices.