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This just shows how little Apple cares about gaming on Mac. It's so sad that I spent thousands on multiple Mac devices (MBP, M Studio, etc.) only to be bottlene

This just shows how little Apple cares about gaming on Mac. It's so sad that I spent thousands on multiple Mac devices (MBP, M Studio, etc.) only to be bottlenecked not by hardware, but by Apple's shitty approach to gaming software. I know why they do it though. Apple can't take their undeserved 30% cut of Mac games the same way they take their iOS cuts. We had a teacher years ago who said something that remains true until today: "everything is about money, especially the ones that appear to have non-monetary reasons."

iwontberude 1y ago
to be fair there is only so much you can do inside the power envelope of 100W or so
- gchamonlive 1y ago
  Not really. If you compare it to gaming rigs, they bear radically different architectures, so you can't really compare them by TDP or power requirements. They don't emit the same hear or require the same amount of power per TFLOP. And I wouldn't be surprised if tflops also wouldn't translate to actual compute room for shaders. Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles, specially indie ones. Nothing really excuses Apple from this contempt it has for the gaming market.
  - theandrewbailey 1y ago
    > Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles Steamdeck runs on 45W, and that's plenty enough power to have fun.
    - Rohansi 1y ago
      The included charger is 45W but the chip consumes less.
    - rafram 1y ago
      I briefly owned a Steam Deck (before returning it), and it seems like most users tone down their expectations a lot compared to PC gaming. 30fps at the Deck’s low resolution seems to be the norm for recent games. Enough power to have fun, sure, but I think people would rightfully pan it if it weren’t Valve.
      - serf 1y ago
        absolutely agreed. you swallow the taste of the terrible hardware of a steam deck for the support of valve/proton/devs and the ecosystem.
      - terribleperson 1y ago
        Expectations are lowered appropriately, I think. There are a number of other handhelds on the market. Of the high end PC handhelds that came out reasonably close to the Steam Deck, they have to trade away a lot of battery life to perform better than the Steam Deck. Valve was clearly optimizing for battery life and I don't think it was a bad choice. The Switch 2 isn't even held back by x86 and it's battery life is still quite painful. Now, handhelds with newer hardware are definitely going to trounce the steam deck without having to trade away battery life, but I think they did the best they could at the price point and time.
        rafram 1y ago
        The battery life is nice, but the Steam Deck is huge - big enough that I'd feel incredibly silly pulling one out of my bag on the train - so it's the least I'd expect.
    - shantara 1y ago
      Steam Deck's APU is power limited to 15W
  - DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
    > Nothing really excuses Apple from this contempt it has for the gaming market. Considering how the typical self-identifying "gamer" conducts themselves online, I think Apple might be on to something...
    - neutronicus 1y ago
      What, you mean you aren't champing at the bit to get death threats over a bug in a piece of software for which 70 dollars was paid three years ago?
    - gchamonlive 1y ago
      I have no idea how they behave online. I know however that in 2022 the market size of the gaming industry was over 200 billion in value.
  - Almondsetat 1y ago
    While the differences between ARM and x86 CPUs are quite substantial, Apple's iGPUs follow the same architecture as all the brands
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- semiquaver 1y ago
  100W TDP ought to be enough for anyone.
- jsheard 1y ago
  The Xbox Series S only uses about 80w under full load, and that's built on TSMCs old 7nm process. Apple's bleeding edge 3nm silicon should be able to do even more with a similar power envelope.
wlesieutre 1y ago
I think their bigger problem is there's shit for documentation. You get a big list of function signatures and if you actually want to know how you're supposed to use anything you find the WWDC session from 4 years ago and hope it's still accurate.
- xcf_seetan 1y ago
  Somebody told me that the quality of a company is directly proportional to the quality of its documentation...
  - thfuran 1y ago
    I guess mathworks is one of the best companies ever.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    Boeing's documentation is probably excellent. In general it is assumed that documentation is the boring part and paying attention to it is a sign of quality. But where do you put people who prefer writing and/or teaching to thinking long and deep about product issues ?
    - reactordev 1y ago
      You encourage them to blog about it and you aggregate the posts into documentation - somehow. (I'm sure there's people for that, or an AI, or something). They had to explain it when they implemented it - explain it on a post. Confluence. Somewhere. You're right though.
    - unscaled 1y ago
      Perhaps the biggest issue with the 737 MAX was lack of documentation. Boeing consciously chose to completely omit several new features (most notoriously MCAS) from the pilot manuals in order to make it seems like nothing important was changed that would require retraining 737 NG pilots on a simulator. In a sense, this is far worse than what most tech companies do since it is a life-and-death issue and Boeing has made a very conscious effort to hide details here, rather than just being lazy.
latexr 1y ago
> I know why they do it though. Apple can't take their undeserved 30% cut of Mac games the same way they take their iOS cuts. Why would Apple be deliberately sabotaging the experience? They would gain nothing from it. That argument makes even less sense when you consider most of the games mentioned in the article are on the Mac App Store, Apple can take their cut. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/control-ultimate-edition/id6502953520 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/control-ultimate-edition/id650... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shadow-of-the-tomb-raider/id1439569401 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shadow-of-the-tomb-raider/id14... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/riven/id1437437535 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/riven/id1437437535 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cyberpunk-2077-ultimate/id6633429424 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cyberpunk-2077-ultimate/id6633... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stray/id6451498949 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stray/id6451498949 This is an obvious case of Hanlon’s Razor. Anyone who develops for Apple platforms and has had to file Feedbacks is aware of Apple’s incompetence and lack of care.
- goosedragons 1y ago
  Except for the handful of Mac ports exclusive to the Mac App Store, who with a lick of sense would choose to buy from there? Steam, GoG and Epic are all more feature rich, have more often sales/3rd party resellers and throw in the PC version too. On iOS there is no choice.
  - lowkj 1y ago
    When No Man’s Sky first announced a Mac port, they promised to release on Steam and App Store. I waited a year after the Steam release for the App Store release which never came. I am a very casual gamer and sometimes weeks go by without playing. My first experience with Steam was with Civ VI. Long flight, no internet, great I’ll play some Civ! But instead of opening up Civ, I was forced to open Steam which would then not allow me to play my own game because I hadn’t authenticated recently enough for them. Or I would try to play and Steam would say, oh first you need to download some huge update before you’re allowed to play your single player entirely offline game. I know theoretically GoG is supposed to solve this issue but no Mac game I wanted was available there. Finally Cyperpunk 2077 launched on multiple stores and I bought on GoG. Even then, the default option became to use the GoG launcher. If I wanted DRM free download, there was some immediately complicated off putting set of instructions, downloading something like 20+ files, etc. App Store experience, I click download, it downloads. I open it, it opens the app and not some launcher. Everything just works.
wetpaws 1y ago
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mvdtnz 1y ago
> I spent thousands on multiple Mac devices I mean... yeah why would they change?
- eru 1y ago
  Generally, if you lower prices you can sell more volume. The profit maximising trade-off for Apple might however be where they are right now. Not sure.
whateveracct 1y ago
It's a shame because a Mac Mini is a solid gaming computer.
- lostlogin 1y ago
  I just replaced a nuc 9 ghost canyon with a Mac mini. The difference in power consumption is insane. Nuc was 67 watts. The mini is 4-10. I don’t have enough data for a long term average on the mini yet, but it’s ludicrously efficient.
  - 6SixTy 1y ago
    Is it me or is a 6 year old product on 14nm against whatever isn't exactly the most level of comparisons?
    - galaxy_gas 1y ago
      Its been across the board for me. Have ryzen 6xxx-8xxx mini PCs that are 45-60W and my 5 year old M1 Mini is comparable at a fraction of power draw
      - protimewaster 1y ago
        I would think a low TDP Ryzen chip shouldn't be that much different. Were those the 15W TDP Ryzens?
        galaxy_gas 1y ago
        30W and 54Ws. iGPU performance is also better on the Mac compared to the non-65W Ryzens. The good thing is that the Ryzen boards can be upgraded on RAM and Storage but that seems to be changing with soldered DDR5 on many mini PCs now.
    - conception 1y ago
      Mac Mini is i believe the most efficient consumer computer made ever. It uses the same energy most computers Ethernet ports use.
makeitdouble 1y ago
They sure don't care about games on Mac, but I think this specific issue is more due to trying to do "magic" for better or worse. Introducing the notch creates this "here but not really usable" area that is specific to some displays, and Apple touts it as something that will just work thanks to their software layer. Yet every app has to deal with it one way or another and most apps that care about screen estate or resolution will need hacks. It will be the same for every feature that pushes the boundaries and offers an abstraction layer as an answer to how the issues will be solved.
- mort96 1y ago
  No, every app does not need to deal with it, at least in principle. Apple could literally have provided a resolution list which only covers the 16:10 resolutions which aren't covered by the notch, and then games literally wouldn't have known that they were running on a machine with a notch. The problem here is 100% that Apple, for some reason, provides both 16:10 "safe" resolutions and the actual whole screen resolutions. All those non-16:10 resolutions are a trap, because they cause the compositor to downscale the window to fit below the notch anyway -- they serve literally no point. There is no situation where a user would want a window that's 16:10.39 or whatever and then downscaled to fit within the bounds of the 16:10 safe area, so there is no reason to provide those 16:10.39 resolutions in the list of display modes. Apple botched the implementation, but the hardware would've been perfectly reasonable and caused no issues or complexities for either users or developers if Apple hadn't botched the software.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    There are ways for an application to actually use 100% of the screen and draw over the notch[0], and apps taking screen captures or need to know the screen area but not for drawing will also need the full actual screen resolution. https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qveb0u/force_true_fullscreen_on_macbook_with_notch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qveb0u/force_true_fu...
    - mort96 1y ago
nativeit 1y ago
I don’t try to game on my laptop, and I have always thought “gaming laptops” are somewhat akin to “racing-spec BarcaLoungers”. That’s why I’ve never understood why so many people bitch about not being able to game on Macs. If you want to play video games, you should probably buy a console or a desktop PC. White-hot take: you’re allowed to own a PC and a Mac. They aren’t like matter and antimatter, you won’t collapse the galaxy or anything.
- wyre 1y ago
  Valid and correct take, but I don’t want to own a Mac and a PC. I’d like to be able to run casual games on my MacBook. I don’t game often or heavily enough to warrant purchasing a rig for it.
- chickenzzzzu 1y ago
  White-hot take: you are allowed to own an outhouse and a urine only toilet. They aren't like matter and antimatter, and so on.
  - esseph 1y ago
    I so glad someone else was saying what I was thinking.
- Fade_Dance 1y ago
  >That’s why I’ve never understood why so many people bitch about not being able to game on Macs. Well that's where you're wrong then. It's perfectly possible to game on a laptop. Over the last decade with the development of the lightning ecosystem and docks it's become a very low friction endeavor as well. There are a myriad of quality "gaming" laptops out there, but obviously that's not for everybody, and that's one of many reasons why workstation laptops exist (basically the same thing - ability to run at high loads for extended periods of time - without the gamer aesthetic). There are many casual gamers out there who don't want to shell out for a dedicated gaming device, nor should they win a laptop is a perfectly adequate device to game on. It's not that hard to comprehend.
  - 1y ago
Razengan 1y ago
What? This seems like just games not defaulting to the correct resolution for the display they're on. The first thing I do in every game I play (on any platform) is go through the settings, and make sure the resolution matches the screen's physical resolution. If the game is dumb about it, I choose a smaller multiple or run in windowed mode or on an external display.
eru 1y ago
> We had a teacher years ago who said something that remains true until today: "everything is about money, especially the ones that appear to have non-monetary reasons." That's more of an aspiration than a statement of fact. Eg I'd happily have organised a crowdfunding to give Vladimir Putin a few dozen billion dollars to bribe him away from starting a war. And if you look at Russia's finances that's effectively what happened: he (and even more his oligarchs) predictably lost untold billions in revenue and profit for this war. Also, migration from poor to rich countries increases workers' pay so much, that you could charge them a hefty sum for the privilege and they would still benefit from coming. However voters by and large don't like it, even if you were to distribute the proceeds amongst them (as a "citizen's dividend" or whatever). They have non-monetary reasons. See https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=38136c55c54a89b9dee821027d64ce7f4c010bd7 https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... for an interesting collection of historical cases drawn from such diverse sources as Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa, Malaysia, Nazi Germany.
TechSquidTV 1y ago
Im on an M3 Ultra Mac Studio. A $4K computer. And I'm not sure why but if I try to stream anything on StreamLabs (even with no game open), the recording is laggy and choppy. I just don't understand how that's possible.
- tbolt 1y ago
  OBS works fine. StreamLabs could just be bad software.
- daneel_w 1y ago
  Streamlabs is crap on iOS, crap on macOS. As someone else mentioned, OBS works great. I've had no issues with it.
monkeyelite 1y ago
> "everything is about money, especially the ones that appear to have non-monetary reasons." There are countless other incentives as tangible as money including meaning, status, security, fame, etc. If you spend time around people with money you will find they will happily trade it to achieve these. What this belief signals most strongly to me is your class.
- behnamoh 1y ago
  > What this belief signals most strongly to me is your class. What this "classism" mentality signals is your sense of superiority due to the amount of $ you have in a bank.
  - monkeyelite 1y ago
    Class is not money - and you're making non-personal comment a personal one.
    - behnamoh 1y ago
      > non-personal comment You literally said "What this belief signals most strongly to me is your class.". So that wasn't personal?
      - monkeyelite 1y ago
        No - this is a general statement. People who are saying that everything is about money are revealing they don’t appreciate other motivations.
        capitol_ 1y ago
        But how do that relate to their class? The working class desire money just as much as the owning class.
    - rustystump 1y ago
      Depending on culture it very much is. Money is a direct signal of status in a way most other things are not as it is correlates to resources which nature selects for. In the us of a, money is the ultimate status and often used as the measuring stick to the value of ones ideas, personhood, and everything in between. I cannot stand it but it is what it is.
jama211 1y ago
[flagged]
- bowsamic 1y ago
  That companies do things to many money is not a “big conspiracy”
  - jama211 1y ago
    Well that’s just reducing my point to the point of absurdity, and then stating that it’s absurd. You did that, not me.
Shorel 1y ago
Macs were bad for gaming long before the software Apple Store existed. Steve Jobs was dismissive about gaming, even when PC gaming was on the rise, that's the reason.
troupo 1y ago
Apple is institutionally incapable of understanding games. It started with Jobs who didn't like and didn't understand video games. and continues with the top brass [1] Games with app purchases are just a lucky turn of events for Apple because they still don't understand what games are. Hence the "oh, we now have desktop-level graphics on iPhone" or some other drivel they pronounce from time to time at WWDC. From time to time someone in the company manages to push something forward (see Game Porting Toolkit), but those remain very few and far in between. [1] To be honest, I doubt any of the top brass even uses computers these days looking at the decisions they make wrt Mac OS.
- alpaca128 1y ago
  > I doubt any of the top brass even uses computers these days looking at the decisions they make wrt Mac OS. I had a similar thought about the Microsoft manager who just claimed that in 2030 no one will use a mouse and keyboard anymore and people won't want to be "mousing around". If he actually believes that it says a lot about the way he interacts with computers. And how rarely he uses it outside of a quiet office.
  - DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
    > I had a similar thought about the Microsoft manager who just claimed that in 2030 no one will use a mouse and keyboard anymore That's nothing new: Microsoft still has an institutional obsession with pen-computing (going right back to 1992's "Windows for Pen Computing"); it re-emerges every few years: sometimes it's a major imitative like Windows XP TabletPCs[1], or re-launching OneNote as a "free" Windows feature; or adding "inking" support anywhere it doesn't belong (so if there's one good thing about the invasive MS Copilot awareness campaign: it made me forget about how useless "inking" is and shareholder value pissed away on it. ----- [1] Speaking from personal experience: I had a Tecra M4 myself, but despite everything: a very high-resolution display, Wacom digitizer and stylus, NVIDIA's best laptop GPU, and the best OS and Office integration yet (the 2005 version of the TabletPC Input Panel in Windows XP is a work of art, honestly) and the launch of a brand new product-line: Office OneNote - but the whole experience was really just still... a noticeable downgrade compared to using a good pen on good lined paper; but especially a significant downgrade from using a mouse and keyboard. The main reason it was such a disappointment comes down to a small number of intractable problems that probably won't be solved on Windows for a long while still: 1. The time-latency between moving the stylus and the on-screen (hardware scanout sprite!) moving with it. 2. The time-latency between writing with the stylus and the on-screen ink being drawn (which is done in software, through multiple layers of buffers, making it easily 3-5x more laggy than the bufferless hardware cursor sprite. 3. Insufficient display resolution: even with a 125dpi display (compared to the 96dpi most laptops had at the time) of 1400x1050 @ 14 inches, natural handwriting with a pen on paper really needs to be rendered at 300dpi or maybe 600dpi. 4. That awkward gap between the actual LCD display screen and the plastic-y stylus-safe screen covering - this was long before iPad-style laminated displays existed too; which means there's parallax error - making it impossible to take the stylus off the screen and reposition it exactly where you expect: it would always land off-target by 3-5px if you're lucky. This alone kills cursive handwriting because you won't be able to accurately dot-your-Is-and-cross-your-Ts even if you have the best fine motor-control possible. ...and there were other issues too: handwriting recognition remains an evergreen joke going back decades[2]; while my Tecra was better at it than my PocketPC, it was still far short of the MS PDC demos showing a full Letter-sized paper of handwriting transforming into rich-formatted text with zero spelling mistakes. There were plenty of glitches in Windows GDI when you used the screen-rotation feature too (e.g. it disabled double-buffering for most Win32 controls; and everything would awkwardly lock-up for a few seconds after the rotation; iPad OS this surely was not). (I'm sorry for writing obsessively about this; it's one of my... uh... autistic hangups) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiorZ4yrbtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiorZ4yrbtk ----- Apple gets a lot of things wrong; but when Apple get something right, the world knows. And what Apple got right was their understanding that pen-computing for text input is just plain unworkable; even on the iPad with Apple Pencil, it's clear they only intend it to be used for tasks like art/drawing or for simple shape-like annotations - neither of which require fine application of the stylus point on-screen. Whereas Microsoft just won't let the dream die; and I've no idea why.
singhrac 1y ago
I've always thought that the reason they don't care about gaming is because gaming has always been a race-to-the-bottom in margins business. Gamers care a lot about hardware in ways that make selling gaming PCs always very low margin (compared to enterprise or creative) (very few other customers know about RAM or SSD prices, famously Apple's bread-and-butter margin increaser).

iwontberude 1y ago

to be fair there is only so much you can do inside the power envelope of 100W or so

gchamonlive 1y ago
Not really. If you compare it to gaming rigs, they bear radically different architectures, so you can't really compare them by TDP or power requirements. They don't emit the same hear or require the same amount of power per TFLOP. And I wouldn't be surprised if tflops also wouldn't translate to actual compute room for shaders. Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles, specially indie ones. Nothing really excuses Apple from this contempt it has for the gaming market.
- theandrewbailey 1y ago
  > Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles Steamdeck runs on 45W, and that's plenty enough power to have fun.
  - Rohansi 1y ago
    The included charger is 45W but the chip consumes less.
  - rafram 1y ago
    I briefly owned a Steam Deck (before returning it), and it seems like most users tone down their expectations a lot compared to PC gaming. 30fps at the Deck’s low resolution seems to be the norm for recent games. Enough power to have fun, sure, but I think people would rightfully pan it if it weren’t Valve.
    - serf 1y ago
      absolutely agreed. you swallow the taste of the terrible hardware of a steam deck for the support of valve/proton/devs and the ecosystem.
    - terribleperson 1y ago
      Expectations are lowered appropriately, I think. There are a number of other handhelds on the market. Of the high end PC handhelds that came out reasonably close to the Steam Deck, they have to trade away a lot of battery life to perform better than the Steam Deck. Valve was clearly optimizing for battery life and I don't think it was a bad choice. The Switch 2 isn't even held back by x86 and it's battery life is still quite painful. Now, handhelds with newer hardware are definitely going to trounce the steam deck without having to trade away battery life, but I think they did the best they could at the price point and time.
      - rafram 1y ago
        The battery life is nice, but the Steam Deck is huge - big enough that I'd feel incredibly silly pulling one out of my bag on the train - so it's the least I'd expect.
  - shantara 1y ago
    Steam Deck's APU is power limited to 15W
- DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
  > Nothing really excuses Apple from this contempt it has for the gaming market. Considering how the typical self-identifying "gamer" conducts themselves online, I think Apple might be on to something...
  - neutronicus 1y ago
    What, you mean you aren't champing at the bit to get death threats over a bug in a piece of software for which 70 dollars was paid three years ago?
  - gchamonlive 1y ago
    I have no idea how they behave online. I know however that in 2022 the market size of the gaming industry was over 200 billion in value.
- Almondsetat 1y ago
  While the differences between ARM and x86 CPUs are quite substantial, Apple's iGPUs follow the same architecture as all the brands
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
semiquaver 1y ago
100W TDP ought to be enough for anyone.
jsheard 1y ago
The Xbox Series S only uses about 80w under full load, and that's built on TSMCs old 7nm process. Apple's bleeding edge 3nm silicon should be able to do even more with a similar power envelope.

wlesieutre 1y ago

I think their bigger problem is there's shit for documentation. You get a big list of function signatures and if you actually want to know how you're supposed to use anything you find the WWDC session from 4 years ago and hope it's still accurate.

xcf_seetan 1y ago
Somebody told me that the quality of a company is directly proportional to the quality of its documentation...
- thfuran 1y ago
  I guess mathworks is one of the best companies ever.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  Boeing's documentation is probably excellent. In general it is assumed that documentation is the boring part and paying attention to it is a sign of quality. But where do you put people who prefer writing and/or teaching to thinking long and deep about product issues ?
  - reactordev 1y ago
    You encourage them to blog about it and you aggregate the posts into documentation - somehow. (I'm sure there's people for that, or an AI, or something). They had to explain it when they implemented it - explain it on a post. Confluence. Somewhere. You're right though.
  - unscaled 1y ago
    Perhaps the biggest issue with the 737 MAX was lack of documentation. Boeing consciously chose to completely omit several new features (most notoriously MCAS) from the pilot manuals in order to make it seems like nothing important was changed that would require retraining 737 NG pilots on a simulator. In a sense, this is far worse than what most tech companies do since it is a life-and-death issue and Boeing has made a very conscious effort to hide details here, rather than just being lazy.

latexr 1y ago

> I know why they do it though. Apple can't take their undeserved 30% cut of Mac games the same way they take their iOS cuts. Why would Apple be deliberately sabotaging the experience? They would gain nothing from it. That argument makes even less sense when you consider most of the games mentioned in the article are on the Mac App Store, Apple can take their cut. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/control-ultimate-edition/id6502953520 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/control-ultimate-edition/id650... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shadow-of-the-tomb-raider/id1439569401 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shadow-of-the-tomb-raider/id14... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/riven/id1437437535 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/riven/id1437437535 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cyberpunk-2077-ultimate/id6633429424 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cyberpunk-2077-ultimate/id6633... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stray/id6451498949 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stray/id6451498949 This is an obvious case of Hanlon’s Razor. Anyone who develops for Apple platforms and has had to file Feedbacks is aware of Apple’s incompetence and lack of care.

goosedragons 1y ago
Except for the handful of Mac ports exclusive to the Mac App Store, who with a lick of sense would choose to buy from there? Steam, GoG and Epic are all more feature rich, have more often sales/3rd party resellers and throw in the PC version too. On iOS there is no choice.
- lowkj 1y ago
  When No Man’s Sky first announced a Mac port, they promised to release on Steam and App Store. I waited a year after the Steam release for the App Store release which never came. I am a very casual gamer and sometimes weeks go by without playing. My first experience with Steam was with Civ VI. Long flight, no internet, great I’ll play some Civ! But instead of opening up Civ, I was forced to open Steam which would then not allow me to play my own game because I hadn’t authenticated recently enough for them. Or I would try to play and Steam would say, oh first you need to download some huge update before you’re allowed to play your single player entirely offline game. I know theoretically GoG is supposed to solve this issue but no Mac game I wanted was available there. Finally Cyperpunk 2077 launched on multiple stores and I bought on GoG. Even then, the default option became to use the GoG launcher. If I wanted DRM free download, there was some immediately complicated off putting set of instructions, downloading something like 20+ files, etc. App Store experience, I click download, it downloads. I open it, it opens the app and not some launcher. Everything just works.

wetpaws 1y ago

[dead]

mvdtnz 1y ago

> I spent thousands on multiple Mac devices I mean... yeah why would they change?

eru 1y ago
Generally, if you lower prices you can sell more volume. The profit maximising trade-off for Apple might however be where they are right now. Not sure.

whateveracct 1y ago

It's a shame because a Mac Mini is a solid gaming computer.

lostlogin 1y ago
I just replaced a nuc 9 ghost canyon with a Mac mini. The difference in power consumption is insane. Nuc was 67 watts. The mini is 4-10. I don’t have enough data for a long term average on the mini yet, but it’s ludicrously efficient.
- 6SixTy 1y ago
  Is it me or is a 6 year old product on 14nm against whatever isn't exactly the most level of comparisons?
  - galaxy_gas 1y ago
    Its been across the board for me. Have ryzen 6xxx-8xxx mini PCs that are 45-60W and my 5 year old M1 Mini is comparable at a fraction of power draw
    - protimewaster 1y ago
      I would think a low TDP Ryzen chip shouldn't be that much different. Were those the 15W TDP Ryzens?
      - galaxy_gas 1y ago
        30W and 54Ws. iGPU performance is also better on the Mac compared to the non-65W Ryzens. The good thing is that the Ryzen boards can be upgraded on RAM and Storage but that seems to be changing with soldered DDR5 on many mini PCs now.
  - conception 1y ago
    Mac Mini is i believe the most efficient consumer computer made ever. It uses the same energy most computers Ethernet ports use.

makeitdouble 1y ago

They sure don't care about games on Mac, but I think this specific issue is more due to trying to do "magic" for better or worse. Introducing the notch creates this "here but not really usable" area that is specific to some displays, and Apple touts it as something that will just work thanks to their software layer. Yet every app has to deal with it one way or another and most apps that care about screen estate or resolution will need hacks. It will be the same for every feature that pushes the boundaries and offers an abstraction layer as an answer to how the issues will be solved.

mort96 1y ago
No, every app does not need to deal with it, at least in principle. Apple could literally have provided a resolution list which only covers the 16:10 resolutions which aren't covered by the notch, and then games literally wouldn't have known that they were running on a machine with a notch. The problem here is 100% that Apple, for some reason, provides both 16:10 "safe" resolutions and the actual whole screen resolutions. All those non-16:10 resolutions are a trap, because they cause the compositor to downscale the window to fit below the notch anyway -- they serve literally no point. There is no situation where a user would want a window that's 16:10.39 or whatever and then downscaled to fit within the bounds of the 16:10 safe area, so there is no reason to provide those 16:10.39 resolutions in the list of display modes. Apple botched the implementation, but the hardware would've been perfectly reasonable and caused no issues or complexities for either users or developers if Apple hadn't botched the software.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  There are ways for an application to actually use 100% of the screen and draw over the notch[0], and apps taking screen captures or need to know the screen area but not for drawing will also need the full actual screen resolution. https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qveb0u/force_true_fullscreen_on_macbook_with_notch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qveb0u/force_true_fu...
  - mort96 1y ago

nativeit 1y ago

I don’t try to game on my laptop, and I have always thought “gaming laptops” are somewhat akin to “racing-spec BarcaLoungers”. That’s why I’ve never understood why so many people bitch about not being able to game on Macs. If you want to play video games, you should probably buy a console or a desktop PC. White-hot take: you’re allowed to own a PC and a Mac. They aren’t like matter and antimatter, you won’t collapse the galaxy or anything.

wyre 1y ago
Valid and correct take, but I don’t want to own a Mac and a PC. I’d like to be able to run casual games on my MacBook. I don’t game often or heavily enough to warrant purchasing a rig for it.
chickenzzzzu 1y ago
White-hot take: you are allowed to own an outhouse and a urine only toilet. They aren't like matter and antimatter, and so on.
- esseph 1y ago
  I so glad someone else was saying what I was thinking.
Fade_Dance 1y ago
>That’s why I’ve never understood why so many people bitch about not being able to game on Macs. Well that's where you're wrong then. It's perfectly possible to game on a laptop. Over the last decade with the development of the lightning ecosystem and docks it's become a very low friction endeavor as well. There are a myriad of quality "gaming" laptops out there, but obviously that's not for everybody, and that's one of many reasons why workstation laptops exist (basically the same thing - ability to run at high loads for extended periods of time - without the gamer aesthetic). There are many casual gamers out there who don't want to shell out for a dedicated gaming device, nor should they win a laptop is a perfectly adequate device to game on. It's not that hard to comprehend.
- 1y ago

Razengan 1y ago

What? This seems like just games not defaulting to the correct resolution for the display they're on. The first thing I do in every game I play (on any platform) is go through the settings, and make sure the resolution matches the screen's physical resolution. If the game is dumb about it, I choose a smaller multiple or run in windowed mode or on an external display.

eru 1y ago

> We had a teacher years ago who said something that remains true until today: "everything is about money, especially the ones that appear to have non-monetary reasons." That's more of an aspiration than a statement of fact. Eg I'd happily have organised a crowdfunding to give Vladimir Putin a few dozen billion dollars to bribe him away from starting a war. And if you look at Russia's finances that's effectively what happened: he (and even more his oligarchs) predictably lost untold billions in revenue and profit for this war. Also, migration from poor to rich countries increases workers' pay so much, that you could charge them a hefty sum for the privilege and they would still benefit from coming. However voters by and large don't like it, even if you were to distribute the proceeds amongst them (as a "citizen's dividend" or whatever). They have non-monetary reasons. See https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=38136c55c54a89b9dee821027d64ce7f4c010bd7 https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... for an interesting collection of historical cases drawn from such diverse sources as Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa, Malaysia, Nazi Germany.

TechSquidTV 1y ago

Im on an M3 Ultra Mac Studio. A $4K computer. And I'm not sure why but if I try to stream anything on StreamLabs (even with no game open), the recording is laggy and choppy. I just don't understand how that's possible.

tbolt 1y ago
OBS works fine. StreamLabs could just be bad software.
daneel_w 1y ago
Streamlabs is crap on iOS, crap on macOS. As someone else mentioned, OBS works great. I've had no issues with it.

monkeyelite 1y ago

> "everything is about money, especially the ones that appear to have non-monetary reasons." There are countless other incentives as tangible as money including meaning, status, security, fame, etc. If you spend time around people with money you will find they will happily trade it to achieve these. What this belief signals most strongly to me is your class.

behnamoh 1y ago
> What this belief signals most strongly to me is your class. What this "classism" mentality signals is your sense of superiority due to the amount of $ you have in a bank.
- monkeyelite 1y ago
  Class is not money - and you're making non-personal comment a personal one.
  - behnamoh 1y ago
    > non-personal comment You literally said "What this belief signals most strongly to me is your class.". So that wasn't personal?
    - monkeyelite 1y ago
      No - this is a general statement. People who are saying that everything is about money are revealing they don’t appreciate other motivations.
      - capitol_ 1y ago
        But how do that relate to their class? The working class desire money just as much as the owning class.
  - rustystump 1y ago
    Depending on culture it very much is. Money is a direct signal of status in a way most other things are not as it is correlates to resources which nature selects for. In the us of a, money is the ultimate status and often used as the measuring stick to the value of ones ideas, personhood, and everything in between. I cannot stand it but it is what it is.

jama211 1y ago

[flagged]

bowsamic 1y ago
That companies do things to many money is not a “big conspiracy”
- jama211 1y ago
  Well that’s just reducing my point to the point of absurdity, and then stating that it’s absurd. You did that, not me.

Shorel 1y ago

Macs were bad for gaming long before the software Apple Store existed. Steve Jobs was dismissive about gaming, even when PC gaming was on the rise, that's the reason.

troupo 1y ago

Apple is institutionally incapable of understanding games. It started with Jobs who didn't like and didn't understand video games. and continues with the top brass [1] Games with app purchases are just a lucky turn of events for Apple because they still don't understand what games are. Hence the "oh, we now have desktop-level graphics on iPhone" or some other drivel they pronounce from time to time at WWDC. From time to time someone in the company manages to push something forward (see Game Porting Toolkit), but those remain very few and far in between. [1] To be honest, I doubt any of the top brass even uses computers these days looking at the decisions they make wrt Mac OS.

alpaca128 1y ago
> I doubt any of the top brass even uses computers these days looking at the decisions they make wrt Mac OS. I had a similar thought about the Microsoft manager who just claimed that in 2030 no one will use a mouse and keyboard anymore and people won't want to be "mousing around". If he actually believes that it says a lot about the way he interacts with computers. And how rarely he uses it outside of a quiet office.
- DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
  > I had a similar thought about the Microsoft manager who just claimed that in 2030 no one will use a mouse and keyboard anymore That's nothing new: Microsoft still has an institutional obsession with pen-computing (going right back to 1992's "Windows for Pen Computing"); it re-emerges every few years: sometimes it's a major imitative like Windows XP TabletPCs[1], or re-launching OneNote as a "free" Windows feature; or adding "inking" support anywhere it doesn't belong (so if there's one good thing about the invasive MS Copilot awareness campaign: it made me forget about how useless "inking" is and shareholder value pissed away on it. ----- [1] Speaking from personal experience: I had a Tecra M4 myself, but despite everything: a very high-resolution display, Wacom digitizer and stylus, NVIDIA's best laptop GPU, and the best OS and Office integration yet (the 2005 version of the TabletPC Input Panel in Windows XP is a work of art, honestly) and the launch of a brand new product-line: Office OneNote - but the whole experience was really just still... a noticeable downgrade compared to using a good pen on good lined paper; but especially a significant downgrade from using a mouse and keyboard. The main reason it was such a disappointment comes down to a small number of intractable problems that probably won't be solved on Windows for a long while still: 1. The time-latency between moving the stylus and the on-screen (hardware scanout sprite!) moving with it. 2. The time-latency between writing with the stylus and the on-screen ink being drawn (which is done in software, through multiple layers of buffers, making it easily 3-5x more laggy than the bufferless hardware cursor sprite. 3. Insufficient display resolution: even with a 125dpi display (compared to the 96dpi most laptops had at the time) of 1400x1050 @ 14 inches, natural handwriting with a pen on paper really needs to be rendered at 300dpi or maybe 600dpi. 4. That awkward gap between the actual LCD display screen and the plastic-y stylus-safe screen covering - this was long before iPad-style laminated displays existed too; which means there's parallax error - making it impossible to take the stylus off the screen and reposition it exactly where you expect: it would always land off-target by 3-5px if you're lucky. This alone kills cursive handwriting because you won't be able to accurately dot-your-Is-and-cross-your-Ts even if you have the best fine motor-control possible. ...and there were other issues too: handwriting recognition remains an evergreen joke going back decades[2]; while my Tecra was better at it than my PocketPC, it was still far short of the MS PDC demos showing a full Letter-sized paper of handwriting transforming into rich-formatted text with zero spelling mistakes. There were plenty of glitches in Windows GDI when you used the screen-rotation feature too (e.g. it disabled double-buffering for most Win32 controls; and everything would awkwardly lock-up for a few seconds after the rotation; iPad OS this surely was not). (I'm sorry for writing obsessively about this; it's one of my... uh... autistic hangups) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiorZ4yrbtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiorZ4yrbtk ----- Apple gets a lot of things wrong; but when Apple get something right, the world knows. And what Apple got right was their understanding that pen-computing for text input is just plain unworkable; even on the iPad with Apple Pencil, it's clear they only intend it to be used for tasks like art/drawing or for simple shape-like annotations - neither of which require fine application of the stylus point on-screen. Whereas Microsoft just won't let the dream die; and I've no idea why.

singhrac 1y ago

I've always thought that the reason they don't care about gaming is because gaming has always been a race-to-the-bottom in margins business. Gamers care a lot about hardware in ways that make selling gaming PCs always very low margin (compared to enterprise or creative) (very few other customers know about RAM or SSD prices, famously Apple's bread-and-butter margin increaser).