With intel and amd getting much better in the low end power and performance-wise, Apple should look at going back to x86. The developer situation is still a mess with Docker x86 and arm mismatches, and it was so convenient just to throw Windows on to a mac to game.
I really hope they don't do this. Apple never cared about desktop gaming and I hope they don't sacrifice the amazing gains that Apple Silicon made in power and efficiency just to support a niche use case that's often better served by GeForce Now anyway.
The Apple Silicon machines I've had were tremendously better than any x86 one I've ever used, at any price point, for laptop work. Powerful, silent, battery efficient. Definitely worth the tradeoff of losing x86 support IMHO.
I guess the x86 compat depends on what you work on. For the web teams I've been a part of, it was a real headache in the first couple years (the M1 era) but hasn't been an issue at all since then. But that's just anecdotal.
Def not universal. It annoys me to no end when I need to cross-compile on my windows machine so the content guys at my company can use it, and then I have to walk them through how to allow their machine to actually run it. God forbid someone wants to just run internally developed software on their own hardware.
Isn’t this more a problem with Apple’s application security than the CPU architecture? You’d be jumping through the same hoops to run unsigned software if it was still Intel.
I didn't realize there were still companies doing this. What sort of use case is it where a cross platform desktop app is chosen over a web app or a webview?
We are operating on content on physical portable hardrives from the studio. A webapp would be pointless and inefficient (these videos are hundreds of gbs). Most of the internal software we write for our content team is basically glorified macros. They need to adjust 100's of videos sometimes, and doing it one by one would take months. If they can define what needs to be done, an engineer can usually get it done in a few hours or days instead of weeks.
As someone who has about 800 Steam games (mostly various indie titles, some free games, few AAA games grabbed on a discount:
* all 800 of those work on Windows, in very few cases any of those work better on another platform
* about 600 of those can be made to run on Linux distros with Proton (with varying degrees of success, relatively few actually have native versions)
* when it comes to Mac, only about 120 of those have native versions that run and Proton doesn't seem to be an option
* I know that Game Porting Toolkit exists, but haven't really looked that much into it, I probably should in the future
* none of that, not even Proton would be really necessary, if people bothered to export versions of their games for all platforms, which is at the very least an option that is offered by all big mainstream game engines, or even smaller ones like Godot; but we don't live in that kind of a world, sadly
* oddly enough, in many cases games won't run because the developers explicitly choose not to support additional platforms, especially in the case of the various anti-cheat solutions, which plain sucks
It's quite unfortunate, because otherwise I could definitely enjoy more gaming even on my slightly dated M1 MacBook Air - because while I wouldn't be playing that many cutting edge AAA games, if you could have a satisfying gaming experience even on a Nintendo Switch, then I see no reason why the same couldn't be said about Apple hardware.
There's just not a big gaming market for Macs (and I say that as both a gamer and a Mac user). It's a chicken and egg problem. Apple historically has not cared about desktop gaming much, and don't provide an easy way to port games to it. They don't even support Vulkan, so developers have to port to Metal or use GPT. A lot of devs in turn skip the Mac because it's a lot of additional work for a tiny market. And without the devs, there are very few Mac-only gamers.
Apple had a chance to do what Valve did with Proton here, using GPT and custom first party patches or configs to certify a collection of games as working. But they never bothered, instead handing that off to Crossover (who does an OK job but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of UX). It's still a huge pain to get games running on Mac, even worse than Linux. Way worse, actually.
Unless Apple suddenly has a change of heart and really tries to support and help game devs, they're not going to entice anyone no matter how good the Apple Silicon GPUs are. And they're probably not going to do that since Steam is so dominant and they wouldn't be able to make the 30% they do on iOS. Even for their new platforms like Vision, gaming was an afterthought. It's just not part of their culture. Apple Arcade on Mac is a sad little market compared to any other games ecosystem.
Thankfully there's at least GeForce Now, which works way way better anyway.
There's a wrapper over this called Whisky (https://getwhisky.app) that makes it really straightforward to install and run Steam or other Windows binaries.
I use it on an M1 Air and an M1 Pro. Less demanding titles run very well, heavier games like Cyberpunk 2077 don't really reach a stable 30fps even with Steam Deck-like settings so keep your expectations in check.
Even Crossover doesn't work all that well. It has a small list of supported games, many hundreds of untested games, and even on the games it supports, there are frequently glitches, significant slowdowns while loading new textures & levels, occasional crashes, etc.
I'm a paid customer, occasional beta tester, and frequent compatibility database submitter. I don't think I'll continue using it after my subscription expires, though. It reminds me of the DOS days of having to tinker with config.sys to get your game to run... which is the last thing I want to do these days, in middle age, just to play a game for an hour or two. I often end up spending more time fighting Crossover than actually playing the game =/
Some games work better in Parallels than Crossover, too. (Parallels uses Windows for Arm, which uses Microsoft's own x86 emulator instead of Wine.) Some the other way around. Neither is anywhere near Proton-level seamlessness, much less native Windows gaming. Neither would come anywhere close to passing the "girlfriend/wife/mom test" in terms of ease of use.
I still game on my Mac everyday, but almost entirely in Geforce Now (streamed from the cloud) instead of fiddling with all the virtualization and emulation. Hugely better graphics and no local fan noise or heat to deal with, or any incompatibility issues. Just one click and the game launches and runs at max setting and runs flawlessly for hours, which is definitely not something that I can say about Crossover.
It's also huge in web dev, graphics, marketing, etc. Every single web dev I know uses a Mac. The hardware guys prefer some Linux variant or another, though.
Windows has WSL, but otherwise it's a lot easier to run a lot of the CLI tools on a Mac, while still having access to a polished GUI and mainstream apps (Adobe and Microsoft, etc.)
Didn't say it's not big, only that Apple themselves build it to service their own ecosystem only. The fact it runs any of these tools is simply a result of the Unix-y core. If you want 100% compatibility with Linux tools, Linux is still the best bet (obviously).
IMO it was a mistake switching to x86 the first time. Repeating that mistake would once again kneecap the one major thing differentiating Apple's desktops and laptops from your average Windows PC.
I'm going to disagree. Moving to x86 moved to native windows compatibility speeds and was a massive boon to our security team. We could interact with everything in our Windows environment, use FOSS tools natively, and the support for battery and power management was streets ahead of our Dell laptops.
x86 -at the time- was the right things to do, because IBM wasn't going to get them there...moving to NeXT's underpinnings also opened the door to a TON of pre-existing code.
