Part of Apple's historic MO has been to not invest in areas they don't see themselves having a competitive advantage in. Now that they can make gaming happen with a very low wattage budget they may well try to enter that space in earnest.
The difference between an Apple TV and a Mac Mini is essentially how powerful of Apple silicon it has, whether it runs tvOS or macOS, and whether it has HDMI out or not.
The Studio is a more compact form factor than any modern 4K gaming console. If they chose to ship something in that form factor with tvOS, HDMI, and an M1 Max/Ultra, it would be a very competitive console on the market — if game developers could be persuaded to implement for it.
How would it compare to the Xbox Series X and PS5? That’s a comparison I expect to see someday at WWDC, once they’re ready. And once a game is ported to Metal on any Apple silicon OS, it’s a simple exercise to port it to all the rest; macOS, tvOS, ipadOS, and (someday, presumably) vrOS.
Is today’s announcement enough to compel large developers like EA and Bungie to port their games to Metal? I don’t know. But Apple has two advantage with their hardware that Windows can’t counter: the ability to boot into a signed/sealed OS (including macOS!), load a signed/sealed app, attest this cryptographically to a server, and lock out other programs from reading with a game’s memory or display. This would end software-only online cheating in a way that PCs can’t compete with today. This would also reduce the number of GPUs necessary to support to one, Apple Metal 2, which drastically decreases the complexity of testing and deployment of game code.
I look forward to Apple deciding to play ball with gaming someday.
This all makes sense, and in that context it’s unfortunate that Apple’s relationship with the largest game tools company, Epic, is... strained, to say the least.
They could always choose to remedy that with a generous buyout offer.
> Microsoft already used Pluton to secure Xbox Ones and Azure Sphere microcontrollers against attacks that involve people with physical access opening device cases and performing hardware hacks that bypass security protections. Such hacks are usually carried out by device owners who want to run unauthorized games or programs for cheating.
So initially you could have Pluton-only servers and down the line non-Pluton hardware will simply be obsolete.
Yep. On the plus side, anything with Apple silicon or a T2 chip has this available today already in macOS, so that's every shipping Mac starting in what looks like 2018: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208862
They won't have the Ultra GPU, but Apple's been shipping for years and Microsoft is just now bringing Pluton to market. I do wish them luck, but that's a lot of PC gamer hardware to depreciate.
If you could spend 2-4k on a special playstation or xbox with double/triple/quadruple graphics capability, it would sell. The games will work fine on the cheapest m1 mac mini, not everyone and every game will need max settings on 4k at 144hz to be a great experience.
Well, only the macOS users would be spending a thousand dollars or more for their console-capable Macs, which are general purpose computers with absurd amounts of memory. TV users could spend a lot less for an Apple TV 4K with M1 inside, assuming Apple released it with less of this or that.
> I look forward to Apple deciding to play ball with gaming someday.
I wish.
But playing ball is more than hardware. It is spending billions to buy Activision or Bungie. And I can't honestly imagine Apple having the cultural DNA or leader aspiration to make a game like The Last of Us where the player is brutally beating zombies to bloody clumps.
In video games the business side demands having exclusives, or timed exclusives, to sponsor twitch streamers playing your game and cutting special deals with studios. This is very different to the App store where Apple emphasizes their role as a neutral arbiter and a dev having the same deal as any other dev. Can you imagine the complains here on hn if Epic Games would get a a special deal just because they are a bigger fish and Fortnite is popular?
The gaming performance of the existing M1 GPUs is, well, crap (like far behind the other laptop competition, to say nothing of desktop GPUs). The Ultra probably isn't changing that, since it's very unlikely to be a hardware problem and instead a software ecosystem & incentives problem.
I don’t think the performance is that bad. On a whim I tried running WoW on a 16” M1 Pro MBP and it consistently got FPS higher than the refresh rate (120hz) with the game rendering at 1x scale and most effects maxed out. Granted, that’s not as good as what you’d get with a mobile RTX 3080 or something, but it’s nothing to sneeze at for a laptop that doesn’t get scorching hot and doesn’t sound like a leaf blower when being pushed.
I could definitely see the Max and Ultra with a beefier cooling system (like the Studio’s) having pretty respectable performance.
M1 Max struggles to keep up with an RTX 3060 mobile.
Now that's with the overhead of Rosetta 2 and all that, so it's of course "not fair" for the M1. But that's also the current reality of the market, so ya know.
WoW isn't exactly the pinnacle of demanding performance. It's like saying you can run counter strike at 200FPS: congrats, so can everyone else, without paying $2000
Yes, it's "crap" not because GPU is slow but rather that most triple A title games are optimized for Windows. So it's difficult to expect a good performance from a game that runs with API conversion layer(s) (Windows -> Mac) and then CPU emulation (x86 -> arm).
So publishers/developers need to make more native games. Even though every Mac port will probably make 1/10th revenue of a Windows title I guess Mac users would be happy to pay more for better games. I certainly would.
This has been always very strange for me. Apple chips used in smartphones were very consistently near the top of the pack even in terms of GPU performance, and unlike their Android counterparts, they rarely throttled, and could deliver said perf with decent battery life.
Yet the iOS 'gaming' scene, despite being one of the major revenue drivers, consists mostly of low-quality F2P games.
Every god damn child has an iPad already to keep them entertained and the hardware is plenty good enough. Going one step further in the age ranges to get big game revenue like the switch will help them capture more.
