Is this because they fab their own parts rather than off-the-shelf stuff that has been in supply side limbo for 2 years?
$1000 "arm board" with impressive power and performance envelopes will get you some market share, especially if the existing ecosystem bends to the manufacturer's will. As they do.
I fully expect the first company to really try and make an impressive risc-V workstation to clean up in that market, especially with people like myself that use higher end consumer parts as servers.
No not that direcly. Even with mac + intel chips the situation is the same, the hardware not really the main barrier.
It's just a different software stack (OS, Drivers, Window management/UI, Sound, Networking, file access). It has similar barriers/differences in Linux. It requires extra build/compile pipelines at the minimum and most cases it means some refactoring of your code. In the worst case your gfx/audio/netcode is just plain incompatible (hard coded for a Windows/DirectX stack), meaning you have to rewrite quite a bit to abstract away the differences. This counts even in unity, it just helps here and there with making it cross platform and enforcing an opinion. These guys didn't use much of Unity and seems to use unity just as a rendering pipeline.
People who buy macs tend not to game on them much, they buy it for other reasons. I think people who owns macs and play games, tend to have consoles or even a gaming rig (since they can most likely also afford those to begin with).
