> Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store
This is why their efforts are largely doomed.
I'd love to play more AAA games on my Macbook, but too many of them require a separate purchase from the App Store to make that happen, rather than just putting the Mac versions on Steam alongside the Windows version.
If you're going to make me choose between playing a game on my laptop and playing it on my gaming desktop, I will choose the desktop every single time. It would be nice to take more of those games with me when I travel, but it's not a frequent enough use-case for me to give up all the benefits of real PC gaming.
What do we do as Apple users stuck in this ecosystem whose main goal is to extract more money from our pockets? I hate Windows with all my gut but at least I had a sense of freedom about the software I wanted to install on Windows, including games.
On Mac, I'm constantly reminded that beyond this facade of user-friendly UI and nice visuals, there's a greedy company whose market cap is $3T but doesn't give a flying f* about the end-user because it wants to make even more money.
> What do we do as Apple users stuck in this ecosystem whose main goal is to extract more money from our pockets?
Leave ... the ... ecosystem.
This is the whole point of things like Asahi Linux. Take advantage of the hardware and escape from the software.
If all the developers who slave over Apple devices spent 10% of their time improving the experience on something else, 24 months later Apple wouldn't have a market.
I left. I got tired of fighting bugs in macOS given that Apple clearly no longer gives a damn about macOS.
I just bought my second Lenovo Carbon X1 after leaving Land-Of-The-Fruit. This one is about $1700 + a Saumsung 4TB SSD. Note: I can actually upgrade the SSD. It has 32GB of RAM for half the price of anything equivalent in macOS. The OLED display is right about the equivalent macOS resolution, and it's a matte display. It has a useful set of ports--a goddamn HDMI port as well as 2 USB-C and 2 USB-A ports.
And Lenovo's external dock actually freakin' works.
Yeah, it probably doesn't get the performance or battery life as an M3. Given that I didn't notice on my previous Lenovo vs an M1/M2, I'm not likely to notice this time either.
And, as a "bonus", I can run an actual Windows install if I absolutely must.
I'm not as certain about that as you are. I think there are - as always - different streams withing that mega corporation. It is probably sales-oriented people wanting nothing but AAA games on the App Store and be okay with the Mac not being a major choice for games if that doesn't happen. The other stream is probably more enthusiastic (especially with the Apple Silicon being "enough" gaming machines for 1080p@60) and wants to bring gaming over - that is probably the stream that made GPTK happen and give a licensing exception to crossover to be able to integrate it in their department. I'm in the later department, hoping we will see a proton-like GPTK that can run my steam library.
Well regarding the Macbook/Laptop case vs. Desktop: With me typing this on the MacMini M2 base model (8GB/256GB) retailed at 650€ I can assure you, it is a nice gaming machine hardware-wise. Not for latest and greatest AAA games of course, but I played through all the Tomb Raider reboot games on this machine (using Rosetta2 as they are non-native on Steam) on High details with 1080p. Now the major issue is software, there is just not enough games available. I do use Heroic+Crossover Wine to run some other games, but it is just finnicky and only for the pro user - not average casual gamers.
Saying this, Apple could launch a 999€ Mac Mini with focus on gamers with a custom M4 design soon, if they
had a proper Proton-like layer. Heck, size & noise wise, the Mac Mini beats the current PS5 and Xboxes. But they only treat GPTK as a solution for developers, not gamers. And I highly suspect, this is only due to the fact that they won't get any percentage from games sales, as Steam is the dominant player here.
This is why their efforts are largely doomed.
I'd love to play more AAA games on my Macbook, but too many of them require a separate purchase from the App Store to make that happen, rather than just putting the Mac versions on Steam alongside the Windows version.
If you're going to make me choose between playing a game on my laptop and playing it on my gaming desktop, I will choose the desktop every single time. It would be nice to take more of those games with me when I travel, but it's not a frequent enough use-case for me to give up all the benefits of real PC gaming.