“It’s time for Apple to take Mac gaming more seriously,” Dennis Sellers writes for Apple World Today. “The global personal computer (PC) gaming hardware market has breached the $30 billion mark for the first time, according to Jon Peddie Research gamers buy (or customize) high-end (ie, pricey) systems, so a tricked-out iMac might appeal to such a group.”
“Part of the phenomena JPR observes is that the ranks of PC gamers are growing in the Mid and High-End where average selling prices are high,” Sellers writes. “Also, the average PC sale is increasingly motivated by the video game use model which is important to understand in a stagnant or declining overall PC market.”
Sellers writes, “I’d love to see Apple make moves to improve gaming on our favorite computing platform. Some ways: Offer an Apple joystick/gamepad or at least the “hooks” so third parties could make ’em; really push Metal for macOS; lLook into the The GameDock (based on a concept first developed by Mac/Life a few years ago), which was based on the success of the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch as a gaming platform.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good luck with that; Apple can’t even manage to make Mac displays (they stupidly want us to stare at “LG” all day).
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tom R.” for the heads up.]
If Apple doesn’t take it’s Macs seriously, why should they take games seriously?
Apple is good at selling old slow tech at premium prices. They’re not interested in selling real power machines.
I feel as though when the only device that is updated at all is the iPhone and the Apple Stupidwatch (which is the current situation), then Apple’s once sticky ecosystem is sticky no more.
Cook has gutted this company. Every product that used to thrive has been ignored, stripped down, or dropped altogether. The iPhone’s removal of the headphone jack is reason for me to stay with my 6S and wait for the MS Surface phone. Cook is lazy, greedy, and incompetent and is only focused on gay rights.
Jambro you’re right on.
This has been said before and needs to be said again:
Cook says he loves the Mac. Fine.
If I said I loved my wife but ignored her for a year she would have cause to question my commitment.
But then again, Cook wouldn’t know anything about that would he.
I don’t see Apple winning against high end PC gaming hardware or software.
A wide range of video cards and Steam on the software side is a very compelling draw and is going to be hard to dent.
more proof MDN is clueless.
cuz the display totally make the mac a gaming machine.
crucial things about gaming machines is
GPUs
without them you can’t run games at full speed on high res displays.
The new MBP has about one third the speed of a mid range PC video card ( other Apple products are worse )
For some games you need to turn the graphics to medium or low to play certain high end games even with a brand new MBP.
What is he talking about?!?!
Another phony who’s been jumping in the Apple world lately…
Mac user play, they play a lot. They play with audio, video, graphics, animation, web, photography… Real gaming. Those people are casual gamer. For that they have iOS.
As far as I am concern, the mac gaming is healty enough if not, fire up bootcamp and get a life!!!
Move on!
Come on, APPLE, wake up.
Give me four (4) hardware engineers and a small budget and we will design an acceptable Mac Pro that will kick-butt and most Mac power users will be pleased with. We will do it in under 6 months, and very likely under budget.
It will be ugly by current APPLE standards but it will still look good — I’m going to use the old G4 as my model and just shrink it down. Like the the Mac Pros of old, it will be easy for the user to get into so they can update or expand the internals.
It won’t be a world-beater in looks, and it may not win any awards for thinness, but it will be functional and powerful and most users will want to show it off. Go ahead, google Mac Pro G4 to see what it will look like but think of it binge about 1/3 that size.
I know, you’ll take a lot of grief from the pundits who will claim APPLE has lost its mojo and can no longer design its way out of a wet paper sack, but in offering this solution you will make a lot of Mac power users happy. Think MUSCLE, SPEED, EXPANDABILITY.
Oh, and my team will also design a “new” monitor with an APPLE LOGO as part of the “new” Mac Pro bundle.
And since so many design people will be offended by this back-to-the-future package because it doesn’t meet their standards, I encourage you to name it “Mac Pro Cretin.”
“It won’t be a world-beater in looks …”. “… and my team will also design a new monitor with an APPLE LOGO …”.
I’m a bit concerned that you see no problem or contradiction between these two statements. Totally agree with your last statement though.
How about “Mac Pro Retro?” And yes to give professionals the malleable & upgradeable machine they want would not be hard or complicated by other device standards. Or just turn the whole magilla over to quality PC Workstation people like Puget Systems who could custom build any size Mac Pro you want.
While I applaud your enthusiasm (and whish senior management at Apple had just a tiny fraction of it) unless you plan on just assembling a Hackintosh with an Apple logo on it you are NOT going to design a new Mac Pro in just six months with just four hardware engineers. You’re enthusiastically naïve if you think you can do so.
Additionally, a true Mac Pro machine will not be able to be 1/3 the size of the G4 Mac Pro. The thermodynamics of a true pro machines with top of the line “K” or Xeon processors, up to 128 GB ECC RAM, and two high end graphics cards, e.g., 1080s, won’t allow it. That’s just reality.
Instead of the G4 Case use the 9600 as your starting point. It had 6 slots in addition to the video card.
From the minds that brought us the Apple Watch, and the $300 coffee table book, and from the geniuses who figured out you can remove the ports, sell them separately as dongles for $50 each, and still jack the price of the laptop up to $5000 with last years GPUs, you want gaming? I’m much more confident that previous article on Apple glasses is probably more likely.
Exactly, I swear to God that last time I walked into an Apple store, the Genius Bar made me sign away my next year’s income just to reserve a spot in line. I can’t believe that we have literally no choice but to buy all the products, and the most expensive versions, that the company sells. It’s extremely disruptive to my lifestyle having to visit Tim Cook’s slavehouse to visit the son I traded for an unlocked iPhone 7+.
The silver lining, however, is that he’ll be officially released once I trade the phone in for the next model with my other child.
Well, with usb-c, it’s now possible to bootstrap an external video card to a Mac mini.
Got me rethinking my intention of putting a Windows box together, after all, I only needed a beefy video card set-up.
Why should I pay for all the other stuff (mobo, OS, ram, cpu, etc.) when all I really needed was the video card?
https://bizon-tech.com/
Now, if only I could get an Apple branded 4K monitor…
Interesting.
I’ve seen these but don’t really know anything about them. Are there issues with OS updates breaking drivers?
The bigger question it raises though is why would you need to spend additional money for a current GPU? Apple is selling at premium prices and giving customers stale hardware. The competition manages to update their top of the line products on a regular basis to use current generation CPUs and GPUs.
Thanks, didn’t know about this external video card box. There’s also the Wolfe Pro.
https://9to5mac.com/2016/08/24/macbook-pro-external-gpu-kickstarter-wolfe/
I had a hard look at the Bizon 3 for just this purpose; the limitation unfortunately is that it will not work for Windows software on your Mac. That cuts out AAA titles that the serious gamer would want to run. Apparently there are complex ways around this issue, but personally I’d rather wait for a hard solution. I still think the GPU-augmented monitor would be an awesome solution – but lack of upgradeability would make the external box a wiser choice.
I do not get the fascination with an Apple branded monitor for the Mac. It belies a fundamental lack of understanding of industrial design (ID) as practiced by Apple under Steve Jobs. The implication is that ID is only skin deep based only on form. Jobs NEVER saw it that way and neither does Ive.
Apple needs to do more than repackage existing monitor hardware and slap an Apple logo on it. Doing that would drive the monitor price up without increasing its value to the consumer. How many people really want to pay $200-$300 more for an Apple logo? Any takers? Thought not. This would feed the narrative that Apple design is all surface without substance. That would harm the Apple brand.
Apple could offer swappable GPU/VRAM, FaceTime camera, and touch input for a start. But that’s not good enough as competitors could easily replicate that configuration. If Apple is serious about replacing OS X with iOS, then iOS needs to go large screen. Ive must know this as his designers have been using CAD forever. The Apple monitor should have a place to hang and connect an iPhone to it and use the large screen as the main I/O with the iPhone’s A series processor working as the CPU. That would pave the way forward for an eventual iOS take over and make it more challenging for competitors to replicate.
This debate has raged since the 80’s. Apple doesn’t care, and will never care, about gaming.
Ritman, you are spot on!
Plus, Apple owns the modern mobile gaming market and they don’t brag about it!
Well, Apple has made little bits of efforts here and there to promote or enable gaming. It hasn’t been a brick wall dead end. But the efforts have never been enough.
The Mac used to be incessantly called a ‘toy’ by Apple haters. My sense is that Apple turned to pushing the professional uses of the Mac in response, neglecting much of anything having to do with play. Steve Jobs even outlawed Easter Eggs in applications, a very Scrooge thing to do IMHO.
Remember Pippin? Not too many people do because it never shipped. The idea was basically a MacOS-based video game console.
While a $30B global annual market in PC gaming hardware is substantial, it is not all that enticing for Apple. First of all, Apple will only get a piece of the business. Second, selling gaming hardware only works if the gaming software is available, and the Mac has always suffered in gaming software because of its smaller market share.
Apple stands to make far more money in the iOS hardware and software business, which includes a strong gaming element. And this growing iOS-based revenue stream does not require Apple to step outside of its core business and take the risk of attempting to penetrate a new market.
I saw a Pippin once. I recall it was very underpowered for its time.
The iOS game market is excellent. No problem there! But the Mac game market is an eternal deficit. Bleh.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he produced the G3 and it came with an ATI Rage Pro, and there were many premium game titles available for the Mac at the time. Never as much as there were for PCs anyway. I know it was for about 2 generations, but anyway.
Today the gaming subject on Macs involves much more than gaming. VR is in its infancy but VR could be more than just gaming. Also AR. But the point is with such a powerful hardware ready for visualization and multimedia I think the possibilities are open for a combination of technologies to emerge and produce a next wave of high end computer utilization in many fields. Will the iPad or the iPhone be enough in a few years? maybe. But a desktop will always bring the fuller experience and be the dedicated center for the home and the office.
So the risk this Apple is facing is they may not be prepared to be a substantial part of technologies and opportunities that may come in the next years. Only a visionary could be intuitive enough, or at least prudent, to be prepared. But surely a visionary will be ahead of the curve and hit hard when the opportunity appears and he is ready.
Tim and Jony can’t think the desktop will be a significant part of the future and they underestimate the opportunities it may offer. But mostly I don’t think they can see anything beyond even with the iPhone and iPad on top of their heads.
Who knows? Maybe gaming is the one thing Tim Cook is actually good at.
There are far too many technical issues that Apple needs to clean up on the Mac side before taking this on.
As someone said, they have iOS for games, fix the important stuff first.
The single biggest hardware hold back are the GPUs, as Zooner and others have pointed out above. Apple has been considerable miserly putting high quality, contemporary GPUs into Macs. Intel graphics NEVER cuts it for decent gaming, in my experience. And yet, that’s Apple’s staple for hardware graphics support. Cheap and stupid. 😛
But it wont be solved on its own, right? And besides who has more resources than Apple today. What they don’t have is a vision or enough motivation. This Apple is a me too company enjoying their last impulse.
Ritman said it. Every few months, someone writes an article how it is time for Apple to take gaming on the Mac seriously. At this point, I have a feeling that this is the same article that keeps popping up, since the arguments are the same, for sure.
Apple was never interested in gaming. Or in enterprise markets. Not for Mac, and not for iOS either. That gaming became a strong part of iOS was certainly NOT thanks to Apple’s effort. It grew organically, and Apple simply let it, without putting up obstacles. While the are showing some nominal effort into supporting enterprise markets, they are as far from actually pursuing them as they ever were.
Apple does NOT focus on any specific segment of the market; they simply make the devices and let the market decide.
I think they have been all dreaming of spaceships and wondering/planning where their new cubicle will be and how to decorate it.
Yes. And the blame for that falls on Steve Jobs, sad to say. He planned on living through the transition, no doubt.
Pfffft. That battle was over eons ago. The only games Apple is interested in, is the mindless blather called candy crush. Anybody who knows, knows Windows machines rule when it comes to gaming. That won’t ever change. Move on.
It’t time Apple takes the Mac Pro seriously.
Or maybe that time has already passed.
No, the time has not passed. Demand for computing power is greater than ever. Apple simply doesn’t know what it is missing.
It’s unfortunate, but among the 3D people I know who do some serious work, even the die-hards have left Apple’s ship. And who could blame them? There’s not even an option to run CUDA dependent apps – and hasn’t for years.
Imagine if Apple had blocked Microsoft snatching up Halo back in the day. How many XBox consoles and Gaming PCs were sold by that series?
Apple pissed away $3 Billion to thieves and GF beaters for rental rap service that also sells shitty headphones & defective Bluetooth Speakers, then created an online radio station that no living person owns up to listening to for only gawd knows how much. If they had spent a fraction of that on Mac gaming and a proper tower that does not feature Intel Vampire Video, how many more high end Macs could have been sold?
There is a lot of overlap between the pro market and the high end gaming market in hardware. The investment in both could reclaim a lot of ground Tim Cook has given up with his Trashcan, iMovie Pro X and all the rest. He just gave away a highly valuable market for high end computers that also has an outsized mindshare. Not seeing too many projects on TV or at the Movies done in Final Cut. Maybe some broke wannabe rapper who sells CDs out of his trunk, but the Pro market is leaving Apple behind.
Phil gases on about the dream of having no connectors, but maybe a musician wants to be able to hook their computer to their instruments and such. Someone needs to tell Apple there are higher uses for computers than Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest.
The #1 reason to buy Apple products is the Apple Ecosytem.
Alas, that ecosytem is sick. Apple can cure it or can let it die.
One thing for sure, I won’t be paying an ecosystem premium for Apple products in the future if the Mac is allowed to wither away.
This subject has a 5-year alarm on it. Right on time! And as usual, nothing will be done to solve it.
We were supposed to get cross platform gaming thanks to the likes of Steam. But it didn’t quite turn out that way. Part of the core problem is Microsoft’s proprietary DirectX technology. If that’s what a game developer chooses to use, the game is NOT going to go cross platform. At one point Microsoft deliberately killed support for OpenGL, which has been supported by Apple in OS X for many years.
IOW: It’s not just about which OS platform is more common. (I won’t say ‘popular’). Microsoft has a hand in keeping Windows software incapable of running on Mac (with of course WINE exceptions).
I don’t know why, but the virtualization systems have ALL stopped dead at DirectX 10. It’s been that way for about six years now. If a game uses DirectX 11 or 12, you’re SOL running it in virtualization. There is no prospect of this situation changing. 😛
Can Apple license directx?
Pr would it be feasible to port directx games to Metal?
My understanding is that Microsoft has gone out of their way to make certain only they have DirectX. It’s deliberate.
It didn’t help that Apple was too lazy to keep up with OpenGL standards. Or support further OpenGL advancement to make it the preferred graphics standard.
MS simply ran circles around Apple in technology that matters while at Apple Ive was sketching the circular Mac Pro which accomplished nothing other than signify that Apple has truly lost all sense of what desktop users need.
Total agreement! For all my enthusiasm for 3-D GUIs, I haven’t kept up with 3-D tech. Other members here know a lot more than I do. Comparing Microsoft’s attention to 3-D versus the very FLAT, 2-D Mr. Ive is entirely relevant. What a blunder by Apple, or whoever let Ive loose on macOS. 😛
Not really. You are talking about how it was a few years ago but today Unity3D can compile to over 20 platforms including iOS and Mac OS. Unity3d is now the biggest gaming platform and latest version started to support OS X Metal. 1/3 of all games today are produced with Unity. But sure the AAA titles use proprietary technology. However Unity is now very strong and capable to deliver top quality games.
My point is Apple could take advantage of Unity3d and other emerging platforms and technologies, invest heavily and even pay developers to support the Mac.
But again what Apple lacks is a vision and the will, not the resources and the opportunities.
I didn’t know all of that about Unity. It certainly has been a good gaming platform and apparently has very good security (versus Adobe Flash crap).
Of course, what would help would be to get both Windows and Mac game developers to take advantage of what they can from Unity coding. It could happen! Tomorrow is a new day. 😉
All Apple has to do is support pro/power users …. that will take care of most issues…. ….
(and create incentives for Steam game developers to support macos. )
Its stupid not to ..like many other stupid decisions at Apple lately.
Hey Apple those kids /teens playing on PC..(almost every serious gamer ) are the kids whose mind share you lose… these kids grow learning the ins and outs of Windows… and PCs and nothing of Macs and Macos..
Guess what they are going to prefer/feel more comfortable to use later in life.
Apple..Tim and team ….. you are screwing up on the pro/power user end and kids/student /education sector end.
Very very Shortsighted!
You are shooting yourself in both your feet and legs. …
Dont forget the legs you stand on just because you have something nice in your hand…the iPhone.
Dont ignore your roots.
You are headed towards a cliff !
The answer to the headline question is of course, YES!
I am not a gamer, but I am a stockholder and as a traveling photographer I want a replacement for my 17″ MacBook Pro. A REAL replacement with real uncompromised by the ridiculous pursuit of thinness kind of power. My graphic/photo/video professional market combined with a slice of a $30B gaming market…. What are you waiting for Apple? Make a true beast of a laptop. Screw thin and light, you got that covered. DO IT!
It breaks my heart that all my kids tell me they want Windows PC’s because they want it for games.
And its something that Apple should not ignore ! Kids/teem mind share is crucial !
Tim Cooks response: “But we have the app. Store with many, many wonderful games. No need for high end macs anymore, nobody plays those types of games anyways”
No idea what these people at JPR have been smoking, but Apple will never be able to take gaming or highend 3D seriously – mainly because they are too dumb to understand the concept of a proper GPU (accompanied by top notch drivers, obviously) as well as the need to manually modify and upgrade crucial components in your computer. This being said, Apple excels at making computers for people who describe their hardware as being “good enough”.