Apple has been showing renewed interest in gaming — look at those high-profile game ports (and the porting kit) as an example. I see RT as part of that revival; as was explained earlier, the feature should let UE5 games use Lumen properly. I just don't think Apple is about to win gamers over any time soon, and this is more about putting foundations in place to improve the situation years down the road.
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Apple iPhone 15 Live Event "Wonderlust"
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Apple is trying to make itself more attractive to the, "You have to work, but you want to play too" demographic, and getting a foundation there is a big one.
Apple internally is very pumped by their progress with Apple Arcade, AppleTV units aren't exactly weak machines, and I can see a not-too-distant future where they are quite capable gaming consoles.
Apple also has the money, resources, and talent, to launch a very capable first-party development studio if they wanted too, but more likely the means to partner with anybody they damned well want to because they can pay. So they could throw around some fun money get a developer or 3 under their thumb and have them churn out some solid Arcade titles.
Word on the street is Apple is somewhat interested in picking up Gearbox, but that is one of those rumors you overhear from the booth across you at a Dennys at 2 a.m., and not the good Denny's either, the other one.
Mchart
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If Apple were to throw money at the gaming industry like they did with Apple TV - You'll pretty quickly find them to be putting out some decent games on their platforms. And yeah, imagine if the next Borderlands or something similar were Apple only... I think they'd get a lot of AppleTV/Whatever sales TBH.
Smashed Ixnay
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Interested in the 15 Pro Max, but honestly I don’t see a need to upgrade my 13 Pro Max. The only reason I should is because it’d cost me $10 a month for the next 3 years. I always upgraded every two years, but realistically every 3 years is fine.
If I wait another year my phone will be worth less than the $850 or so they’ll give me now. I do work outside a lot, so the improved brightness would be useful.
I’m going to think about it.
If I wait another year my phone will be worth less than the $850 or so they’ll give me now. I do work outside a lot, so the improved brightness would be useful.
I’m going to think about it.
That’s the only reason why I upgraded my XR Max; battery drained so quick. Dang thing felt like it was gonna burn a hole in my pocket at times, lol.
wra18th
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I'm currently on an iPhone 12. Not Max or Pro. I had the battery replaced at the Apple store in July and looks like I might be good until the iPhone 16. Crossing my fingers.
I'd go for it. The 13 Pro Max will depreciate more than the +$10/mo for 15 Pro Max will cost.
This is how Tim Apple gets you.
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Mchart
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One thing for certain is this iPhone will feel way better in the hands just due to the move back to a more rounded shape vs the hard edges ever since the 12 (Which are awful IMO).
Airbrushkid
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I’m preordering the 15 Pro Max 1 TB. I’m on the 12 Pro Max 512 GB Now. Since I’m retired I don’t do payment plans.
DukenukemX
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From what I understand, you can run iOS apps on MacOS, but due to restrictions placed by Apple, you're not allowed to. In fact, some people have found work arounds for this so they can play their favorite mobile game on MacOS, but they can be banned for this.
This is because before the M1, the Mac was just a PC. You could install Windows through bootcamp and play your favorite games at full speed. If you really hated Windows and partitioning your drive, you could use CrossOver or Parallels. None of those things currently works for Apple's M series.
Apple's sales are down and Whoopi Goldberg is pissed that Diablo 4 isn't on her Apple Macbook. If gaming didn't mater to most Mac consumers then why is Apple even trying?
Apple has to do a lot more to entice developers to port their games other than put out shitty tools based on Wine and DXVK.
I don't think performance is an issue, but the fact that there's no Vulkan and their monitors have huge latency is a big issue. Especially developers who have to learn Metal, learn ARM, and learn MacOSX for what currently has less gaming market share than Linux.
BG3 is one of many good games that came out this year. The port is still delayed to later this month.
Apple has the money but if they spend it then they wouldn't be profitable. Gotta remember that Apple is making chips for a market that's much smaller than what AMD and Intel have access to, which means it's hard to justify the R&D. Apple's SoC design is a heavily modified ARM SoC with a lot of influence from Imaginations PowerVR design. Apple took shortcuts in making their chips, and it shows. If Apple wants to, they could just break the bank open and pump R&D to push away from AMD and Intel, but their investors won't be happy about it.
Parallels works fine on the M1’s and M2’s but they charge you $99 a year for it.
CPU architecture isn’t really a big issue, unless you are building the engine at a base level. ARM, x86, PowerPC for all it matters, C++ doesn’t care, LUA doesn’t care, none of that matters that’s a compiler problem, game developers don’t work on that level. The biggest issue for developers is storage types and the issues there, Mac is far more similar to a console in that regard and it’s pretty easy compared to a pc, but macs don’t have enough as it is the modern titles would rip those nvme drives up like fresh vinyl.
Dev suites abstract away from the languages as much as they can and avoided as much DX, Vulcan, Metal as much as possible, that’s an engine developer problem and they are mostly on that already. Metal is low level, and the available translation libraries add less than 2% overhead at worst they do Vulkan support and pass it through molten it’s not going to hurt anything. Other aspects of the platform will get in the way long before that transition layer becomes a measurable factor.
Monitor latency isn’t bad, their worst is still better than the TV‘s hooked to most consoles but it’s No gaming monitor for sure and that’s something they will need to address if they want to take a serious swing at it on their MacBook.
You are underestimating Apples silicon supply. Apple may only move like 35 million laptops a year, but they use them in the iPads too that’s another 60 million chips. But the M series is basically a scaled up phone chip with a few extra bits, Apple will move like 230 million phones in a year. Intel will only move 180 million mobile CPU’s in a given year and AMD far less than that.
Apples economy to scale and ability to share expenses is a huge advantage for them.
It also weighs 20 grams less, though that really isn't much.
Comixbooks
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There is literally nothing concerning in that entire article.
Non ionizing radiation ≠ ionizing radiation FFS!
Also sick of the carbon neutral BS everywhere! When you order alleged carbon neutral products made in China guess how they get to to the USA?
A I
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They dig a hole in the ground to the other side of the world and toss them in, I learned that from old cartoons.
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DukenukemX
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But can it run modern games like Elden Ring?
Assuming that everything in modern games is written in C++. This isn't as simple as running your favorite compiler and being done with it. Especially when in the gaming industry you don't see many ARM devices used for AAA games.
Mac is like a console, if you ignore over a decades worth of Intel Macs still in the wild, which is likely the majority of Macs. Gaming market share is pretty low already for Mac, so you really don't want to ignore those Intel Macs. Also, the storage issue is due to Apple charging a huge fee for more storage, plus the storage is soldered into the boards.
The whole idea behind Vulkan was to make it easy for any developer to use any graphics code like Microsoft's HLSL thanks to SPIR-V. They knew it's important to make developers lives as easy as possible, because it would entice developers to use it. Apple's Metal is the opposite of this. There is a Vulkan layer through MoltenVK, which is probably what the Baldur's Gate 3 developers will be using to port their game to MacOS, but again why make developers lives harder and in doing so make worse ports because Apple won't adopt Vulkan?
A lot of TV's have a gaming mode that sorta fixes the latency issue. The latency on Apple's screens are really bad, like beyond cheap Walmart TV bad. Screen latency was sacrificed for higher color accuracy on Apple devices. Great for photo editing, but terrible for gaming.
DukenukemX
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iPads I understand, but not mobile phones. You won't see an M series chip in an iPhone. To get the kind of performance and power out of the M series chips, Apple needed to recreate their mobile phone chips. While the M series is just the iPhone chips scaled up, it isn't really competitive to what AMD and Intel has in terms of performance. Apple's been losing to AMD and Intel's performance for some time now, especially when it comes to graphics performance. AMD, Intel, and Nvidia all have AV1 encoding and decoding support but not Apple. For Intel and AMD, they have access to more than just the laptop market, but also the desktop and server markets as well. AMD just takes their desktop parts and glues them together for their servers parts. Intel's Meteor Lake will in some way find parts of itself in Xeon's.
Binary compatibility is only part of the story. Yeah, most Macs in use are probably Intel-based right now, but how many of those are really game-ready? Some higher-end iMac and MacBook Pro configs, the Mac Pro... while gaming-capable specs are always a small subset of a larger computer share, I'd say the portion is smaller than it is on the Windows side.
Besides, the reality is that ARM is the Mac's present and future, and Apple needs to focus on that. Bending over backwards to support an older architecture will end up in a compromise. I'd rather Apple cut loose and concentrate on making the Macs it's selling more compelling for gaming, even if it's just "I can play the occasional big-name title with solid performance."
Mchart
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ARM is the future for gaming/home market. Apple is just the first to make the big push. I don’t suspect it will be many more years before x86 is server/enterprise only.
The fact that Ubi is already porting the new asscreed and their engine to work on arm/Mac is a big deal. That will likely mean every major ubi game moving forward will be on mac. Besides, if you’re porting to switch you’re already porting to Arm.
The fact that Ubi is already porting the new asscreed and their engine to work on arm/Mac is a big deal. That will likely mean every major ubi game moving forward will be on mac. Besides, if you’re porting to switch you’re already porting to Arm.
Mchart
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I mean, with the power in the iPhone pro you can just airplay to an Apple TV and you get a console. I suppose they just want to keep the Apple TV cheap because they assume if you want more power you’ll buy a Mac/iPad/iPhone and AirPlay.
crazycrave
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The radiation I think they are really talking about is ungrounded, when you walk around a lot of high voltage panals in a building you can feel grounded radiation, it is what they check for when people start seeing things like Ghosts.
DukenukemX
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There's a lot of Intel Macs with AMD GPU's, so I'd imagine those are gaming capable. Baldur's Gate 3 for example is very friendly to older computer hardware.
Apple aren't the developers who have to focus on older hardware. Look at World of Warcraft and how Microsoft had to put DX12 in Windows 7 just for that game, because again the developers have to worry about people who still use Windows 7.
It also makes it a cheap add in for some TV’s, Samsung for example has it built in some models and it’s convenient.
BG3 on an old gen 8 uHD 640 isn’t good for anybody… on all lows you can reasonably expect an average in the upper teens.
Best ignore it, and the AMD options around then are focused around the Pro 5000 series, which wasn’t a hugely popular option either. Gaming wise that lands around an RX560
Larian would do better to focus on the M1 so they could also get a chance at an iPad launch.
The Mad Atheist
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So, what defects are "features" this round?
You can take a much higher level of EMR at 50/60Hz then say 1.9GHz. The emissions from cellular radio sets in the microwave range but much below the limit of feeling warm for sure.
Using the term "radioactive" or showing the familiar radiation warning label in any article is irresponsible, fear mongering type reporting.
10 ish years ago I was brought into an area because the locals were convinced the radiation from the hydro equipment was killing them and giving them cancer.
They kept spouting numbers and statistics and scary things, big issue.
They were very upset to find out that the base radiation levels of the region with all that equipment off and the power out was virtually indistinguishable from it on and all the equipment reporting.
Turns out that their mining heritage they were so proud of contaminated the crap out of everything so lead and mercury was leaching into everything and Radon levels were off the charts in most of their homes due to bad building practices from the 1920’s and such in their heritage homes they were very proud of.
Humbling for many of them for sure, but they stopped shooting at the cell towers for a while at least.
DukenukemX
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USB 2 from the new USB-C port. Not a defect, but not very modern to Android phone standards.
View: https://youtu.be/6lTu9z4AwNU?si=pWl8wJoiAvqqx31k
Think this is less purposeful segmentation on Apple's part as just a virtue of the USB controller being built into the SoC. Short of introducing a new A16 variant or watering down the A17 (say, making a non-Pro version at 4nm or 5nm), Apple was going to have a year where the base iPhone was stuck with slower speeds.
Thankfully this doesn't matter as much as it once did, but it's lousy if you need quick wired syncing. I suspect this will be a non-issue next year.
Why sync locally when it’s all in iCloud already? It’s one more thing that subtly pushes users towards their Apple ecosystem pairings.
It also has better compatibility, USB 3’s documentation and options are all over the map. USB2 is about as clean as it gets and it pushes more towards wireless charging which is what Apple wants anyways.
DukenukemX
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Just want to point out that Samsung's Note 3 has had USB 3.0 speeds since 2013. You mean to tell me that iPhones have only now gotten USB 3.0, and only for iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max? Also seems kinda cheap that Apple is still using the A16 on their base model iPhone 15. So buying a base model iPhone 15 is like buying the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max? Why even have a base model when a smart consumer could just buy a discounted iPhone 14 Pro?
Mchart
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USB 3/C is only useful on the pro model for those actually using the camera a lot TBH. I don't see the point on the lower-end models given that most people buying the non-pro model aren't taking pro-res RAW videos constantly and need a faster way of getting them off. For most people on a non-pro iPhone they haven't been plugging the phones in for years anyways for data transfer.
Mchart
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A16 is still a full generation beyond anything on the Android SOC side. Yes - This is further the way they are segmenting the non-pro vs pro. The pro gets the better chip, the non-pro part gets the prior years pro chip.
You're absolutely correct - A smart consumer would buy a used/refurb prior Pro model, but Apple knows most won't, and will just buy whatever the standard latest part is.
And it's still way faster particularly with video export/encode.
Mchart
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Reality is that the A16 in the 15 is WAY more capable than most consumers buying a 15 would ever utilize. At the very least you know with buying an iPhone now is that you get decent software support for 4-5 years because of how overpowered the SOC is on the base product.
DukenukemX
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I think you mean a full generation behind.
View: https://youtu.be/XsphpsMTTjI?si=MZ_1aGH-EHLCCzcD
Are you applauding Apple for this?
I wouldn't feel comfortable knowing that I paid $1k for a phone that has a USB standard from 23 years ago. Especially for something that most modern Android phones come with for free. Whether or not you can justify the slower speeds is irreverent, because Apple feels that this feature is important enough to limit it to Pro and Max models. https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?chkUSBC=selected&sFreeText=USB Type-C 3
Mchart
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15 isn’t $1k.
As for the test, the geek bench numbers speak for themselves. You can come up with any scenario you want to make the android phone look better or vice versa. This is why you use something objective like geekbench.
The only problem with Android is that it runs Android.