The current situation of gaming with Apple computers makes complete sense.
Most of the people dedicated to playing games on their computer will at least want to upgrade the occasional part from time to time to keep up, which is impossible when everything is soldered together.
It simply has never been a decent platform for games, bar some mobile ports, due to its closeness.
That's a weird argument. The M1 is quite capable and can keep or or even outperform many current gaming value builds. And eSports titles generally do not change their minimum requirements too much to keep their entire audience engaged and FPS high. Not to speak of Intel rarely to never reusing the same socket anymore and the switch to AM5/DDR5 specifically making incremental updates unavailable to most people.
> The M1 is quite capable and can keep or or even outperform many current gaming value builds.
At the same price? I would be surprised if that is the case. You can get a used M1 Mac Mini for around $300 on eBay. For that money, you can get a used i5 business desktop and a new low-profile RX 6400 for about that. At that price point, you'll see much better visuals and framerate for most games on the Windows PC (or you could run Linux). The PC owner can then later buy a better desktop system and put the same GPU in it. And later still the PC user can upgrade the GPU.
With the M1 Mini, that's basically it, and if you want to upgrade anything, you are buying a completely different system.
I've generally been quite negative on Mac's prospect throughout this thread, but even I would expect a M1 mini to wipe the floor with an 8th gen i5 (or whatever businesses are currently retiring) and RX 6400 for the games that are supported.
Why would you think that? The CPU is likely to be a non-issue for lower end gaming and the RX 6400 has significantly better theoretical performance and memory bandwidth.
- People shouldn't buy Apple hardware for the games, but there's clearly an audience of Apple users (that have these devices for _other_ reasons) for a lot of games, so supporting it should be an easy win. Source 2 already had a Metal build (via Dota 2). Valve cut away a confirmed audience larger than Steam Deck owners.
- Don't get hung up on "the M1". Apple's higher end models scale quite well, the Pro is very common and the Max, while mostly a bad investment solely for games, would scale well if there were games to run on it.
Besides the other responses to your comment, many gamers are probably playing other games besides eSports titles - they'll also want to play more demanding games as well. Not many are going to buy a platform they can't upgrade the bits and pieces in.
Intel and AMD have multi generation sockets both newest generations can run on ddr4/5 and for most the bottleneck is still their GPU... stop inventing.
Intel has Sockets for one tick/tock generation. AMD is much better there, but especially right now AM4 is not exactly futureproof and AM5 is still quite expensive.
And which component bottlenecks is always relative to your resolution.
It simply has never been a decent platform for games, bar some mobile ports, due to its closeness.