One of the things about modern apple is it just doesn't seem to follow through.
It introduces new tech, which is potentially ground breaking, then doesn't give it the use case that drives wide adoption. The new tech just sort of sits there.
Thunderbolt is a clear example (and firewire, and probably lightning before it). Apple leads its introduction, then drag out the TB3/USB-c adoption. Doesn't bother come up with a product that drives the uptake of the new port, like this example. If third parties aren't doing it, Apple should. You can't tell me they haven't explored just that before they decided to adopt the port. There is no killer combination of a mac with a laser printer that comes up these days.
what you see has not following through, apple sees as staying focused. it is not their goal to build bleeding edge gaming rigs. nor third-party TB accessories. it is most certainly not true that if third-parties arent doing it that apple should by definition. that doesnt make sense. there are all sorts of things that arent being done, and it doesnt mean apple should do them all.
havent you ever listened to Jobs or Cook talk about this? all the product ideas they say No to? a 1000 No's to every Yes, etc...
theyre a highly focused, mass market device company. they dont make gaming rigs, or car stereo head units, no matter how much a few of us wish they did.
I want this to work with my 2016 Air so very badly. Competing with my children for the console is annoying, but I don't want to build an entire separate PC just for gaming.
And who cares how it looks - that's what the space behind the monitor or under the desk is for!
... Why does Apple seem so ambivalent toward desktop gaming? ...
The real answer here (the one no gamer wants to hear or will ever believe) is that it's because it's a small-ish and very niche market.
They already pour money down the drain just to keep the Mac Pro in their lineup and pretend that they are relevant in the high end desktop market. This market is even smaller and likely to give even less return on the research dollar.
Anyone who has the ability to step back and look at the computer industry, and the way it's developed over the last two decades, as a whole, can see that this kind of desktop gaming is a fading segment of that whole. It's time has passed. It's peak was probably a few years after the first Halo came out and it's been sliding down ever since.
Steam has roughly 125 million users. Only a small percentage probably have high end gaming PCs. Still, it may be a tiny niche market but Valve are absolutely minting it. Not Apple level of course, but there are no shareholders to worry about, no dividends to pay.
I have been using Macs since the LCIII and the Performa line. Never owned a single Windows machine and i never will.
But i do have a problem. I don't game that much but i would like to enjoy awesome graphics if that is a feature of the game. Now I don't have the option to enjoy great graphics. In fact we never had ! Who cares if i play games for 5 minutes a week or 5 days a week ? All i ask is to have a CHOICE !
Anybody who loves cycling in the winter wants to have a home-trainer. Anybody who is not familiar with the revolution in that area which is happening today, yesterday and the past 6 months, should check it out. It is called Zwift. It's a virtual world, with awesome graphics, through which you move on a virtual racing bike. Your virtual bike is a mirror of your real bike that is mounted on a smart-trainer like a Wahoo Kickr. So the faster you kick, the faster you climb the virtual hill.
I have Zwift running on my Mac Mini with the Radeon 6630 with 256MB memory and its connected to my Sony TV.
So, i am not a silly, inferior, stupid gamer (in the eyes of Apple), i am trying to live a healthy life and enjoy my sport which is cycling.
What options do i have ?
Should i stick an iMac behind my TV ? Should i buy a new Mac Mini with 3% better graphics ? Shoud i buy a 3000€ Mac Pro and place that thing behind my TV ? Buy a 3000€ Macbook Pro ?
What does Apple want more from me ? I have several iPhones, 3 iPads (the iPad Pro is awesome !) numerous Macs... I have sold many more stuff to other people for Apple while all i ask is;
GIVE ME THE FREAKIN OPTION TO CHOOSE FOR AWESOME GRAPHICS !!!!
I am kind of done waiting and i will NOT buy Windows-crap. So what are my options, anybody ?
By the way; an iMac with DCI P3 ? Really ? What kind of joke is that ? A colorspace nobody uses, nobody knows how to use and a colorspace nobody will ever use as a standard. Who is into colormanagement ? Already too few ! So let's introduce a colorshift that makes my photo's look overly green while i have been working in photoshop to make it a great picture. Brilliant ! Who is the sucker who carries his Color Checker Passport everywhere he goes ? Let's f@ck up his pictures, just for the fun of it...
So now i'll have to work in Adobe RGB 1998, convert the color profile to sRGB for all mobile devices because ONLY sRGB is recognized if included, and for those who i suspect to have a new 2015 iMac 5K i should convert from Adobe RGB 1998 to DCI P3 to prevent a color shift.
If i would be working on a new iMac even more steps are needed to prevent the color-storm that destroys everything you are working for !
Insane.
Where does this end ?
Apple TV... OMG...
That is one of the ugliest boxes I've ever seen. Even if it were beauti-ugli-ful I think Apple's approach to design, and to products, would preclude them from ever arriving at something remotely like this.
It's not a million miles away from the design of the old Mac Pro. Hardly ugly. The green lighting is obviously overkill and Apple would never do anything like that, but it's part of Razer's brand aesthetic.
Actually the green lightning? That's Razer Chroma- you can change it to any color you want, any gradient you want, or have it shift.
The price of that brick is missing and rather important determination of how many people might give it a shot. Performance is a very important question too. Thunderbolt is how many PCIe lane's worth of bandwidth? 2? 4? And you want to run games on an Ultrabook? Even a fast Ultrabook chip, that's asking a lot to expect near-desktop class performance even with what looks like a very expensive side car. Thunderbolt may be a fast protocol, but compared to a full length PCIe slot, I bet it's like feeding data through a straw.
I think a separate computer is your best bet. Shoehorning or sidecaring a desktop card to an Ultrabook just doesn't sound like a dollar-effective way to get game performance.
That's why it hasn't worked until now - Thunderbolt 3 is the first time we can emulate PCI Express 3.0 16x. Older Thunderbolts couldn't handle it.
I have been using Macs since the LCIII and the Performa line. Never owned a single Windows machine and i never will. But i do have a problem. I don't game that much but i would like to enjoy awesome graphics if that is a feature of the game. Now I don't have the option to enjoy great graphics. In fact we never had ! Who cares if i play games for 5 minutes a week or 5 days a week ? All i ask is to have a CHOICE !...<SNIP>...I am kind of done waiting and i will NOT buy Windows-crap...<SNIP> OMG...
You could build a Windows gaming box. That would give you what you want, which is the latest cutting-edge graphics, as well as the largest library of games.
You could also build yourself a hackintosh box. That might actually suit your needs quite nicely. But don't expect the same performance and game library of a Windows machine.
At the end of the day, to get the best graphics performance with the all the latest bells and whistles you will still need to run most of the games from Windows.
You might also look into a Steam Box, but the performance is not quite there and neither is the game library when compared to a Windows box of the same hardware.
I don't think buying a Mac Pro is money well spent for just gaming, neither would be buying an iMac. Both are completely capable machines but I wouldn't recommend buying either with just gaming in mind.
My genuine recommendation would be to build your own gaming rig with a clean Windows install with no third party garbage and enjoy yourself with the latest and greatest gaming experience. Everything else you can do on your Apple gear.
I've been using an external TB2 box with a video card for a while now. I didn't think it was particularly ingenious. Back in the day my 300mhz PowerBook and I were doing that with a pc express cards and a magma box. Things have improved but nothing extremely new. Regarding video cards thanks to current iterations of mac OS X you can use damn near any video card in a box like this since there's no need for a boot screen and performance is barely nicked over using a pc. Personally I think a MacBook will just run a little better and any MacBook will benefit from something like this beyond belief over having nothing to aid at all. Anyone thinking they need another computer I'd say this is a better option especially if you have a brand new MacBook/ Pro.
" Interest has only intensified since Thunderbolt's introduction, but Apple has ignored their cries."
Considering that you need TB3 for this to work, you can't blame Apple for not releasing it yet.
This kind of product has been speculated about since TB1, it's only Razor's box that requires TB3.
speculation is one thing, execution is another. The reason the Razor's works with TB3 is because this feature is supported only by Intel Skylake & TB3. It wasn't practical to do before.
The real answer here (the one no gamer wants to hear or will ever believe) is that it's because it's a small-ish and very niche market.
They already pour money down the drain just to keep the Mac Pro in their lineup and pretend that they are relevant in the high end desktop market. This market is even smaller and likely to give even less return on the research dollar.
Anyone who has the ability to step back and look at the computer industry, and the way it's developed over the last two decades, as a whole, can see that this kind of desktop gaming is a fading segment of that whole. It's time has passed. It's peak was probably a few years after the first Halo came out and it's been sliding down ever since.
Steam has roughly 125 million users. Only a small percentage probably have high end gaming PCs. Still, it may be a tiny niche market but Valve are absolutely minting it. Not Apple level of course, but there are no shareholders to worry about, no dividends to pay.
It shows that high-level modern GPU's make up about 15% of Steam's users (that being, at the time, the 970 and later from nVidia and the R9 200 and HD7900 from AMD). The most popular discrete GPU was the 760 with about 2.5% of the user base, and the most popular over all was HD 4000 graphics from Intel with about 5% of users. Overall, Integrated GPUs were about 35% - not a giant number. that means 65% had a discrete GPU, which tends to lean toward those people having put the effort into getting a graphics card.
Now note, computer gaming is an 11 BILLION dollar business. 15% of that is not tiny number. Plus a lot of that 15% will spend big money - one guy at my work just dropped 4500$ on a new system, with dual 980ti's, custom loop cooling and a monster case, plus a 4K monitor to drive the whole thing. It takes a lot of 899$ laptops to get that kind of profit margin.
The price of that brick is missing and rather important determination of how many people might give it a shot. Performance is a very important question too. Thunderbolt is how many PCIe lane's worth of bandwidth? 2? 4? And you want to run games on an Ultrabook? Even a fast Ultrabook chip, that's asking a lot to expect near-desktop class performance even with what looks like a very expensive side car. Thunderbolt may be a fast protocol, but compared to a full length PCIe slot, I bet it's like feeding data through a straw.
I think a separate computer is your best bet. Shoehorning or sidecaring a desktop card to an Ultrabook just doesn't sound like a dollar-effective way to get game performance.
This is what people don't understand, to game well you need an 8 lane PCI slot and 16 wouldn't hurt. TB 2 just isn't fast enough. Now if developers got some game logic running on the external GPU things might get interesting.
I want this to work with my 2016 Air so very badly. Competing with my children for the console is annoying, but I don't want to build an entire separate PC just for gaming.
And who cares how it looks - that's what the space behind the monitor or under the desk is for!
A separate gaming PC will likely be cheaper. the other problem with these boxes is hitting enough volume to be able to offer competitive prices. We have already seen the high cost of simple TB2 hubs, this will be far worst.
"Halo debacle?!?" Jobs turned his back on Bungee. Only Mac users that were gamers thought it was a debacle. ...
Nah, you're attempting to rewrite history here. Bungee jumped ship for more money. Jobs had nothing to do with it.
Bungee betrayed Apple by leaving for Microsoft after giving multiple assurances that they wouldn't. Jobs would never have included them in the keynote if they weren't considered "locked in" already.
How was Bungie "locked in?" They were already selling PC versions of their games. Bungie was in the keynote because they were one of the most innovative Mac developers at the time. Other than that I never heard of them ever getting much official support from Apple, or heard of Jobs/Apple doing anything to stop the sale. It was started as a Mac based company but pretty much the entire staff of the company agreed to the sale. I don't think Jobs has ever shown a real interest in Mac games or gaming hardware.
dogcowabunga - Ugly? because it looks like it was based off the Mac Pro design. granted the Razer green is a bit much, but no more really then Apple's upside down Apple on the Powerbook.
Nah, you're attempting to rewrite history here. Bungee jumped ship for more money. Jobs had nothing to do with it.
Bungee betrayed Apple by leaving for Microsoft after giving multiple assurances that they wouldn't. Jobs would never have included them in the keynote if they weren't considered "locked in" already.
How was Bungie "locked in?" They were already selling PC versions of their games. Bungie was in the keynote because they were one of the most innovative Mac developers at the time. Other than that I never heard of them ever getting much official support from Apple, or heard of Jobs/Apple doing anything to stop the sale. It was started as a Mac based company but pretty much the entire staff of the company agreed to the sale. I don't think Jobs has ever shown a real interest in Mac games or gaming hardware.
Exactly, Bungie was simply allowed to announce the release of the game Halo that was going to be on Mac and PC.
Comments
what you see has not following through, apple sees as staying focused. it is not their goal to build bleeding edge gaming rigs. nor third-party TB accessories. it is most certainly not true that if third-parties arent doing it that apple should by definition. that doesnt make sense. there are all sorts of things that arent being done, and it doesnt mean apple should do them all.
havent you ever listened to Jobs or Cook talk about this? all the product ideas they say No to? a 1000 No's to every Yes, etc...
theyre a highly focused, mass market device company. they dont make gaming rigs, or car stereo head units, no matter how much a few of us wish they did.
/want the Naga Chroma mouse for my gaming rig.
That's why it hasn't worked until now - Thunderbolt 3 is the first time we can emulate PCI Express 3.0 16x. Older Thunderbolts couldn't handle it.
You could also build yourself a hackintosh box. That might actually suit your needs quite nicely. But don't expect the same performance and game library of a Windows machine.
At the end of the day, to get the best graphics performance with the all the latest bells and whistles you will still need to run most of the games from Windows.
You might also look into a Steam Box, but the performance is not quite there and neither is the game library when compared to a Windows box of the same hardware.
I don't think buying a Mac Pro is money well spent for just gaming, neither would be buying an iMac. Both are completely capable machines but I wouldn't recommend buying either with just gaming in mind.
My genuine recommendation would be to build your own gaming rig with a clean Windows install with no third party garbage and enjoy yourself with the latest and greatest gaming experience. Everything else you can do on your Apple gear.
That is my best advice for you.
It shows that high-level modern GPU's make up about 15% of Steam's users (that being, at the time, the 970 and later from nVidia and the R9 200 and HD7900 from AMD). The most popular discrete GPU was the 760 with about 2.5% of the user base, and the most popular over all was HD 4000 graphics from Intel with about 5% of users. Overall, Integrated GPUs were about 35% - not a giant number. that means 65% had a discrete GPU, which tends to lean toward those people having put the effort into getting a graphics card.
Now note, computer gaming is an 11 BILLION dollar business. 15% of that is not tiny number. Plus a lot of that 15% will spend big money - one guy at my work just dropped 4500$ on a new system, with dual 980ti's, custom loop cooling and a monster case, plus a 4K monitor to drive the whole thing. It takes a lot of 899$ laptops to get that kind of profit margin.