Marvin

AppleInsider said:

CodeWeavers CEO James Ramey said the company is reaching out to NetEase Games on the matter, asking if there can be anything done to allow macOS players to play the game. Ramey explains that this is ultimately NetEase Games' decision to make, but he assures the developers that Crossover is being used legitimately, not for cheating.

"I am sure that if we are successful that this will be widely announced," said Ramey. "Otherwise we will continue to plead our case."

NetEase Games, the operator of the game, has yet to comment on the incidents. AppleInsider has also contacted NetEase Games for clarification on its policies.

It is plausible that, if the game continues to be popular for a long period of time, a port to iOS could occur in the future. That port may open the door to a full macOS port as well, but that would still depend on the game's popularity.

For the moment, AppleInsider strongly advises prospective players of Marvel Rivals to not be tempted to run the game on Mac via emulation, until a developer-sanctioned method to play is available. 

NetEase has been lifting the bans:

https://www.ign.com/articles/marvel-rivals-dev-apologizes-for-mistakenly-banning-players-for-using-cheats

"“We sincerely apologize for this situation and want to assure you that we do not and will not ban players who are playing fairly and without cheating,” NetEase said.

The developer said it had made a list of affected players and lifted their bans. “We have identified the specific reasons behind these false bans and have compiled a list of affected players,” it said. “We have lifted these bans and want to express our heartfelt apologies for the inconvenience this has caused.”"

oberpongo said:

Where does „half the performance“ come from. 

I am sure Apple can tweak some cores (more gpu etc) to easily double the PS5 performance 

GPUs have raw performance measures that come from core counts and clock speeds. These measures aren't always directly comparable but they tend to be fairly reliable. M4 is 4.6TFLOPs (around the same as XBox Series S), the PS5 is around 10 TFLOPs.

It's better to compare actual GPUs, the consoles use AMD hardware and the PS5 is close to an AMD 6600XT:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Radeon-RX-6600-XT-vs-M4-10-Core-GPU_10939_12502.247598.0.html

There aren't many games on the Mac to compare but Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a well-optimized title. It shows M4 around 30% of the PS5-equivalent. With upscaling, it can get close to half.

M4 Pro is 9.2TFLOPs and roughly equivalent to PS5.
M4 Max is 18.4TFLOPs and roughly double the PS5, probably close to PS5 Pro.
A18 Pro in the iPhone is 2.5TFLOPs, around 1/2 the M4 or 1/4 the PS5.

Apple's cheapest M4 Max product would be the $2000 M4 Max Studio when it's released.

Nvidia's latest AI frame-gen can 4x the FPS. Apple will have at least 2x frame-gen in an upcoming MetalFX for the Cyberpunk 2077 port this year so this will help vs the PS5 performance, although PS5 has it too:

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/98570/amd-fsr-3-frame-generation-is-now-available-on-ps5-and-xbox-series-consoles-to-deliver-120-fps/index.html

The Nintendo Switch 2 is rumored to be around 4TFLOPs (10x Switch 1) and will support DLSS3 and frame-gen, this should perform closely to a PS5 without upscaling and frame-gen and similar to the base M4 iPad Pro. Apple would be competitive with Switch 2 in the iPad Pros and Mac mini and with upscaling and frame-gen can give PS5-like performance.

A TV dock would allow people to use their iPad Pros this way too and the dock could open a TV UI like Steam's Big Picture mode.

https://store.steampowered.com/bigpicture

Apple used to have something called Front Row, which was a media center software:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_Row_(software)

This is used for photos, music, movies. A dock could help get more Apple TV+ (and Arcade) users because way more people have iPhones than Apple TV boxes.

High quality games for this setup are still lacking but Ubisoft is having some financial trouble just now and seem to be putting themselves up for sale. Tencent owns a portion of the company but the owners have some contention about leadership. If Apple was more willing to let them lead the company, perhaps they'd sell to them instead (should cost $5-10b). Then they'd get a few decent franchises like Splinter Cell, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Rayman, Rabbids, Watchdogs, The Crew (like Forza), Trackmania, Just Dance. They'd get 2 game engines: Snowdrop and Dunia (fork of CryEngine). Snowdrop was used in the Avatar game:



They can port their existing library of games:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games:_2010%E2%80%932019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games:_2020%E2%80%93present

StrangeDays said:

elijahg said:

If it was £999 I’d be tempted. But for £3500 there is not a chance. Especially since it’s first generation and much like every other VR device, doesn't really have much of a purpose. Nor does it have many apps. I think Apple is going to struggle to find devs who will write for it because they know the market is minuscule. That said it took a while for the iPhone to take off, but then it was 1/4 of the price.

Counterpoint: it's the half the price of the original Macintosh (corrected for inflation). Which had extremely limited capabilities and use cases. See how that turned out. Then repeat for iPhone, and iPad, and I can't think of a reason why this would be different. Other than those who just like complaining I guess. 

The original Mac almost bankrupted Apple, it took 3 years to sell 1m units:

https://www.cultofmac.com/479113/today-apple-history-first-100-days-mac-roaring-success/

Steve Jobs left Apple because of this, he wanted to lower the price to help improve sales and they couldn't or they'd make a loss:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2013/09/09/john-sculley-just-gave-his-most-detailed-account-ever-of-how-steve-jobs-got-fired-from-apple/

"“Steve went into a deep depression,” Sculley said. As a result, “Steve came to me and he said, ‘I want to drop the price of the Macintosh and I want to move the advertising, shift a large portion of it away from the Apple 2 over to the Mac.”
The successful Mac was the iMac, which launched at $1299 ($2449 adjusted for inflation), which they got down to $799 ($1500 inflation adjusted) the following year:

https://www.theverge.com/23830432/imac-twenty-five-years-ago-saved-apple

The most successful companies in the world are mostly made up of mass-market businesses - retail (food, clothing, shopping), health, transport, banking, insurance, telecommunication, utilities and personal computing.

Apple's success doesn't come from luxury but mass-market luxury. The iPhone is a premium product but it starts at $429 and ASP is under $1000. The Mac ASP is around $1300.

They sell Macs over $3000 but it's easy to see from the revenue that this represents < 5% of their Mac sales and the Mac represents < 10% of their total sales. Sales over $3000 are < 0.5% of their customer base.

If Apple wants this product to become a platform, it needs a lower entry price and this will happen when the manufacturing costs come down but a more cost-effective design would reach it faster. They build a premium iPad Pro with M4 that sells for $999, they can build a premium headset that sells for under $2000. Apple would be able to sell 5 million+ headsets per year at $1500, when the display manufacturing capacity is there.

crazyexcalibur said:

You’re lucky that you don’t have any issues with the weight. I’ve tried at least ten different iterations of the face cushions and none have been able to make it where I can wear the AVP for longer than a couple hours. It’s not so simple to do this either. I’ve had to buy them, try them on for a week or so and return them. Then repeat the process. I’ve even bought third party head gear hoping it would help. I’ve found a few but they just transfer the weight from my eyes to my forehead. I only use it for watching media because of this, as media usually is about 2 to 3 hours, the max before my face hurts too much. 

There are a lot of components inside:

The weight is actually similar to most headsets:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1337114/vr-headset-comparison-by-weight/

AVP weighs 600-650g for the headset and 350g for the battery pack.

The Big Screen Beyond VR headset (display-only) is lighter and weighs 170-185g:

https://www.uploadvr.com/bigscreen-beyond-weight-specs/

An iPhone 15 weighs 171g, including battery.

An iPhone 15 compute unit (minus display) + Big Screen Beyond headset would weigh 356g, almost the same as the AVP battery pack. It may need more battery power but they can still build a much lighter unit.

Hopefully the 2nd revision will see a big reduction in size and weight. It would be good if they could sit it closer to the eyes to increase field of view.





In September this year, they will have the 3nm A19 Pro chip, which could go in AVP 2 or a smaller model. This will run much cooler than M2 and drain less battery.

If Apple had made AVP1 like an iPhone strapped to a headset, even with 2K displays around $1499-1999, they'd have sold a few million units. It would still have been the best VR headset on the market and people would mostly use it for media consumption. Text would have looked more blurry but people used SD monitors for decades and this problem will get resolved in time as display manufacturing improves.

A more mainstream model would let them see what the demand is like and would drive more software and content having a larger userbase.

Galfan said:

Is it just me or does the M4 Max feels like a less improvement. Maybe it's because M4 Pro took such a leap I was expecting M4 max to become a 16 and 18 CPU with maybe 32 and 42 GPU cores but it remains the same on core counts as M3 Max......I think I got my hopes up a bit too much

Apple has comparisons to M3 Max on their site, under the 'go deeper' link at the bottom of the popup. Divide M4 amount by M3 amount to get the relative difference:

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

M4 Max has about 15% improvement over M3 Max but there are a couple of areas where it's as much as 30%. M4-series uses Armv9 so has faster vector computing. They also have 2nd-gen raytracing cores.

As usual, it's not worth upgrading for a single generation but there's a large jump every 3-4 generations. M4 is 2-3x M1 so people with M1 Max could comfortably move to M4 Pro to get the same performance at lower power and lower price.

Xed said:

jfabula1 said:

lukevaxhacker said:

Very simple in concept: return production to the U.S., although hasn't been done for years. Remember the Fremont plant…

It’s funny, anti-tariffs are all complaining and crying about high prices, dude open your brains, America had been ripped off for a long long time and we keep borrowing..we’re sinking fast. If Apple has to raise prices so be it. Will still gonna buy them.

So you believe that America is being ripped off by what I assume are "other countries", so you think the solution is to charge every American wanting an Apple product an extra fee?

To reiterate, American is being ripped off so let's rips off the American people? That makes sense to you?

The problem needing solved is the debt. There has been a large deficit for a while:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:Federal_Government_annual_spending_and_revenue.webp

This has accumulated over 20+ years. When the debt is higher than a country's GDP (as it is in the US) then it's in a danger zone. There's a level where the economy collapses catastrophically.

There are a few causes. One is the population time-bomb that is affecting most countries now. When the economy is bad for younger generations due to depressed wages, higher cost of housing etc, they delay having children and have fewer children. This creates an elderly population that strains social security.

Another cause is trade deficit. The biggest one for the US is with China. The aim, as described in the following video, is to have no deficit:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v4g6pfpngEM

Vietnam offered to negotiate in response to the tariffs but their offer was rejected apparently due to still resulting in a deficit:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/vietnams-tariffs-offer-rejected-by-trump-adviser-not-a-negotiation/ar-AA1CrSiw

Some countries block foreign companies from trading at all, this isn't considered a tariff but it passes billions to other companies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China

There are ways to deal with the debt: cut public spending, increase taxes, reduce trade deficits, increase GDP, increase population (birthrate or immigration), increase retirement age.

If tariffs are left in place and have to be paid for then it's a tax on the people of the country imposing the tariffs. If countries implement measures to reduce the deficit then they bear the cost.

Some harm to GDP is from losing manufacturing to other countries, which often happens by other countries implementing harmful working conditions to lower costs significantly. Some manufacturing of military components has been moved and has become a national security risk.

Tariffs are not the end goal. The goal is to have close to zero deficit trading, domestic manufacturing, more jobs, higher birthrate. But until they get those requirements, they are planning to use tariffs as a cudgel to achieve it. It's reckless, probably won't be effective and they should try to achieve their goals more responsibly.

If the people of the country imposing the tariffs end up paying more, this actually results in paying more taxes to cut the deficit, assuming they keep buying.

I doubt it would impact iPhone sales much. People mostly pay on contract so even a 50% increase would be $30/month vs $20/month. An extra $10/month is minuscule vs people's typical monthly expenses. This is why the iPhone is such a good product for Apple because even at a premium price point, it's an inexpensive product relative to everything else.

There's a sense that they are trying to fix the debt issue urgently and it doesn't seem like it needs to be done that urgently. Although it's a critical issue to solve, they could implement fixes over the course of 1-2 years instead of 'by Wednesday, or else'.

They could also communicate their goals more effectively. They can post an official page showing the debt, what's responsible for it, their proposed fixes, projections and their success rate. Like the following site but with more accurate numbers and clearer information:

https://www.usdebtclock.org/
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny

camber said:

Sweeney ought to be considering how many people will never but EPIC products because of his conduct!

Not enough unfortunately, Fortnite is still one of the most played games in the world:

https://fortnite.gg/player-count
https://www.demandsage.com/fortnite-statistics/

Around 30 million daily active players, 650 million player accounts. $40 billion in lifetime revenue.

This is what gave Epic the ability to lose $1b on a lawsuit.

According to a recent interview, Epic still spends more than they make though so once the one-hit-wonder game finally loses player interest, their situation will be different.

It's crazy how such a repetitive, mindless game has lasted so long and generated so much revenue.

Epic is also trying to get big game studios hooked on Unreal Engine and their store, which will tie their products to their company success. Apple has options to undermine this but they need to partner with the studios.

The likely worst outcome is that Apple is forced to lower their fee to 15% to avoid big developers processing fees externally. There's a single digit percentage that is break-even for any developer/publisher processing revenue at scale and as long as the fee is at a reasonable level, they will use Apple's setup.

tht said:

Moving heat from the SoC chip to the graphene sheet (or other heat spreader) could be a bottleneck as chips are very small while transferring heat through a conduction path with solid metal needs a certain amount of contact area. The higher the power per unit area of the SoC, the more using a solid metal (with a thermal paste interface) becomes a bottleneck. A vapor chamber can address that as it can transfer more heat per unit area. That heat still needs to get out of the phone.

The solid state coolers could be an option, either on their own or combined with the vapor chamber:

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/xmems-ucooling-xmc-2400-airjet
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/air-cooling/xmems-fan-on-a-chip-cooling-can-reduce-ssd-temperatures-by-up-to-20-percent



If they can move air in from one side of the phone, across the CPU and out the other using the solid state fan, that should help cool it down a lot. In older designs, these options used more power than a fan but maybe these newer ones are efficient enough or Apple could try designing their own.

blastdoor said:

When I first read that Apple executives wouldn’t be talking to John Gruber this year (https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/29/the-talk-show-live-tickets-2025) I interpreted it as a snub. But now I wonder if the Apple executives are just going into hiding. 

John Gruber was rude with his recent unforgiving article about Apple. He definitely deserved a snub.

Just because Apple goes the extra mile to do their normal quality assurance doesn't justify attacking them for it the way he did.

AI is a constantly evolving technology and every month there's a new bar being set for what it can do like Google's Veo 3 video generator and others:







Apple hasn't been involved nearly as much with large scale cloud computing as other companies like Google and Microsoft so they have to scale up cloud infrastructure to handle this or figure out how to do more locally. Apple would probably prefer to do it locally but there are too many constraints on low-end hardware.

They should start with small, meaningful features that are done reliably and give people the assurance of privacy like being able to generate photoreal backgrounds for Facetime and wallpapers. They just need to manage expectations better so that people know this will be a multi-year technology and it won't come all at once.

michelb76 said:

Some results from my M1 Max, 10 CPU / 32 GPU, 64GB:
Steel Nomad - 1754
Solar Bay - 22008
Wild Life Extreme - 17910

Even with the M4 Max, Apple still has long way to go.

M4 Max is a laptop chip, it's comparable to a laptop Nvidia 5070.

5070 laptop (~100W):
https://www.3dmark.com/sn/6066166 (Steel Nomad - 3166)
https://www.3dmark.com/sb/301082 (Solar Bay - 67588)
https://www.3dmark.com/wl/477536 (Wild Life Extreme - 25707)

Desktop GPUs like the 4090-5090 are 400-500W GPUs.

M3 Ultra is a bit higher (about the same as a 5080 laptop):
https://www.3dmark.com/snmac/876 (Steel Nomad - 5519)
https://www.3dmark.com/sbmac/624 (Solar Bay - 81084)
https://www.3dmark.com/wlmac/340 (Wild Life Extreme - 51896)

If there was an M4 Ultra, this would be about 25% faster.
If there was an M4 Extreme (quad Max GPU), this would be competitive with the fastest PC GPU, the 5090, but this would also use 400-500W. Only the Mac Pro chassis would be able to handle this and the sales volume at that price point would't justify it.

The main thing is they are competitive in the laptop space as that's the majority of users and they have the advantage with unified memory.