auxio

coolfactor said:

A Mac mini would be an ideal entry-level candidate to test the waters with an ARM-based Mac. It's long overdue.

Unfortunately, the sales numbers and profit margins on the Mini could never fund the technical effort required to create an entirely new platform.  If anywhere, I'd expect to see it in the MacBook line first.

EngDev said:

While it's nice to see a port supporting Metal 2, it's unfortunate that this game is 2 years old, and even then, I'd question if it could perform as well as the DirectX 11 version on Windows. Perhaps a comparison upon release?

It depends on whether the team doing the porting of the game to Mac takes the time and care to optimize it the way the original developers did with DX11 or not.  I have no doubt that Apple, given that they make the hardware and software, has optimized Metal on macOS as well as DirectX is optimized on Windows.  The trouble is that Mac ports of games are typically outsourced and simply done good enough for the game to be released.  But the masses don't understand this and will simply blame Apple.

tshapi said:

I also believe Apple has an awesome PR department.  That beautifully takes what the company has been building for months or years and spins it to look even better. 

Or perhaps these are truly the foundational concepts and models upon which their technology is built, and they make sure to carry that through to their marketing.

There's a reason why Jobs stated that Apple tries to be at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology.  And I'm sure he made that a mandate for those working on new technologies at Apple: understand what it is in the real world which that technology is attempting to recreate, the history of it, why it matters to people, and use that to drive the design.

https://youtu.be/IKxOywaoUKo?t=2m

These are things which a company purely fixated on technology and selling products just won't understand or value.

This site is worth a read if you're into the history of electronic music instruments: http://120years.net

It stops around the time the 808 came out, but the foundations were already well established by that point.  I'm big into the history of electronic music and am always saddened by the very limited (and typically awful) exposure it gets in the pop music industry.  Aphex Twin was one of the few interesting artists in the genre to actually achieve some level of pop success.

Check out the fairly recent documentary on Raymond Scott for a small sample of the interesting history behind it: http://scottdoc.com/