Johar

I have to confess that I rarely play mobile or casual games, so I had missed some of the developments mentioned above.

As for Game Center, one of its most glaring faults was that it was so insular. It was OK in the early years, but the lack of support for Android and social (read Facebook) connections effectively rendered it obsolete as a foundation for games, and particularly multiplayer games. Also, like I said, it was technically unsound and highly unreliable.

Are Apple's current game related services (as mentioned in posts above) multi-platform?

As for the Mac, I think Apple has the resources and competence to do very well as a gaming company. The real question is if they want to.

Apple calls itself a gaming company because it's generating tons of revenue from the mostly casual mobile gaming market. However, I would never call them a gaming company - in the same way that I wouldn't call a TV maker like LG a movie company.

As a game developer I have suffered the consequences of using Apple's buggy and severely crippled Game Center service. It honestly felt like its product manager was an intern... who didn't even particularly like games. Ultimately they realised how terrible it was and decided to kill it rather than fixing it.

As a AAA segment gamer, I previously used to be able to play most games on my Mac. Either ported to native code or running in Windows by way of Bootcamp. Since Mr. Cook took over, I can't find any other explanation to Apple's attitude visavi serious gaming, than a personal dislike of these games. Hence, Apple hardware has gradually become a completely lost cause for any serious gamer.

Like someone else said in a post above, there's a long list of actions that Apple need to take to get even close to earning the right to call themselves a gaming company.

Apple has always been strong in hardware design (albeit with a dark age in the years before Jobs returned and a few duds, like the puck mouse and the cube).

On the software side, it's much more of a mixed bag. Clearly, the Mac was revolutionary when it launched, thanks to BOTH really great graphic design and groundbreaking UI, driven by the stellar Human Interface Guidelines, which was lightyears beyond the competition.

Under Jobs we certainly got the eye candy of the 3D accelerated Aqua interface, as well as the rock solid stability of Mac OS X. But Apple also launched a huge number of equally groundbreaking apps: iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, Final Cut, Garage Band, the iWorks suite, etc. all of which looked really nice and made it an absolute joy to manage all things digital. Granted, we also got a less consistent UI, with bouts of superfluous skeumorphism. But honestly, just the sheer magic of using Keynote instead of the then utterly horrible Powerpoint was more than making up for all of that.

My point, however, is that Apple has been gradually deteriorating on the software side. Remember when Apple was the undisputed leader in software design, and every new iteration of OS X was faster and often came with useful new features or innovative new apps. These days it looks really bland, with upgrades often noticably slowing down (particularly older) hardware. As for the apps, they have either been dumbed down to align them with the iPad versions, stalled in terms of new features or have been outright cancelled, like Aperture. And when did Apple last dazzle us with some awesome new software?

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Ives was the culprit. But he did mar the revamped UI with some glaringly ugly icons, which could only have been designed by a color blind person. And the flattening really didn't feel like anything else than a variation of the Android UI. Maybe even inferior - after all, Material Design uses subtle 3D effects to make the interface more intuitive. The Apple interface is just a rather dull and sometimes hard to read grey on grey. 

For sure, Apple software isn't worse than the competition, but the innovative magic and the obvious design leadership is definitely and sadly gone.

There seems to be some confusion about "gamers". The desire to play graphically advanced games at high frame rates doesn't equate to an anti-social, sedentary life, spent in front of a blinged out gaming rig. It's like assuming that everyone who likes a great cinematic experience in front of a large screen TV with a surround sound system by definition have to be wasting their life away binging TV shows all the time.

Hardcore gamers are mostly kids in the 10-25 year old bracket with gaming, often both competitive and social, as a major interest. I would advise against letting your prejudices paint them all as degenerate lowlifes. And the size of the gaming market seems to contradict the notion that playing games is a niche.

It has been sadly obvious for oh, about as many years as Steve Jobs have been dead, that Apple is firmly opposed to any kind of state-of-the-art gaming on the Mac.

I've been a Mac user since I got my first Macintosh SE (so quite a while) and it has always been a bit of a challenge to be a gamer on that platform. But Steve Jobs regularly trotted out gaming celebs like John Carmack to tout the gaming prowess of Mac OS X. We also got OpenGL, PC compatible ports and eventually the ability to boot straight into Windows and play any game we wanted.

Under Cook, mobile games seem to be OK, but game developers on the Mac are given such a cold shoulder that even Mac gaming stalwart Blizzard refrained from launching their latest hit game Overwatch on the Mac. This was the first game since the start of that company that wasn't simultaneoulsy launched on both PC and Mac. Apples anemic GPU choices didn't enable the game to meet Blizzard's user experience standards.

What I don't get is the joy that clowns like Lkrupp seems to derive from the fact that Mac users now need to purchase a second computer for gaming. Is there any reason at all to celebrate that one specific, and incidentally very popular, activity simply can't be adequately performed on a Mac computer?