rmoo

maury markowitz said:

... which is why there's basically 1 in 20 games on the Mac?

Its not like they can blame weak GPUs any more.

Come on you know that it is lack of market share. https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/27/21083870/rocket-league-mac-linux-service-refund-reason-why

And the reason for the lack of market share is the cost of Apple machines. Back in the Intel days, the entry point was $1000 for a dual core 1.1 GHz CPU that would have barely been able to play the 99 cent mobile games or the ancient stuff like Portal on Steam. For that you can get an Intel Core i7 device with a midrange Nvidia GPU. 

The switch to Apple Silicon has made things worse. Despite what Apple's PR is willing to allow you to believe, market share has not increased. But now the RAM on Macs can't be upgraded and there is no third party GPU support, even over Thunderbolt. Your "you can't blame weak GPUs" is false. While the M1 in the Mac Mini, MBA and entry level MBP has CPU performance comparable to many gaming machines, the GPU performance is nowhere close (on games anyway, not the Final Cut Pro stuff that Apple designed and optimized it for). To get RTX 3060 performance you need to spend $3300. That would get you an RTX 3080 system easy. Or two RTX 3060 systems with enough left over to buy an iPhone SE 2020. 

That is also why the "Apple needs to take gaming more seriously and invest in it" talk can't be taken seriously. The pricing just isn't competitive and the decades' old "total cost of ownership" sales like that Apple pushes doesn't work in gaming because hardware gets upgraded or replaced every 3 years - or less - in order to be able to play the latest games. No one who is even halfway serious about gaming is going to buy a Mac. What you want is for devs to ignore this, create or port games for macOS anyway and lose money. 

I don't even believe there is a real avenue for console gaming for Apple. The PS5 and the XBox One X cost $500. The M1 Mac Mini? $700. So the idea of Apple producing a machine with equivalent graphics power for $200 less than their current 8 core GPU device just isn't happening even if Apple chooses to emulate Microsoft and Sony and sell it at a loss. Maybe more things could be done with iPhone and iPad gaming, but they have tried Apple Arcade and it didn't have an impact, mainly because they didn't move nearly as many Apple TV units as they hoped (again, cost). 

First off, we get it. The M1 Pro and the M1 Max are the best PC CPUs on the market right now. Still, why compare MacBooks to gaming laptops?
Gaming laptops are designed to run the most Steam games at the highest FPS at whatever price range they are trying to reach. They aren't designed for photo and video editing, music production, data analysis, desktop publishing, CAD, software engineering, 2D/3D animation and VFX, data science and the other workloads are actually used for. 

So what are we talking about here? For CPUs, you want the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS or HX. Or you want the Intel Core i9-11900H or 11950H. For GPUs, the Nvidia 3080X is the absolute minimum. But if you are doing content creation or engineering/scientific work: the Radeon Pro W5500M or the Nvidia RTX Ax000 line are the GPUs to compare.

Dell strangely doesn't play in this sandbox (though I mention that their Xeon CPU/Nvidia RTX A5000 GPU data science laptops can cost less than several 16' MacBook Pro configurations). But for those who do, start with the Razer Blade 14: AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX and Nvidia RTX 3080, which they claim as the world's most powerful 14' laptop!

Then go to theThe HP ZBook Studio (content creation) and ZBook Fury (CAD/engineering) lines. Next consider the Asus ProArt Studio line. Finally consider the Lenovo ThinkPad P15 and P17 Gen 2. Those are machines that should actually be compared to the M1 Pro and M1 Max devices. If you want to compare x86 devices that will be used to do the same things that MacBooks are actually used for that is.