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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

I'm totally fine without having a single Steam game. Most Mac users didn't have access for many years, and I'm not sure that gaming is a big use case for Macs, at least historically. I would be interested to see if this has changed.

And most software that I depend upon is either 1) open source, or 2) developed for Mac first and foremost with a solid backup app that is open source. The one exception is Microsoft Office, whose Mac versions are second thoughts and second rate software, but necessary for collaboration with a world that has locked itself into closed formats. Office would likely get an Arm version for Mac too, I would think.

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People always underestimate how important games are to PC sales, and Apple is traditionally the worst about this given their bicycle for the mind rhetoric. I don't think it is a coincidence that Apple laptops became very popular after you started being able to boot them in Windows to play a game. You got the benefit of MacOS, Apple hardware and PC game libraries.

I doubt very many people are buying Macs to run Windows games. Mac hardware doesn’t exactly come with the greatest GPUs.

"How many people buy Macs to run Windows games" is the wrong question.

I don't buy computers just to read websites (I can do that more comfortably on an iPad), or just to write documents (ever heard of the FreeWrite[1]?), or just to play games (I'd rather use a game console). Rather, I buy a computer because it's a single device that can do all of those things.

I almost added "and switch between them seamlessly" to the end of the last sentence, but of course on a Mac with Bootcamp, that's the one exception—you have to reboot in order to play a game. Still, on a laptop, I consider the ability quite valuable—I don't want to carry around a second computer just to play a quick game of Spelunky from time to time. If I couldn't do that at all on a Mac, it would be a point in favor of Windows.

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1: https://getfreewrite.com/

And the casual game market is much larger and those are mostly on mobile. Besides, Apple will probably already have a large number of casual games via Apple Arcade.

I know a lot of people wi Th Macs, but they are all developers or scientists, and I've never known anybody to install Windows via boot camp! So I'm clearly not in this demographic. However I do wonder how large it is compared to the rest of the Mac userbase.

Mac support in games is less important now than ever before. Services such as Shadow are how I game on my Mac now.

I'm not so sure that generalizes. Steam has a huge userbase and according to https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey, 4% of that is using MacOS. That's a big number - especially keeping in mind how much inferior MacOS is in gaming support compared to Linux, where almost everything works. I don't see that going well with the ARM switch.

1) Let’s take the latest amount of active steam players per month, which is 90MM. That is a number for 2019, I will assume that it grew a little per the usual percentage it does (accounting for Covid) to 100MM. 4% is 4MM.

2) Macbook Pro & Macbook Air have a total share of 78%. I’m ignoring other models, since we are talking about ARM on notebooks, not towers. That brings the number of players to 3,1MM

3) We can assume that most people still rock macbooks since 2012. But let’s start counting from 2013. (We don’t have unit sales, but only the total amount, so I work with the amount that most websites quote) Apple, on average, sells 18MM Macs per fiscal year. Till today, that is 135MM Macs the market.

4) We need to estimate the amount of Macbooks vs Macs, but I cannot find a single stat on this. I’m gonna pull this out of my ass and say that it’s around 90%. The Macs have always been supplemental to Macbooks and Apple has been “forgetting” about them a lot. This brings the total to 121,5MM

5) That is 2,56% of people who game on Macbook. I would say Apple doesn’t care about ~3%. This stat also doesn’t account for hardcore vs casual players. Eq. Those who won’t care vs those who will switch platforms.

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