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Comment by akmarinov | Hacker News Reader

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Only 4% of people using Steam are using a Mac, gaming isn't that popular on macOS, unfortunately. And it's getting worse with the OpenGL deprecation.

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Macs only have ~10% market-share overall, so this just tells us that Mac users are (very roughly) 50% less likely to play games than PC users. That's certainly a drop, but not such a catastrophic one.

And, Apple's asinine decisions around OpenGL don't tell us anything about what users actually want.

That's still about 5 million users. Looks huge to me. Well, maybe that's tiny from some perspective.

Negligible compared to the 738 million iPhone users.

That's not how any of this works. It's about the ecosystem of developers and users. How much VR work is happening on macs? How much AI?

This is a long term race that Apple will fail because it failed to nurture its roots.

But we are talking about the MacOS users, not iPhone users... They won't be affected by this.

Apple sells about 20-25 million Macs a year. That’s negligible to Apple to lose some small percentage of a segment that’s only 10% of it revenue.

Think about how many games died when they dropped 32 bit support.

There are many good arguments in this thread and I honestly appreciate to see the many perspectives, also this one.

But I can't get behind that argument. If all you sell is 20-25 million, to possibly lose 5 million of that is huge. Think about how much they would have to save with the processor move (or how much performance they'd have to gain to make up for it in new sales) to make it worth it. Also, the effort will be huge to make the transition work.

All while there is the easy alternative to just use AMD processors if they wanted a performance boost?

I mean, I'm happy about this. It will probably further cement Linux as the only relevant gaming OS next to Windows. But I'm still surprised. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if it happens.

For reference, they can save $200 per laptop and up to $500 on the high end CPU option.

That ought to put things in perspective.

I guarantee you that Apple isn't paying 500$ for a CPU. And developing a good laptop/desktop ARM will cost conservatively north of a billion dollars a year.

The top i7 generally open around $1000 a piece and can stand there for years. Noting this might change a bit with Ryzen entering the competition on the high end.

Even if Apple is getting some bulk discount for buying 10000 CPU, I have troubles imagining 50% off. Intel is known for enjoying their margin, not for giving steep discount.

Except Apple doesn't buy 10000 CPUs, they buy 10 000 000 CPUs.

If they were paying even 50% of list price, Intel's revenue coming from Apple would be much higher than what it is right now. Also, laptop CPUs are priced very differently from desktop CPUs.

They already have a good laptop ARM chip....

All of those 5 million users on steam didn’t buy the Mac that year. Assuming you buy a computer every 3 years. That number is a lot smaller.

Besides how many new users might Apple get by selling laptops that are cheaper and have longer battery life.

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