I expect Apple to role out its own gaming console by 2nd or 3rd gen. There’s so much potential here. One of the most underrated Apple announcements in a very long time. I haven’t been this excited for Mac since they announced OS X!
I would be shocked if this happened, since Apple has no ecosystem of game developers whatsoever.
Both the newest xbox and the PS5 are for the most part backwards compatible with the massive base of xbox one and PS4 games, since they're a shared x86_64 architecture.
Microsoft has the huge advantage that games can be developed for both windows and the xbox at the same time, with the same libraries. This goes all the way back to the origins of the first xbox which was nearly named the DirectX box.
not comparable at all, 95% of them are simplistic games that can be built by a team of 5-10 people, max. they're things in the same general category as candy crush.
there is nothing analogous to horizon zero dawn, or destiny 2, or death stranding, or cyberpunk 2077 on the ios platform. I define that as AAA size games that require significant GPU horsepower, 70GB+ disk space, and a dedicated handheld game controller.
Things are that are not compatible in any user-interface way with fingers on a touchscreen don't really exist for ios.
Nintendo seems to do just fine with iPad-like (or lower) specs on the Switch. Breath of the Wild is one of the bulkier games, weighing in at ~14GB, Super Mario Odyssey is ~6GB; these are widely acclaimed as some of the best games on any platform.
The closest thing Apple has to a games console is Apple TV, and the offerings on there have been... tentative? They have pushed for developers to pick up Apple TV development, but to date, most of the games on there are ports from the other Apple devices.
Apple is one of the biggest publishers in the market, with over $8bn revenue from games
iPhone as a gaming platform: device sold well, SoC is excellent, RAM is fine, API is fine, users are relatively rich, IAP is easy.
Apple may very well beef up AppleTV and market the gaming angle of the device a lot more than they currently are, but given their history with Pippin I think your claim they will pitch a new dedicated game console type device is unlikely in the extreme.
I am also very interested in what they do with Mac Pro.
The Apple TV 4K already costs $180/$200 without a controller, which could easily set you back an additional $60. Combined, that's more than half the price of a disc-less PS5, and very close to the cost of a Nintendo Switch.
The Nintendo Switch is pretty deceptive in its pricing. You buy it and quickly realise that you need to spend a lot more money.
Internal storage is limited, so you need an SD card at least.
Then if you plan on carrying it around, a screen protector is pretty much a requirement. And if you are planning on carrying it around, you'll also want a case for it.
And if you don't plan on carrying it around and are only docking it, you probably want a Pro Controller since the included ones are not really that good for couch play.
And after you've accessorised yourself, you're now stuck with the most expensive game library, with first-party titles pretty much never dropping in price. Want to buy a first-party launch title for the Nintendo Switch? That'll be $50-60 for Breath of the Wild. Meanwhile Horizon Zero Dawn, which is an acclaimed first-party title pretty much the same age as BotW, is available for $20 or less. Even cross-platform games might be more expensive on the Switch due to the cartridge costs.
I also think the JoyCon grips are fine for TV play (In fact I prefer them over the pro controller) and while I'd also recommend a screen protector, I don't know anyone else who has one IRL. The types of scratches picked up by the Switch are usually only visible in direct light, and a lot of people seem to not care.
That first-party Nintendo games don't go drop in price like most games has been a truism for a very long time. I'm not sure how Nintendo does it. I generally respect them for it—whatever the proper cost of games should be, I don't think it's healthy for games as a medium that they loose a third of their value in a few months.
Well, sure, if you're only buying physical. However, that's not really something you can expect in these days. The Switch has 26 GB of usable storage. That's not a lot considering Breath of the Wild is over 13 GB.
The Xbox One and PS4 come with at least 500 GB. Even if you account for the fact that the download sizes there are larger, there's still much more space proportionally, so you're going to be spending more money to get the full experience on a Switch.
>I also think the JoyCon grips are fine for TV play
It's pretty much the worst controller out there. Not only is it incredibly uncomfortable, it's rather unreliable. The drift issue on the Joy-cons is pretty noted. And once again coming to the controller price issue, the Pro Controller is $70, Joy-cons are $80, where as the Xbox and PlayStation ones are $60, and there's much less of a need to get one since there's one in the box for you already.
>while I'd also recommend a screen protector, I don't know anyone else who has one IRL
I don't know if there are any people who haven't actually gotten screen protectors, especially since it was reported that sliding the device in and out of the dock may incur scratches on the screen. When one of the basic features of the devices can result in scratches, you really want one.
>whatever the proper cost of games should be, I don't think it's healthy for games as a medium that they loose a third of their value in a few months
I'm not exactly sure if it's healthy for old games to retain their value better than stocks. I don't think it's good for consumers if they're still going to be paying brand new game price for BotW couple of years later when it's a five-year-old game.
Really, speaking from experience, I have a PS4 and a Switch. For the PS4, the only accessory that I've had to buy was a charging dock, and I don't really consider it an essential one. I could charge with a cable just fine, but the dock is just a bit nicer and looks a bit better. For the Switch however, I've had to buy an SD card, case, screen protector and a Pro Controller, all of which I consider pretty necessary to get the full experience.
Although I agree with your conclusion, the Apple Newton didn't prevent the creation of the iPad. That would have been a little silly—both Apple and the world are so different now.
So why would an energy efficient ARM chip suddenly make a gaming console of interest to Apple? Both Playstation and Xbox are X86 PC hardware. Apple could have just used x86 years earlier, but they didn't. Why? Because that's not their market.
Sales of consoles are driven by price, and the game portfolio. I have yet to meet a consumer who will be excited for a energy efficient console which costs more than the competitors and have almost no big titles.
They cannot compete against PS5 and Xbox. This is not an easy market to enter, making the hardware itself is just a tiny part of the job.
In the same way Nintendo isn't a super direct competitor to Xbox/PS, I would expect the same of Apple's offering.
People don't want to play mobile games on their TV. They want to watch TV while playing mobile games.
If you combine the existing iOS games (some of which are actually kinda impressive visually) with an actually beefy machine that the AAA titles can easily target (shouldn't be that difficult), you have an offering unlike the others.
They understand hardware design and have a larger (and more accessible) software distribution platform than the ps5 and Xbox combined.
Many ALREADY use Apple products as a gaming platform.
They have now wiped the floor with CPU performance. If they can provide comparable GPU performance (they are ONLY a generation behind), then I absolutely think they could compete in that arena.
For casual mobile games, which is a whole different segment.
They would if 1) the Apple exclusives could compete with the Microsoft and Sony ones and 2) games would not be mobile stuff but current generation AAA.
Yeah, not in a million years an Apple gaming console would succeed.
Apple have products other than mobiles - this very article is about one of them...
The PC platform has huge amounts of exclusives, and lots of other advantages that aren't remotely available to Apple's sensibility (end user modding, porn, heavy discounting etc).
Apple would fail miserably at a games console, which is why people have been predicting for years the Apple TV would turn into a games console and it doesn't, because it's a terrible idea and they have no competency in this area, and because to succeed they would have to start doing things completely alien to Apple.
Why wouldn't Apple's console be capable (or arguably even better) at running AAA titles? The vast majority of AAA titles aren't platform exclusives.
On top of that, it would seemingly draw less power / generate less heat.
Hell, Apple could release a Nintendo Switch style competitor (that also actually competes with the Xbox and PS) that is purpose built for AAA gaming at home and on the go.
The question is why would a gamer, a hardcore one, not the one that wants to play Candy Crush, spend multiple hundred of dollars and find space in his living room when he already has a PS5 and the new Xbox? What could possibly entice him?
And which game studio would port their game to a console that uses their own API, own OS, and is basically incompatible to anything else? Yes, the PlayStation is its own thing as well, but it's the bloody PlayStation, not some big unknown.
I spend a ton of money on what is basically my hobby, video games, and right now, nothing would make me buy an Apple console. Absolutely nothing. Who cares about performance, show me the game lineup first.
EDIT: One quick word about the Switch: the reason it exists among giants like Sony and Microsoft is because it has Nintendo exclusives, and Nintendo is a common household name and has always been associated with "games for the whole family". Well, the form factor too. But again, the emphasis is on exclusives and game lineup.
I don't really even understand how the noise even is an issue. The only time I actually hear my PS4 being loud is when I stop playing my games and put the console to rest mode, since I won't have any game audio at that point and the fans are still spinning. I've never heard the PS4 over my game audio.
To get to this level, cost would significantly increase, add in expensive cooling and so on and you'll get to a price higher than the consoles. Indeed, the slower Mac Mini is more expensive.
Also, even then the margins would be too low for Apple to be interested.
I assure you it's not comparable to a 1060, and when people start benchmarking them on Vulkan or DirectX instead of decade old OpenGL this is will be apparent.
Obviously we will have to wait for more sophisticated benchmarks that can take advantage of otherwise unsupported features - but based on raw performance, they ARE comparable. That is not even up for debate.
As should be clear - these aren't consoles. But apple certainly have the knowledge to create one.
Markup on apple products is typically 50%. That gives a LOT of wiggle room for them to meet the pricing of your famed loss leaders (that are ALREADY a generation behind at release!).
If you want to know just how much of a disaster NVidia GPUs are on Mac OS, you can test them on Windows vs Mac OS and you will notice a huge difference.
It's so bad that people were working on OpenGL to Metal translation layers.
The 1050Ti is indeed much more powerful than the GPU in the M1, as even on OpenGL, where it is generally 30% slower than the competition vs on DirectX, and even though it has to deal with horribly bad drivers, and even though it's extensions are not fully supported on Mac OS, it stays competitive. And Apple does not have the knowledge to be competitive with AMD in GPUs, not even remotely close.
If you want to look at raw performance, we can. The M1 GPU does 2.6 teraflops. The GPU in the PS5 does 10.28 teraflops.
The PS5 is, in raw performance, 4 times faster than the M1 chip.
The 1050ti is 2.1 teraflops, vs the 2.6 for the M1! Also, M1 GPU has "extensions" that aren't being benchmarked...
> The PS5 is, in raw performance, 4 times faster than the M1 chip.
I already said that the ps5 GPU is a generation ahead of M1, so it is no wonder it is more performant.
Anyway, like I said, we will have to wait for some comparable benchmarks. Not sure how that will ever happen though.
As for the 1050Ti, while it has a bit less raw compute power, it uses many tricks like variable rate shading, streaming memory compression, and vastly faster memory, that the M1 doesn't have.
The difference between those features, exposed via extensions but not used on macOS, is that they actually significantly speed up the rendering of video games. If there were in the M1 chip, I don't know why Apple wouldn't expose them. NVidia does, on every platform except macOS because Apple doesn't want them to.
As for benchmarks, the best you're going to get is a Vulkan benchmark running on the Nvidia card via the native driver and on M1 via MoltenVK.
M1 has "variable rate shading", and "streaming memory compression" (since, at least, A12) - in addition to many, many more features both before and since. I don't understand why you would think otherwise. Go read the docs.
We can't just talk about "faster memory", as the architecture is so completely different. But lets just start by saying that it is DDR4 in the M1 vs DDR3 (GDDR5) in the 1050ti. i.e. its MUCH lower latency, and has a higher bandwidth per module. It is also utilises a unified memory pool. i.e. the CPU can GPU access the same memory - so there is no "transfer" involved. This isn't your "shared memory integrated GPU" of old.
As I said, there is no fair benchmark to compare theses two. Based on openGL, the m1 wins. You think the 1050ti features would make it more performant - I'm saying the m1 has those same features (and more), that also wouldn't be utilised up by a simple openGL benchmark.
By all means enjoy your ps5. It is a great console (I want one myself), and it isn't being threatened by the m1.
But don't deceive yourself into thinking it is something magical, or cutting edge - or that a trillion-dollar computer hardware designer and manufacturer doesn't have the know-how to create something as performant.
Stadia is perfectly capable of running AAA titles (more or less, though it's a pain to develop for, as an Apple ARM box would be).
It's still a miserable failure, because gaming is about understanding a huge ecosystem play and, in many ways, culturally going for a market segment that Apple flat out doesn't like and doesn't understand.
It's like comparing ping pong and tennis.
Both of whom spent a lot.
Sure, they may not be "real" games according to some, but their opinion is irrelevant to the actual revenue figures.
Oh and regarding the hardware... The next gen consoles completely smoke whatever tiny little GPU Apple has. It's probably the first time that consoles get hardware that is on par with the PC ecosystem instead of being one generation behind.
If Apple makes real forays into gaming I would expect a sort of cloud gaming service before I expect a full-fledged console. At best I think we can expect more tight integration of Apple Arcade into Apple TV with controller support.
There are plenty of other games on the App Store, tho.