Apple wasn't also the most helpful when it came to motivating developers to port their games over. 30% fee for apps and no native development until 2014 with Metal. Windows had DirectX for a much longer time.
Sadly this is a problem of Apple's own making.
Apple switched to ARM ISA and moved away from an open graphics abstraction layers. Those two things go hand-in-hand. ARM ISA isn't the problem, being a proprietary API on a platform that isn't of value for major game devs - that's the problem.
(FFS - Blizzard left MacOS, the one that released their titles on OSX one of the first.)
Arguing over what ARM ISA includes or not, is besides the point.
Since then Apple has only made more excuse and even raised the price of their weak-ass proprietary hardware. They made their bed they deserve no efforts from anyone ; not developers not users. If they come out with competent hardware at a decent price then we will see...
The Apple GPU is actually more like the Cell idea that Sony had to give up on (and add a GPU) before the PS3 shipped. It's not as slow as Cell, but it's different enough from a regular GPU that games optimized for one aren't that great on the other. I love my M1 Max and M2 Max for Civ and Factorio, but I've got a windows gaming rig for playing the kind of games that need show stopping graphics, and a PS5 for convenience.
Metal and Vulkan are very conceptually similar. Most things you can write against Vulkan will work in Metal, only the API calls will differ. MoltenVK will even wrap Metal with Vulkan's API.
But the OP isn't talking about graphics APIs, they're making the absurd claim that ARM CPUs are "obscure". It's so wrong it borders on asinine.
Only because you're complaining about their exact wording and ignoring context.
As far as high level code is concerned Apple's chips are just ARM chips. They've got microarchitectural features that put them ahead of other ARM chips clock for clock. But if you want to call their implementation obscure then by that twisted logic then AMD chips are obscure because they operate differently than Intel chips despite the AMD64 ISA.
It's a stupid distinction to justify an ignorant statement. Between iPhones, iPads, and Macs Apple has shipped a billion of their CPUs. At a billion units it's just dumb to suggest they're obscure. Different from Wintel PCs? Sure. But obscure? That's just asinine.
Long-reaching backwards compatibility has never been an Apple thing due to how it encumbers OS development. The longest period old apps were supported was probably in the classic Mac OS era stretching from System 7.5 or so up through OS 9, but that was mainly due to how little the OS changed in that timespan (relative to contemporary OSes and OS X in the the same length of time). With OS X the bits under the hood have always been in a state of flux even if the user facing bits barely changed at all, which makes backwards compatibility extremely challenging short of shipping virtualized old OS versions (which brings its own challenges, such as having to patch 0-days those old versions for however long you plan to keep compatibility for each version around).
Windows’ backwards compatibility is good but has meant that many parts of the OS are effectively frozen in time which has complicated modernization efforts. I suspect that soon MS will bail and start telling people to virtualize software targeting anything older than Windows 8.1 or 10.
Any game dev that wants the full hardware capabilities reaches out to NVN.
Honestly, this is the biggest division between gamers who obsess over API and people who develop gamers. API divergence is really not that big of a deal as long as you can do similar things.
It's very different than anything on a Mac or PC.
That’s only if you publish through the App Store. A developer who publishes on their own website doesn’t pay any percentage fee, though they do pay 100$ a year for the developer account which allows to sign and notarise the app. A developer who publishes on Steam pays 30% to Valve.
Not the point. Also, it’s not surprising that one of the biggest gaming platforms, catering exclusively to games, is doing better in games than a more general platform; it would be strange if it were the other way around. Also also, no one is defending the state of gaming on macOS, we’re all aware it’s bad.
That ET(1982) game is indicative of the money-grabs that were trying to be avoided.
You can just skip the app store, can't you?
I don't have a single store-installed app on my mac and I only get warnings (once) from 1-2 open source apps whose developers don't code-sign.
Neither do apps distributed directly by third parties as long as they are signed etc. (you just need the $100/300 per year apple dev. account for that).
Which is exactly the same cut every other publisher takes. Valve, Origin, GOG, etc are all 30%.