I meant to play this again last year, but it turns out that it’s another casualty of the mac 32-bit kill-off, and there doesn’t seem to be an obviously easy way to get it running with Wine or equivalents. Maybe I’ll look into it again…
The Apple Silicon machines I've had were tremendously better than any x86 one I've ever used, at any price point, for laptop work. Powerful, silent, battery efficient. Definitely worth the tradeoff of losing x86 support IMHO.
I guess the x86 compat depends on what you work on. For the web teams I've been a part of, it was a real headache in the first couple years (the M1 era) but hasn't been an issue at all since then. But that's just anecdotal.
Want to develop on Docker (Linux)? You should use Linux.
AMD and Intel getting better means now you can have a very, very good Linux experience too.
Windows has WSL, but otherwise it's a lot easier to run a lot of the CLI tools on a Mac, while still having access to a polished GUI and mainstream apps (Adobe and Microsoft, etc.)
* all 800 of those work on Windows, in very few cases any of those work better on another platform
* about 600 of those can be made to run on Linux distros with Proton (with varying degrees of success, relatively few actually have native versions)
* when it comes to Mac, only about 120 of those have native versions that run and Proton doesn't seem to be an option
* I know that Game Porting Toolkit exists, but haven't really looked that much into it, I probably should in the future
* none of that, not even Proton would be really necessary, if people bothered to export versions of their games for all platforms, which is at the very least an option that is offered by all big mainstream game engines, or even smaller ones like Godot; but we don't live in that kind of a world, sadly
* oddly enough, in many cases games won't run because the developers explicitly choose not to support additional platforms, especially in the case of the various anti-cheat solutions, which plain sucks
Apple had a chance to do what Valve did with Proton here, using GPT and custom first party patches or configs to certify a collection of games as working. But they never bothered, instead handing that off to Crossover (who does an OK job but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of UX). It's still a huge pain to get games running on Mac, even worse than Linux. Way worse, actually.
Unless Apple suddenly has a change of heart and really tries to support and help game devs, they're not going to entice anyone no matter how good the Apple Silicon GPUs are. And they're probably not going to do that since Steam is so dominant and they wouldn't be able to make the 30% they do on iOS. Even for their new platforms like Vision, gaming was an afterthought. It's just not part of their culture. Apple Arcade on Mac is a sad little market compared to any other games ecosystem.
Thankfully there's at least GeForce Now, which works way way better anyway.
There's a wrapper over this called Whisky (https://getwhisky.app) that makes it really straightforward to install and run Steam or other Windows binaries.
I use it on an M1 Air and an M1 Pro. Less demanding titles run very well, heavier games like Cyberpunk 2077 don't really reach a stable 30fps even with Steam Deck-like settings so keep your expectations in check.
Some games like Half Life have sound issues on the older Wine versions.
I'm a paid customer, occasional beta tester, and frequent compatibility database submitter. I don't think I'll continue using it after my subscription expires, though. It reminds me of the DOS days of having to tinker with config.sys to get your game to run... which is the last thing I want to do these days, in middle age, just to play a game for an hour or two. I often end up spending more time fighting Crossover than actually playing the game =/
Some games work better in Parallels than Crossover, too. (Parallels uses Windows for Arm, which uses Microsoft's own x86 emulator instead of Wine.) Some the other way around. Neither is anywhere near Proton-level seamlessness, much less native Windows gaming. Neither would come anywhere close to passing the "girlfriend/wife/mom test" in terms of ease of use.
I still game on my Mac everyday, but almost entirely in Geforce Now (streamed from the cloud) instead of fiddling with all the virtualization and emulation. Hugely better graphics and no local fan noise or heat to deal with, or any incompatibility issues. Just one click and the game launches and runs at max setting and runs flawlessly for hours, which is definitely not something that I can say about Crossover.
x86 -at the time- was the right things to do, because IBM wasn't going to get them there...moving to NeXT's underpinnings also opened the door to a TON of pre-existing code.