Inside Apple's Massive Push to Transform the Mac Into a Gaming Paradise
In an interview with Apple product marketing managers Leland Martin, Doug Brooks, and Gordon Keppel, we go deep on how Apple is transforming the Mac into a respectable AAA video games platform that can compete with PCs and consoles.
For those of you who haven't been paying attention Apple is attempting to give consumers yet another reason to dump Windows. It's going to be interesting to see what Apple does going into 2025. They are trying to take a piece of Microsoft's gaming pie.
On July 21, 1999, Steve Jobs stood on stage in front of a packed Macworld Expo New York audience and announced a video game that would go on to influence the entire games industry and turn Apple into a gaming powerhouse.
Half of that promise turned out to be true. The first-person shooter that Jobs revealed didchange the course of video game history — but not for Apple. Instead, Microsoft purchased the game’s developer a year later, snatching up the title for the launch of the original Xbox in 2001.
The game Microsoft “stole” from Jobs and Apple was called Halo: Combat Evolved, and the developer was Bungie, a pioneering game studio for the Mac. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
In an alternate universe, Apple never lost Halo to its long-time tech nemesis, the Xbox never became a gaming juggernaut because it didn’t have Master Chief, and the Mac — not PC — went on to become the biggest non-console platform for blockbuster games.
No doubt “losing” in gaming for decades has not been fun for Apple. It’s certainly painful and disappointing for Mac users both new and old, who have to buy a separate PC or console to play AAA games. But in 2023, the winds of change began to blow.
With a lineup of Mac hardware that can finally go toe to toe with some of the best PCs (gaming-specific or not), year-over-year improvements to Apple silicon that push performance higher and higher, and more gaming-focused software optimizations for developers and users, Apple is not looking to repeat history again.
Apple has deployed its teams on the map with capable weapons and plenty of reloads. Now, all it needs to do is capture the flag. Easier said than done, but not impossible for a company valued at nearly $3 trillion and used to playing the long game.
“We've got Mac-specific features that you don't find on every other system like our displays, our speaker systems,” Gordon Keppel, a Mac product marketing manager, tells Inverse. “So when I'm sitting in front of a system that is performant, it looks great, it sounds great, it doesn't get incredibly hot — that is a great gaming experience!”
Fast forward to 2023, and Apple has a renewed interest in gaming on the Mac, the likes of which it hasn’t shown in the last 25 years.
“Apple silicon has changed all that,” Keppel tells Inverse. “Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3.”
Ask any gadget reviewer (including myself) and they will tell you Keppel isn’t just drinking the Kool-Aid because Apple pays him to. Macs with Apple silicon really are performant computers that can play some of the latest PC and console games. In three generations of desktop-class chip design, Apple has created a platform with “tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs,” according to Keppel. That’s tens of millions of Macs with monstrous CPU and GPU capabilities for running graphics-intensive games.
Apple’s upgrades to the GPUs on its silicon are especially impressive. The latest Apple silicon, the M3 family of chips, supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading, features that only a few years ago didn’t seem like they would ever be a priority, let alone ones that are built into the entire spectrum of MacBook Pros.
The “magic” of Apple silicon isn’t just performance, says Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager. Whereas Apple’s fallout with game developers on the Mac previously came down to not supporting specific computer hardware, Martin says Apple silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games for, but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices.
This unified hardware platform approach is similar to what you get with a console like the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series S/X. With the same architecture, there’s a guarantee that every Mac with a certain chipset generation can run a certain game at optimal settings right out of the box, as opposed to leaving it to gamers to figure out whether their PC’s specs are enough.
“Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design,” Doug Brooks, also on the Mac product marketing team, tells Inverse. “Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory.”
When Apple announced the M3 chips at its “Scary Fast” October event, it touted certain hardware features built into the silicon that were big firsts for Macs. There’s the aforementioned hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shaders, which make games look more realistic with real-time lighting and models with more detailed polygons and textures. But the feature few people are talking about, and the one that could make games on M3-powered Macs and future Apple computers really shine, is Dynamic Caching.
