Comment by acmj
3 months ago
> The only area that saw significant retreat in macos is gaming.
Mac gaming is probably getting better thanks to wine, crossover, GPTK and Whisky [1]. I am not a gamer but I have seen others playing serious Windows games like FF7 remake (not sure if that counts) on mac.
The problem is, significant portion of "real games" used to run on macOS, and all PC games used to run on BootCamp. Now native mac games are all but extinct and cross-platform toolkits seem to be very hit and miss depending on the games (for now).
Sure, nothing beats bootcamp but that is not strictly macos. Apple's GPTK released last year seems to have greatly advanced gaming compatibility. Probably lots of games still don't work but it looks promising and is getting better. Hope Apple can continue to put resources into that.
I do hope that they would steer some of their resources from Apple Arcade into cross platform porting toolkits.
I think the fundamental problem still remains that games unlike softwares are media and cannot be substituted with equivalents. By pushing their proprietary tech and neglecting native macOS ecosystem over the years, Apple has willingly pushed themselves in to the same corner as with console makers where they cannot compete with the value proposition of PC because of the overwhelming majority of exclusive titles that only run on PC. It's either all or nothing in terms of game coverage, because that's what ultimately allows consumers to "buy one device for (mostly) everything" for a hobby that takes significant upfront investment unlike netflix and hulu for example.