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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Speaking only for myself, I use Macs to get work done. The lack of games is actually a plus, as I can get compulsive with games.

It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."

People get Macs, that want to get work done. As noted previously, there's really nothing that can beat a well-built PC gaming rig.

I don't really think Apple has ever cared about the Mac as a gaming platform, and the low-key hype around these technologies shows that. These almost seem like "developer 20% projects," compared to the big stuff, like visionOS.

That said, I think that Apple wants iOS/iPadOS/visionOS to be gaming platforms, so they do dedicate a lot of resources to that.

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> It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."

When did toys become a bad thing?

"Worst gaming platform in the world" may be something of an exaggeration - Apple Arcade isn't bad, and Macs can also run many iPad games.

Good point, but many Mac users are not aware of just How. Damn. Good. games play on gaming rigs. It's like being in a movie.

Many console gamers aren't aware of how [well] games play on PC gaming rigs, or they don't care, and are happy to play games on Switch/PS4/PS5/Xbox.

Apple may very well be targeting mobile and console gamers rather than PC gamers with gaming rigs.

Personally I would definitely enjoy playing on a high-end gaming PC (especially as GPUs become easier to find at MSRP), but I already have a Mac and a PS5.

I wouldn't mind more of my Steam library working on macOS though.

I don’t know, you say that but there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store and Apple did put in the effort into getting their game subscription to work on their desktops.

Let’s be real, we might all be getting more work done as a result but that’s because Apple dropped the ball, hard. They came out with the metal api but refused to support any others, even letting open GL fester. The fact that they couldn’t keep Blizzard of all companies developing games for the mac is all you need to know.

I'm curious if Apple dropped the ball or if there is still something of an anti-gaming culture inside Apple since I know that the company was de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward. In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive. More recent things like the legal theatrics with Epic Games gives one a picture of a company that is still not necessarily super keen on fully embracing the gaming scene.

> In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive.

That was Microsoft's doing, not Apple's. Microsoft scooped up Bungie to make Halo an Xbox exclusive (at least initially). This purportedly angered Steve Jobs, who probably wasn't too into gaming himself but understood the appeal it might have to consumers.

That isn't the version of history I remember reading about Bungie, but I suppose there are probably differing viewpoints about it. In any case, I do know that John Carmack has said that Steve Jobs told him back then that he should stop working on games and work on operating systems instead, and that he generally did not like them.

>eventually became Halo

Halo was introduced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld as an upcoming Mac game. It was always called Halo.

“This is not QuickTime. Everything you’re about to see is being rendered in real time on a Macintosh using OpenGL.” [1]

Then Microsoft bought Bungie and made Halo an Xbox-exclusive launch title. [2]

> de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward

In 1997, the Power Mac 6500 shipped with MechWarrior 2 and Descent 2.

Between 1999 and 2005, Bugdom, Nanosaur, Cro-Mag Rally and Otto Matic by Pangea as well as Deimos Rising shipped as built-in platform games on various iMacs and iBooks, the G4 Cube, and the eMac. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 came with one model of eMac. Nanosaur 2 and Marble Blast were bundled with later iMacs, iBooks, eMacs and the Mac mini. [3]

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxdgo1rFcxU

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie#:~:text=Microsoft%20a....

[3] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/405405/what-third-...

> It was always called Halo.

Oh, I'm so very sorry! I think there was a misunderstanding. I was actually talking about the development of the game and not its public announcement!

Here is the relevant part of the Wikipedia article:

"Days before the Macworld announcement, Blam! still had no permanent title; possible names included The Santa Machine, Solipsis, The Crystal Palace, Hard Vacuum, Star Maker, and Star Shield.[38] Bungie hired a branding firm that came up with the name Covenant, but Bungie artist Paul Russell suggested alternatives, including Halo. Though some did not like the name—likening it to something religious, or a women's shampoo—designer Marcus Lehto said, "it described enough about what our intent was for this universe in a way that created this sense of mystery."[28] On July 21, 1999, during the Macworld Conference & Expo, Jobs announced that Halo would be released for MacOS and Windows simultaneously.[36]"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved

> there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store

Mobile AAA games in the iOS App Store, or desktop AAA games in the Mac App Store? There are some AAAs that work on a desktop Mac (e.g. Resident Evil Village), but it's not the norm at all. As for mobile ... modern mobile games can die in a fire for all I care (as they're 95% gacha nonsense).

I misspoke. A handful of triple A games. Most of which don't perform so well even on high end intel machines due to thermal throttling.

> I use Macs to get work done

Ok, uninstall Steam then, I guess? Games do currently exist on Mac, both in the App store and on Steam. It's just that there's a big swath of games that haven't been ported to Apple Silicon in particular, due to difficulty. I grew up playing games on the Mac, so I'm not sure what your point is.

So why the challenging and abrasive approach? Did what I write offend you? I certainly didn’t mean to, and apologize for my tone.

I have no interest in picking fights online, especially in a professional venue, where folks that could have a significant impact on my career are watching how I interact with others.

Well HN has the ability to create arbitrary screen names to create pseudo anonymity. So there's that.

I guess what appears to be abrasive is just lacking tone. It's just me being mildly exasperated for effect. My point is to stress that the Mac has always been a general purpose computing device. Jobs may have chosen to optimize the Mac for productivity in the 90s, and that probably stemmed from the niches that were available to Apple in the Windows-dominated 90s and 00s (that he learned from running NeXT).

The lack of upgradeable components also held the Mac back in graphics technology which precluded it from premium games market. But the M1/M2 chips are game changers. But since they're newish and the Windows market is so established and ARM chips are different from traditional x86 based chips, it's tough to get devs to port for Mac. If they can provide tooling that automates it, it's a great win for Apple.

> pseudo anonymity

Unfortunately, that "pseudo" is rapidly dwindling. I know that there are already AI "decloakers," that look at writing style, and do a damn good job of finding folks, based on that.

I was a UseNet troll, back in my day. It was not my proudest moment.

One of the reasons that I deliberately make myself known, is that it forces me to watch my words, just like IRL.

My career is done. I am retired (not by choice), and continue to work, but at what I want, and the way that I want to do it. Basically, a dream come true. I am not particularly worried about upsetting folks for my career, but I also feel I have a great deal of atonement due, because of my past behavior.

I like the Apple ecosystem. I've been using it to be highly productive since 1986, and have been playing games on it forever. I remember Pathways Into Darkness[0], thirty years ago, which I thought was awesome.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathways_into_Darkness

For a large number of customers, Macs play games just fine (you can get SimCity 4 for Silicon, heh).

It's not the top of the line, but it covers a decent swath, even without doing emulation or translation.

SimCity 4 was released in 2003.

Yep. The surprising thing is that Asypr bothered updating a 20 year old game for Apple Silicon. https://support.aspyr.com/hc/en-us/articles/12168615035405-H...

That is interesting - I bought KOTOR 2 a couple years ago for my kid and ended up having to get a refund it because it didn't run at all (on intel). It just wedged when I clicked play. No response from Aspyr, so I'd assumed they abandoned their older games.

I think they did it because they still sell SC4 via the App Store, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone there is just a huge SC4 fan.

> It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."

Unless you're developing iOS apps or MacOS apps, it's pretty terrible as a work platform too. I guess iWork is OK, but no one uses it, so it's not helpful for collaboration. Maybe people use it for media production? Doesn't the big rendering still happen on Linux though, and hasn't windows caught up?

Having said that, Mac laptops made passable web browser + video phone + dumb terminal in the intel days, and now they're excellent at those things and added "virtualization host" to that list.

I guess I've always thought of them more like glorified vt100s than like computers. They're certainly market leaders for that use case, though WSL is helping windows catch up.

Well, I write MacOS/iOS/WatchOS/iPadOS/visionOS stuff, so I'm dependent on it.

Like most tools, we get used to our main one, and can sometimes get a bit "sneery" about alternate ones.

The Mac is a particularly rich target, because the "snootiness" is actually a deliberate brand ploy by Apple, and pretty much "leads with the chin," so we have that.

I've never been "snooty" about Apple, but it's been my platform for over 30 years, so I'm used to it, and I get a lot done with my Mac.

> guess iWork is OK, but no one uses it, so it's not helpful for collaboration

You realize Microsoft Office has been on the Mac since the mid 80s right?

> Maybe people use it for media production?

Uhh yes?

Microsoft Office has always been sub-par on Mac, and I haven't worked at a company that uses it for collaboration for over a decade. (Sure, there's the occasional person that actually needs VB macros under Excel, or prefers powerpoint, but there's no reason for me to run it.)

I know you can use them for media production. Looking around, it sounds like they still own the low-end with iMovie, but it gets questionable as hardware requirements increase. I guess it's a viable platform for that.

I know a lot of CAD software is missing MacOS ports, so they seem to have lost that market.

Anyway, I'll continue to think of my laptop as a dumb terminal with a good hypervisor bolted on the side.

I know of quite a large company - the second largest employer in the US that have thousands of Macs and come with Office. Do you really think that no one has been using Office for Mac and Microsoft has been selling it for 35 years?

It is hard to switch away from mainframes too, but I haven’t heard of a company that was founded in the last ten years that is a Microsoft Office shop.

Well, maybe your anecdata may be in conflict with reported revenue numbers? Google Office is not taking the world by storm.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...

No it’s also not the year of the Linux desktop either

Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.

Sure, you can get access to an office suite at these companies, but people certainly raise an eyebrow when emailed a docx or told to click this office online link to run word in their browser.

In the link you pasted, the studies are limiting the market in strange ways. Like what is a “workstream collaboration tool” (teams, and whatever google workspaces is. I’ve never used either, despite using google docs periodically).

So, if the question is “which wordperfect clone is winning”, then word is a plausible answer. If the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.

> Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.

Yes because most of corporate America is doing work in Markdown.

Have you ever thought that your workplace may not be representative of the wider world?

> the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.

I’m sure you have a citation to back that up?

How do you explain the adoption of macs among programmers in general? Especially in universities, macs is all I can see.

Everyone I know that uses one (myself included) uses it as a toy (== not production server grade) Unix machine and/or dumb terminal.

In my university, only non computer science students used macs. At my work, I wasn't given a choice and was given a macbook because "we all use macbooks" which really just meant "we all work on the terminal", which mac is not good at, not anymore when we have WSL to compare it against.

Wow, I thought this type of comment died on Slashdot 20 years ago.

I mean, you're kind of dead wrong? I've been using Macs for almost two decades at this point as a developer, and it's never kept me from getting work done. These days it's great having a powerful Mac, with the ability to use local machine learning models with relatively large amounts of VRAM (more than any consumer GPU, though inference won't be as fast as recent Nvidia cards). It's great at video editing, too.

Don't tell IBM they are doing it wrong: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/301863-ibm-our-mac-usi...

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