So it looks like Blizzard is abandoning the Mac

Community General Discussion
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They took way too long to do it.

Also, macs dont neceserely perform better. They have good hardware I wont deny that, but quality vs. price is not appropriate.

You can have a Windows PC with equally good hardware, if not better, but with out the extra $$$ Mac usually charges for “design” and “branding”. Plus all the extra options you get from a Windows you don’t get from Macs.

So $ to $ windows is better. And options wise, Windows is better. And always has been. And that is why the world runs on windows (and Linux for certain applications)…

Mac is just for snobs basically.

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Except for the M4 Mac Mini.

Honestly Apple’s problem right now is that they charge way, way too much for RAM and storage. Otherwise their prices are pretty decent - though the very high end machines are pushed up in price in order to justify the RAM costs for the cheaper ones.

I think if Apple can slice off €500 from the M4 Pro Mac Mini they’ve got a pretty sick gaming rig. Silent, tiny, and as fast as a 4060. That should satisfy a lot of people. And then keep working on GamePorting Toolkit, don’t abandon Rosetta 2, and keep paying devs to make native ports on day 1. That should do it.

:frowning:

I’m so sorry for using Final Cut? :stuck_out_tongue:

FWIW I can tell you that the M3 Max is twice as fast as the Core i9-13900H at running C#. And that’s while plugged in, otherwise it’s 3 times faster.

So that’s… interesting.

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He is absolutely clueless and has no idea what is talking about…

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Eh. 5 years ago he’d be right. I didn’t buy those macs either. :stuck_out_tongue:

It has this reputation, and it’s completely fair even if it isn’t true anymore.

I don’t blame him.

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Apple silicone was out in 2020. Some people have to stop living under a rock.

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66

He’s not living under a rock, he just gave up on Apple. Apple has a 17% general market share and 2% gamer share. Games that sell millions of PC sell thousands on Mac.

Why should he, specifically, care? I don’t blame him. Apple deserves their reputation. If they want to be taken seriously, they have to put in more effort to rebuild.

Yes, the hardware is there now, and even the prices in some cases, but the games aren’t. It’s a fair criticism.

67

What a way to miss the joke. :rofl:

Anything is better than Windows, which eats 3.5 of 4GB idle. I’ll take a look at Arch’s support for the Surface as the device seems to maybe need some kind of custom kernel build after some cursory research.

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68

I saw you wrote JK and everything, but I still felt like you were giving it more credit than it deserved even with the joke xD

Windows is horrific, and it’s about to get a lot worse.

How about, by default, eating 256GB of storage to record your screen at all times so you can search for the pants you found on Google 2 months ago. Just in case.

It’s crazy.

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69

If you plan in coding in any other language, for any other purpose PC/Linux outperforms.

Given the flexibility PC has, you have to have a huge C# code to justify an increase in performance in exchange for less flexibility.

Except nothing. Mac simply dosent compatibilize the drivers for most games to work.

If this guy is right about what he sais, Mac sucks and nobody should buy it.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qRQX9fgrI4s

Cause maybe the “mini” is a nice setup. But if you can only install 1% of the available games and programs then its not worth it for an extra 10% boost in performance. Especially for WoW, which works on a toaster at max graphics.

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Who cares about flexibility if my workflow is specific?

The drivers?

The issue is the games don’t use Metal and isn’t compiled for macOS’s binary format- that’s about it really.

Ok, so two things.

  1. He’s sort of right. Mac games sales are very low, but it’s a catch 22. It’s up to Apple to convince gamers to give it a shot, but actually if the game is on Mac, it works very well. That’s the problem. Same problem Linux has actually. Literally the exact same - they even made a Game Porting Tookit from Steam’s Proton to try to bridge the gap.
  2. That guy is responsible for WoW’s anti-botting efforts from around 2008 to 2016 or some such. I am not impressed by his skills or deduction capabilities, and I never have been.

WoW on max graphics 4K can bring an AMD 7900XT to its knees in heavy combat situations and generally gets around 70-90 FPS in major cities. So I’m not buying that :stuck_out_tongue:

My recommendation was very specific. If you just want to play WoW on the cheap and don’t care about other games, and there are a lot of people like that, then the M4 Mac Mini can’t be beat at its price point.

If you wanna play something else, then yeah you’re right.

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Because maybe you want to work on C# now.

And then you wanna play some Darktide. Or do some photoshop or something…

That is my point. Nobody spends 500E on a computer to just do 1 thing.

People prefer to spend 800E for an equivalent PC, with the idea (or illusion) that they will do many things with it. When in the end they just play wow and scroll youtube shorts.

But PCs got the marketing right, Apple did not. And as a consequence PCs now have such a massive chunk of the market that it its not even economically feasible to try to fight that.

So Apple markets its computers to other types of people. Not to “regular” people.

And that is why that Mini will fail. With all its proprietary plugs, and over-reliance on external stuff… All that “designer” stuff that reaks of being scammed… And why a black box with a fan in it will sell more.

If you are a designer (or want to be one, aka a snob) then a Mac is for you. Always has been, always will be.

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Unless you really need the ARM architecture for something it just feels like a headache getting a mac, lots of compatability issues with any software that is not used by literally everyone

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.NET, and therefore C#, runs twice as fast on an M3 Max MBP than it does on the fastest Intel laptop money can buy.

I tested. It’s very fast.

In fact, when I’m not writing to you, I’m programming in C# on VSCode on a Mac right now.

But I’ve called in sick since I’m… sick :frowning: But I can’t help myself, so doing some hobby stuff.

Well it doesn’t do just one thing. It only plays one game - or that was what I conceded. It’s a computer - it does a lot of things. I mean if you gave me a PS5 (which btw is the same price as the Mac Mini) and said “oh yeah it’s only got 20 games” then I’d laugh at that, too, because a PS5 only plays games, but that’s not the case here.

And besides, here’s “Apple’s favourite games” on the app store:
Sk-rmbillede-2024-12-04-kl-13-09-42

And here’s my Steam library - mac compatible:
Sk-rmbillede-2024-12-04-kl-13-09-50

So… yeah.

Not really. The PC did an amazing job with win32 and NT and DirectX back in the 1990’s, then behaved very anti-competitively, Apple completely screwed up in the meantime, and since then it’s been one continuous snowball. All the gamers are on Windows because that’s where the games are, and all the games are on Windows because that’s where the gamers, ad infinitum.

Developers are not embracing the new Microsoft tech except DirectX 12, and DirectX 12 now actually uses Vulkan’s SPIR-V compiler…

They do have game studios though, and Apple needs to do that too if they want to compete. They have to pull a Sony or a Nintendo.

Are they willing? I don’t know. It’s a big investment.

They did do a little bit with Apple Arcade, but nobody cares. The games are mobile games or just bad.

What proprietary plugs? It literally uses a standard power plug for power - doesn’t even have a power brick, and the rest of it is HDMI, DP, and USB, both USB-A and USB-C. And there’s Thunderbolt on all the USB-C ones, too. It works with any industry standard display, keyboard, and mouse. Right now I’ve got it connected to a Logitech keyboard and mouse and an ASUS OLED monitor. Well, that’s my MBP to be fair but there’s no difference.

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For sure. But C# is not the only language out there.

I code in C++, Fortan, Matlab, Python and Java.

And those run just fine on a PC. The only time I had performance issues is when I had to deal with huge finite element models or deal with massive PB databases. And in those cases, its more efficient to simply delegate that to a computer cluster to do.

They earn way more money releasing the Iphone13 or whatever the new model is. Which is marginally different to the Iphone12 and dosent have a earphone jack.

Marketing is marketing.

Apple has a reputation, and its gonna take them years to clear it out. And you cant have both.

You cannot market to the “designer” and “look rich” part… and simultaneously appease to the “dirty but functional” world PC has.

They will do the same mistake Mc Donalds did.

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And they run just fine on a Mac as well.

The point I’m trying to make here is not that PC’s are useless, and not even that macs are cheap. However then you started claiming that Macs can’t do anything, and that’s not true.

All of this came from me saying the M4 Mini is a great value for playing WoW on the cheap.

Well that’s just large amounts of data and/or large amounts of compute so… any computer will struggle if you push it hard enough, no exceptions. You can push a super computer to the brink if you really want to.

Finite Element models eh?

Back in 2015 I made a polynomial smoother for the full approximation scheme, which is a finite element solver. The problem with it was that to paralellise it you needed to use black-red Gauss-Seidel. Result? Fairly stiff DE’s could be solved for arbitrary grids in arbitrary shapes with a high level of parallelism. It ended up becoming memory bound because the algorithm is O(n) where n is the number of grid points in the finest grid. I basically fixed that, but I don’t think anyone used it :frowning:

I don’t know what’s happened in the field since, but seeing the name made me giddy :smiley:

Yup. So… I don’t know if they’ll do it. They’re making some… minimal efforts right now? But yeah…

Yes. Exactly.

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Maybe I did not explain myself properly.

Macs can do things. But PCs can do EVERYTHING. And that is better.

What happened is that its orders of magnitude cheaper to brute force the model in 30 min with Amazon computer cluster than to pay me to figure out a way to make it work on a desktop.

:smiley:

And that is why Apple Mini will not succeed. Not for gamers and major retail.

It will sell to hardliners like you though. And they should charge a premium for that because that is how Apple makes money.

Funny as it is, if they reduce the price Apple hardliners will get the impression that its a worse performant product. With sub-par design. It has to be expensive to justify the “brand”.

Like luis vouiton handbags… same idea…

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77

Iirc in the past they came with laptop called macbook only .it was suppose to be cheaper then other macs and people at that time started pointing out how it is a product that is inferior then other lineup and stuff

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No, they can’t. There are also cases where they do it much, much worse, but can.

And the other way is true also. More so, but again it depends on what you want to do.

Fair enough :rofl:

Well, saving power is still a good idea. Cloud compute isn’t. Sure it’s cheaper than figuring out the amount of optimisation you’d need for it to run on a laptop or something, but it never hurts to do spend a little money making things a little faster on the cloud.

I’m not sure you intended to, but you basically just called me an idiot :frowning:
Because, truly, only an idiot would think that cheaper == worse

I would like for macs to be cheaper, especially storage. And I’m not an Apple hardliner either, I just think they make the better laptops, primarily because Windows is full of bloat and garbage and doesn’t handle sleep states properly. They wake up in the middle of the night and burn themselves to crisp trying to update themselves.

And don’t even get me started on the Dells that my workplace gave me. Oh my GOD they were awful. Volume control didn’t work, it overheated, the fans didn’t work, at some point it limited itself to one core after a firmware upgrade, C# tests broke because of an NVIDIA graphics driver (how does this happen?!) and so much more. And the battery lasts for 1 hours when in Teams meetings. MBP lasts 15…

Therefore:
Desktop → Linux
Laptop → macOS
Work → I don’t get to decide, so Windows. :frowning:

Bonus: I get to do everything. I always have a computer that does what I want because I run all 3 OS’s :stuck_out_tongue:

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Haven’t seen a “my OS is better than your OS” thread for such a long time, nostalgia :slight_smile:

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80

Yes they can. There are no such things as programs that cannot be installed in PC but ONLY in Mac. The reverse is true though. There are many, many programs that cannot be installed in a Mac.

And because of this, you underestimate the power of convenience.

Tell that to my boss. Cause cents per hour is worth less than hundreds of E per hour.

And saving the planet is not his job… nor is it mine. Saving energy ? Not my issue. Its Amazons.

I did not call you an idiot. I called you a human being.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lPVvFOCq7Wg

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WCRKp4_aBMs

They pay marketing people really good money for a reason. Because they exploit you. But not because you are an idiot, but because you are human. And if you insist that I called you an idiot, then we are ALL idiots (including myself).

And for the record, PCs do exactly the same as Apple. Its not like Apple is the “bad guy” here. Microsoft also spends millions on marketing and sales. And that guy in the video gives us a glimpse of where all those millions go to.

Bonus: I got only ONE computer that does all that. With ONE operating system. :slight_smile:

Super convenient.

It costs 3x less than your set-ups (1 computer costs less than 3). I can do the exact same thing as you (some things a bit slower, but its less time than setting up virtual machines).

And as a bonus I can do whatever I want to do in the future. I still dont know what, but im 100% sure it will work in windows. Like messing around with AIs which is what im doing now for fun.

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