I suppose one of the big questions now is: if you’re in the market for a Mac, do you buy now or do you wait?
I get the impression that Blizzard are slowly reducing all support for Macs bar a few legacy titles (such as wow). When Diablo 4 was announced as pc only it felt like a definite nail in the coffin.
Its a shame but… I get it. Much as I like working on my iMac and MacBook they’re terrible for gaming - my partner sits next to me on a (pretty awful) pc which runs wow just fine while my copy stutters and lags half the time.
It is what it is, I guess.
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I was hoping that the rumored redesigned “gaming” (probably just means “decent GPU”) iMac would debut at WWDC so I could buy that and repurpose my hack tower as a living room gaming box. Was planning to buy even with the looming transition, because it’d probably be powerful enough to remain relevant for many years following.
Said iMac obviously didn’t release, so now I’m actually considering that bonkers-expensive Mac Pro. I’d be using it for work-from-home iOS+Android mobile dev, so I can actually justify the purchase and use the extra muscle, but was hoping to not spend that much.
If I could afford one I’d probably get a Mac Pro. Sadly I couldn’t, so 9900k hackintosh it was. Would have it finished already if not for my bad back (Cosmos II case isn’t light and is very unwieldy in my condition). Still half tempted to just ditch OS X for good considering there is now only a single game I play with it, and that’s Diablo 3. Not like I can play WoW since features I need are still absent even in the Shadowlands alpha (which I’m not part of to even test for accessibility anyway).
Nothing Apple has on tap really interests me anymore. They don’t care about power users. They want mindless sheep on iDevices and I’m uninterested in having two separate computers to do work and/or play games on. It sucks being in this kind of situation, but I figured it was coming sooner or later. Turns out it was sooner. Oh well. Not like my old Mac Pro doesn’t work or this computer doesn’t work, so I can still keep OS X locked in place there, but going forward it’s looking like a losing proposition from my perspective as a gamer. I don’t care how good Rosetta 2 and Universal 2 are - I lose Windows interoperability and booting so that’s a non-starter for me, especially since I’m an Android user, not an iPhone/iPad user.
Now, if Apple made a PCIe ARM card so I could run iApps and games from that, I’d buy that in a heartbeat since it’d let me keep to a single machine. Pipe dreams like that don’t become reality though. 
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I would consider doing building another hack myself, but when iOS development is somewhere between 50% and 100% of one’s paycheck, that kinda feels weird/dodgy. I could use the company issue MBP for that, but then I’m ceding a ton of performance (no matter how good laptops get, desktop CPUs are still way better).
There’s also the bit about how a Ryzen 3950x/3900x based hack would be amazing, except macOS runs on AMD by spoofing a Penryn CPU without Intel virtualization features, making several apps not run at all (VMWare, Apple Watch simulator among others) and limiting the extent that the fancy CPU is taken advantage of. There’s always Intel hacks, but the $/per core (not to mention thermals, power consumption, etc) dampens that. Dollar for dollar, an Intel based hack has fewer cores.
I can’t really entertain switching to Windows or Linux anyway due to line of work, but even if I could any release of Windows past 7 is death by a thousand cuts for me, and even the smoothest Linux desktop setup is still quite bumpy except for those satisfied by the unchanged out of the box config — the moment you start tweaking and trying to mold it to your wants/needs, it starts falling apart.
So at least in my case there aren’t any truly great options… they all have equally bad tradeoffs.
My computers at home were always different use cases than work. I am not a designer (web or print), I don’t do videos or any of the special use cases Macs dominate in. I worked in printing and started on a Mac IIfx with 128 megs of ram. This was a step down from our Crossfield Studio (I ran a Crosfield Scanner). I bought a Mac because I could see the future $100K Mac vs $750K proprietary computer. We had Spac stations for servers, we switched to Scitex and even added a Windows server.
There was a time when computer gaming was big. Mac gaming sucked and barely existed. I ended up going with a Performa 640 (with a 486 daughter card) just so I would play games. It got so bad I bought a PC just to play games on and abandoned Mac gaming. The intel Macs made owning a Mac viable for home users like me.
I bought a nice used 27" Imac added the 27" Mac monitor, bought nice used MacBook Air to have with my Apple Watch my iPhone and a few year old iPad (for less than most current iMacs) and every thing was fine. Than WoW said we had to go to metal and none my my GPUs worked so I went o my local computer shop, traded my Mac stuff in for $ dollars and bought a brand new Acer with an SSD for $399 and had enough left in my pocket to buy a good GPU.
Why did I type out all this? I ended up missing the MacOS. I wanted the interoperability. I just want a my Mac to play PC games like WoW and/or Final fantasy. Those are the only reasons I have to even have a PC at this point. If Mac goes ARM and I can only play iPad games or Apple Arcade games, the Mac platform is worthless to me.
I’m not a software developer so I really don’t know how difficult this transition would be, but considering that WoW is already running on macOS and already uses Metal, would it really be all that much of a feat to get it running on macOS running ARM? I genuinely don’t know, but I sure hope that WoW makes the transition along with Apple.
WoW is the last computer game that I really play, where otherwise I have moved to console, and I am not buying a Windows computer for one game; even a game I have been playing since 2005.
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This is different.
The first transition actually made game development EASIER. windows and mac were finally using same architecture.
Two, it was only CPu
These arm macs, at least the ones coming out first do not have AMD or nvidia gpu, it’s an apple gpu with an entirely different feature set. Blizz doesn’t even know if these CAN run wow yet. It’s new territory all around for everyone. Even if it can run well, expect the performance to be more similar to an intel IGPU and less then that of a mid to high range AMD. the apple GPU is built into CPU just like the intel ones are and not dedicated full size GPU
Fortunately only macs transitioning to start will be ones that only have intel GPU anyways since so I’d expect even if they get it working, it’s probably gonna be same or step up from existing IGPU only offerings.
when it comes to higher end macs later we have to wait and see if they still include AMD gpus or not, that’s a big decider probably. the apple on chip GPU is probably as good if not better than intel IGPU but it’s in no position to replace dedicated GPUs for a while.
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Yeah, looks like the first few A-series Macs will be Mac mini, MBP 13", and iMac 24". Those will all use Apple graphics, which makes perfect sense — the number of people looking for a dGPU in any of those machines is probably pretty small. Would bet on Apple graphics being a good deal better than Intel stuff, particularly on the iMac where they’ve got more room for heat dissipation (especially if they opt for a Pro Display XDR “chunk” design instead of the tapered thing they have going now).
The seemingly imminent 27" Intel iMac bump will probably have something like a 5600M at base config with some kind of 5700 XT variant as an upgrade, so the A-series variant of the 27" iMac will need graphics that are more powerful than either of those, which is a pretty tall order for a newcomer.
I think that A-series Mac Pros will keep compatibility with standard PCI-E cards (else, why would they bother with the current Mac Pro at all) and by extension will also support third-party GPUs. Seems similarly unlikely that they’d kill off eGPUs, so no matter what macOS will need to support third party GPUs in some capacity.
I’m thinking that the first models that come out with whatever Apple decides to name the first desktop chip will be replacements for any iGPU solution used right now (MacBook/air/mini). Apple has worked well with AMD over the years and I can see the upper range of chips to be partnered with dGPU for those machines. Even with the developer’s kit on the A12z has better graphics performance than the current iGPU on the retail mini. I expect over the next couple of years, starting in the spring, whenever a family is due for an update is when it will be slotted for the move over to the new architecture.
I’m curious to see how this all turns out, I’m old enough to remember all the way back to the System 6-7 transition.
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Ah, you youngsters. I’m old enough to remember the ][+ to //e transition. Of course things didn’t really get tricky until we had to upgrade our //e motherboards to ||gs in an enclosure that wasn’t built to hold them.
In all seriousness, though, it seems like if WOW is already using Metal, we could probably expect the new A-series Macs to have better performance than the current Intel Macs with integrated graphics, right?
There are also some quite inexpensive eGPUs now. Before I started my current vacation from WoW, I was playing on a 2018 Mini with a Sonnet Breakaway Puck with, IIRC, a Radeon 560. That’s hardly a beast, but I was able to run smoothly at near-max settings.
If the 13” MBP is expected to be one of the earlier transitions, I’ll probably wait…even if I don’t see major performance gains, there’s a lot to be said for a couple/few extra hours of battery life.
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The //e was my favorite for its time. I had hours of fun during my computer time in elementary school playing T-Rex, Moon Patrol, and The Secrets of Science Island (the latter has almost no surviving copies and luckily someone from a NY library imaged the disks for prosperity…and emulation of course). The funny thing is the IIgs chassis had even less room than the //e, yet had a much better selection of aftermarket upgrades. Go figure. 
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Back in the early 00s, my dad who at the time was working as a public school janitor picked up an Apple IIe, an Apple IIe Platinum, an Apple III monitor, a couple of Disk II’s, and a box full of 5.25" floppies with Apple II software (mostly productivity and design stuff) that the school was going to throw out. My parents sold most of it to a collector in the UK via eBay (those shipping costs, yeesh), but I got to play with it all for while first.
It was pretty fascinating for a kid who’d grown up on a Performa 6400/200 running System 7.5. Didn’t get super deep into it, but got to the point of being able to navigate the software on those floppies reasonably well.
I grew up using ProDOS and ended up knowing it far better than most of the adults at the school(s). One of the ironies of the Disk ][ was that it was actually far more reliable than the newer 400k/800k 3.5" drives built into the early Macs. They were just built more robustly. Slow and cumbersome, but very sturdy despite feeling cheap and plasticky.
The ||gs was smaller, but a bit taller and more square, so while I believe it had less total volume, an individual expansion card could be larger. The upgrade board designed for the //e fit nicely, but expansion cards didn’t. Ultimately, I built a large plywood box and discarded most of the //e enclosure. I used the resulting Frankenmachine from 1987 (college) until I got my first Mac, a PowerBook Duo 210 in 1993.
My longest-lasting piece of vintage Apple hardware, though, is a MessagePad 2100, which I used until I got an iPhone 3g. Still works! But I don’t really have any way to plug it into anything but power anymore.
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If you can find a PC card of the era with ethernet on it, you can connect it that way. Outside of that, there really isn’t any real way to do so on modern systems. If you keep it in good shape it might land you a few bucks from a collector down the road.
I actually have a WiFi card for it, as well as an Ethernet card. But IIRC, installations and the like require serial or AppleTalk.
It really was a remarkable little machine for its time. The handwriting recognition was much maligned, but in NOS 2.0 (which came out for the MessagePad 130, I believe) it improved immensely.
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The new Apple chips have me excited but also solidified my decision to finally separate my gaming from my Mac. I already have an Acer gaming laptop with more power, so I’m going to buy a nice monitor for it and just game on that. I’ll have “dual screens” with an iMac on one side and the gaming monitor connected to the Acer on the other.
Then I’ll finally be able to upgrade to the latest macOS’s and not worry about what it will break in WoW.
The best I can make from this decision is that Apple is walking away from PC desktop gaming and embracing console gaming, trying to make it easier for console games to port to Mac.
Blizzard remains the only studio who develops natively for the Mac, even after the Intel switch. GW2 and FFXIV run in emulation. Almost none of the Steam Games I have that broke in Catalina were updated. Objectively, Apple itself saw no appreciable improvements in the Mac gaming front (though they also continued to make it as difficult as possible for studios to do so).
Frankly, between that and the Mac driver KP bug which still impacts my iMac Pro, I made the difficult decision to build a PC box. This was done a week before WWDC, and I don’t regret the decision…though as a Mac user since 1989, it stings…a lot.
The way I see this play out is that any Blizzard game that can be ported to console, or is already in iOS will likely find a home on ARM Macs, though the transition may not be swift (pun intended). It’s feasible that WoW 10.0 might be a native Mac app, but folks are really going to have to see Blizzard deprecating WoW for the Mac as plausible, and start building out your “Plan B.”
I will never abandon the Mac, and still hope that Blizzard continues to develop natively for the Mac. I have my “plan B” in place though.
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likelyness for me is I’ll probably switch to PC primarily for application and gaming if hackintosh stops being viable, but i’ll end up honestly setting up a mac mini box and a small screen next to it that I can use to continue serving as my asset caching server to make all the iphones/ipads and apple tv in house continue to run much better with greatly reduced network bandwidth usage.
It’ll also serve as a desktop imessaging box. plus I still prefer BBedit for coding over anything windows side so I can do coding on that too. not like I need a powerhouse for typing Lua