While I don't disagree that Apple has long had a corporate culture that has bounced between ambivalence toward the (AAA PC/Console) gaming space and outright hostility I think you're a bit off the mark.
The hardware isn't good. It's not bad, but it's not great. The minimum spec Apple gaming machine is an M1 Macbook Air, which is, honestly, a capable machine - It's at least as powerful as a Nintendo Switch, and that has a ton of games, so theoretically the M1 Macbook could be a good gaming machine too.
First things first this is just completely wrong.
The Nintendo Switch uses an under-clocked Tegra X1 SOC featuring an ARM Cortex A57 CPU (2012) and a mobile Maxwell (GTX 9xx) series GPU. The CPU is slower than an A7 (iPhone 5s) with the only saving grace being it's quad core and it only had to compete with the slow, Jaguar mobile CPUs used in the PS4/Xbox One. The GPU, while at least more modern than the (7xxx) era AMD GPUs in the PS4 and Xbox One, is MUCH slower. In terms of raw performance it's probably closer to the Wii U/PS3/360 than it is even the base Xbox One (which is a good deal slower than PS4.)
The M1 blows away the Tegra X1 in the Nintendo Switch by every conceivable metric. In terms of CPU performance the M1 generally compares favorably in single core performance with fastest Ryzen 5xxx and Intel 12th gen CPUs while offering good multi core performance (likely as good as the PS5/Xbox Series) and much better performance per watt. While GPU performance is more modest, it's far more powerful than not only the PS4, but also the previous dedicated GPUs was featured in 15" MBPs such as the RX 560X and Vega 20. That's not to say it's blazing fast compared to a dedicated gaming PC, but it's close enough to an Xbox Series S I don't see it being a problem running AAA games at lower settings for years to come.
Before you start, yes, I know, hardware doesn't mean anything if you don't have the software (games) to back it up.
The Switch has something besides hardware. It has a company behind it that values gaming. And Apple does not.
I agree, this is Nintendo's real strength. They are and always have been a gaming company focused on delivering high quality experiences. Apple by contrast has typically viewed gaming on the Mac with something between disinterest and disdain.
Watch what happens when you are a AAA game studio, developing for the mac: Find a driver bug. Full stop. There's a high likelyhood that you don't even bother letting Apple know, because Apple is notorious for ignoring bugs. But lets say that you do. There's a very real posibility that Apple does nothing. You may never even know if Apple fixes the bug. You spend development cycles trying to work around this bug.
I agree Apple's lack of transparency and unwillingness to prioritize fixing bugs is another major issue that plagues a lot more than just gaming (we had a memory leak in the Finder for over a year FFS.)
Eventually, you release your AAA game. It's great. Four years later, Apple switches architectures, and the game no longer runs. You can a) spend money trying to get a team together to fix the game, and updated it for free, or b) update it for a fee - but lets be real, the amount of money you'll make off of a half-decade old Call of Duty or the like is minimal. So you take option c) do nothing, and eventually the game dies a slow death as new hardware ceases to run it.
While I agree Apple's lack of transparency and unwillingness to support older APIs/hardware is a problem for users I don't feel like this is THAT big of a deal for game studios. They make their money when the game first comes out and people buy it. If it doesn't work in four years on the latest macOS? Oh well (not saying this isn't bad for consumers, it is, but I don't see this being decisive for the people who make financial decisions at game developers)
Prior to Metal, Apple uses OpenGL, which was stuck at version 4.1 for 9 years. For comparison, Microsoft released (and shipped Windows with) DirectX 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, and 12. MS added API features such as Ray Tracing, VRS, refresh rate switching, and low level API access (similar to Metal), among other things.
Yeah the situation with OpenGL was unacceptable. But Apple seems to be serious about Metal (if for no other reason than gaming brings in a lot of revenue on iOS,) and if Metal 3 is any indicator I'd like to think we've turned the corner.
(Apple's prior actions are) a pretty damn good barometer for how Apple feels about gaming. It's one thing to get a PR person to say some nice fluff, but it's another thing entirely to put your money where your mouth is, and Apple hasn't. All that Apple has done, so far, is more of the same. It's telling that Blizzard, probably the most mac-centric game studio of all time, has dropped Apple from supported platforms.
Again, I don't disagree that Apple has been a poor steward for Mac gaming. However the money they make with gaming on iOS seems to have finally opened their eyes, while Apple Silicon has paved the way for Apple to have the kind of hardware install base that could actually financially incentivize major AAA developers to bring their games to macOS. Not saying it will happen, just that the chances have never been better. Sure we can rehash Mac gaming's past and say "things will never get better" but I think there is reason to think otherwise.
(As for "Blizzard," they're a shell of their former selves, clinging to the revenue of IPs past, so I don't think they're the best barometer for the health of Mac gaming)
