Sketchy Rumor Claims Apple Plans to Announce High-End Gaming MacBook or iMac at WWDC 2020

[ob81]

The gaming industry makes more than the music and movie industry combined.

This isn’t so off-the-rails considering that when you look at the long term prospects, teenagers are asking for PC’s to game on. So they use Chromebooks in school, and prefer PC’s for gaming at home (I have a small sample size obviously. This is not an absolute.). While I have several Macs at home, besides an iPhone, my children continuously ask for PCs.

 

[MacBH928]

Yup... its the ARM macbook and it will be able to play the vast library of iOS games. Thats a gaming laptop right there.

 

[AndiG]

How competitive will this be with soldered and proprietary SSD, soldered RAM, no Nvidia gaming GPUs, slow MoltenVK emulation layer for proprietary Metal while being super expensive. The same game on a MacBook Pro runs 20% slower using macOS compared to a Windows installation.

Lomg story short - Apple doesn‘t understand the PC market. It converted to a phone and watch company.

 

[smulji]

You don't need that stuff though. The biggest reason gaming on Macs sucks is just the OS incompatibility. OpenGL is kept old, DirectX doesn't exist, and IIRC Vulkan is somehow handicapped. Like, CS:GO has noticeable input lag and framerate inconsistency in macOS on my desktop, but if I boot into Windows, it's perfect. Some games treat macOS as first-class and perform perfectly on it, but many are just ports.

If Apple goes for the gaming market, they'll have to start where Nvidia + Microsoft started together: Corner some game devs on their standards (Metal), and become the only real choice for playing certain games.

"Corner some game devs on their standards (Metal), and become the only real choice for playing certain games."

To do that, Apple would need to buy game developers and start creating fist-party content like how they're doing with ATV+

 

[BulkSlash]

Seems pretty far fetched. This would have to ship with Windows installed for gamers to even consider it I think. Unless a deal has been done and Microsoft’s excellent work with using virtual machines for backwards compatibility on the Xbox One has been extended to allowing DirectX Windows titles to run under MacOS.

Plus this would need to be a laptop as PC gamers usually build their own rigs and would never pay for a premium desktop system. I’d be happy to be proven wrong but I think this seems really unlikely.

 

[omenatarhuri]

I could buy this for sure. My last Mac was the high end iMac cause I want a powerful Mac and gaming machine but not too machines. I’m sure there are others out there as well. Some good titles for Mac and for others there’s boot camp.

 

[nt5672]

Will never happen - not Apple's market.

A good thing.

Not sure about this? Cook's process so far seems to be to throw new product against the wall and see what sticks. Unfortunately for Cook, not much has stuck recently. But I see this, if true, as just another thing that Apple will try for a year or two and then abandon.

The other problem is that gamers are not easily fooled by flashy gimmicks, which are Apple's stock and trade these days.

 

[Greenmeenie]

Um...why? Aren’t the regular imac & the imac pro enough? And we already have 3 laptops, the macbook air, macbook & macbook pro. Do we really need a dedicated gaming imac & laptop? On top of that there is a rumor that there will be 6 new iphone models?! I thought Apple was all about simplicity?

 

[sublunar]

It might be that or it might be a "Mac Pro mini"

Headless MacBook Pro 16" for $2k anyone?

 

[Eduardo75890]

Come on....

I mean, I guess you have to report it, but no way this happens.

Also, can we please stop calling these "esports?"

These are not "sports." "esports" "players" are not athletes.

Here's the definition of "sports" from macOS: "an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment: team sports such as baseball and soccer | (as modifier sports) : a sports center. (emphasis added)."

😂😂 Hmm sounds like a Boomer you do know that the US Government had acknowledged esports players as athletes now? They can apply for a athletes visa now and some university are giving out scholarships now to esports players and some international university your now able to major in esports ^^
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Exactly. Video games are not sport, they are works of art. The highest form of art as they involve multiple artistic forms. The greatest works of art are now video games.

👀 How about chess? Or poker? There on the Sport network like ESPN ^^ that’s not a sport? There sitting down playing with a piece of paper with a number and a symbols on it while chess players are just using what I would assume a toy to knockout all the enemy characters ^^

Edit : almost forgot about NASCAR? Your just sitting inside a car driving really fast in circles? Risking your life which in my eyes is dumb and not a sport ^^ Have you seen any esport competition like League of Legends or Fortnite? League is selling major venues that hold up to 50K and prize pools with over millions of dollars ^^. You did hear a 16 year old kid won 3 Million for winning the Fortnite World Cup ^^ while the winning team in league of legends earns up to 5 Million.
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I have a 2K with a Intel I9 and RTX 2080 with 1TB I’m not willing to spend 5K for a gaming “Mac” which most games that I play is not available on ^^

Edit : I have 16GB of Ram ^^ considering you add more ram and storage^^ and still would be under 5K. Including my two 27 inch Quad HD 165HZ monitors and keyboard and mouse and RBG mousepad still doesn’t add up to 5K ^^ it adds up to around 3200K

 

[moshind]

I do not see any reason for Apple to create such thing, the most they can do is to give an option for a better Graphics card in the current iMac or even Mac mini line (and yes, I known there is e-GPU for that).
Apple Arcade? I do not see it as a Gaming platform yet, mostly indy games style at least till they will not bring big names to the service.

 

[infinityharry]

Yeah Apple are seeing what Microsoft are doing with Xbox project x cloud. Apple are probably gearing up to take them on with a MacBook that can stream games to their iPhones & iPads. Still... requires developers and publishers to get on board!

 

[iSayuSay]

Power cable would be sold separately for $999. That's a steal.

 

[Eduardo75890]

😂😂 Hmm sounds like a Boomer you do know that the US Government had acknowledged esports players as athletes now? They can apply for a athletes visa now and some university are giving out scholarships now to esports players and some international university your now able to major in esports ^^
[automerge]1577726877[/automerge]

👀 How about chess? Or poker? There on the Sport network like ESPN ^^ that’s not a sport? There sitting down playing with a piece of paper with a number and a symbols on it while chess players are just using what I would assume a toy to knockout all the enemy characters ^^

Edit : almost forgot about NASCAR? Your just sitting inside a car driving really fast in circles? Risking your life which in my eyes is dumb and not a sport ^^ Have you seen any esport competition like League of Legends or Fortnite? League is selling major venues that hold up to 50K and prize pools with over millions of dollars ^^. You did hear a 16 year old kid won 3 Million for winning the Fortnite World Cup ^^ while the winning team in league of legends earns up to 5 Million.
[automerge]1577726954[/automerge]
I have a 2K with a Intel I9 and RTX 2080 with 1TB I’m not willing to spend 5K for a gaming “Mac” which most games that I play is not available on ^^

Edit : I have 16GB of Ram ^^ considering you add more ram and storage^^ and still would be under 5K. Including my two 27 inch Quad HD 165HZ monitors and keyboard and mouse and RBG mousepad still doesn’t add up to 5K ^^ it adds up to around 3200K

 

[44267547]

A ‘high end gaming MacBook?’....

This isn’t a sketch rumor, it’s completely bogus with no credibility attached.

 

[Justanotherfanboy]

The gaming industry makes more than the music and movie industry

I’m a bit embarrassed that I bothered doing a quick duck duck go search just to confirm I wasn’t crazy- that statement is so obviously intensely incorrect!

FYI, since I already did the legwork:
$43.4 billion + $19.1 billion is NOT less than $2.25 billion.

afterthought:
to be fair - in statistics that add all gambling machines revenue to “video games profit” that does indeed change the statistics immensely... however, I don’t think anyone here thinks Apple is going to start manufacturing one arm bandits for the casino industry, so that’s probably a bit moot

 

[naticom]

just do eGPU and you'll be good to go

 

[sublunar]

There are not many choices now, as most of current GPUs could not handle 4K at 120Hz for gaming. Or Metal 3 provides a revolutionary method about increasing the performance...

I'm sure most of the current generation consoles only upscale to 4k for most of their games. As long as an A14X is competitive with the AMD SoC being sold for the PS5 and Xbox Series X Apple could have a device that could interest folks.

4k at 120Hz would be something that a Mac would have to handle with full-on AMD 5700XT (even though Nvidia appears to be the better gamers choice on the Windows side of things) and even then macOS has no hope in catching up with Windows gamers thanks to outdated OS support.

Maybe if they would unveil some work being done to help matters in WWDC there could be some developer support for it but it would require Apple to make powerful GPU replacement possible in a much discussed but always unlikely xMac - aka headless iMac or Mac mini Pro. Something that will be leapfrogged within 6 months by newer PC hardware.

It makes more sense for Apple to tackle the consoles with an A14X powered tvOS AppleTV 4k Pro rather than get eviscerated by poor software in a macOS vs Windows confrontation.

 

[Noctilux.95]

Killer set up for playing Candy Crush.

 

[KarmaRocket]

I think if Apple was serious about gaming, they should have open sourced Metal when they first introduced it. Metal would be backed by Apple and possibly Intel and AMD. It could easily replace OpenGL and less headaches than Vulkan/MoltenVK. Metal would be a very good alternative to Nvidia's CUDA/OpenCL and a powerful gaming API that could be used in consoles, smartphones and computers.

Would be a lot easier to make games for iOS/Mac if game developers only needed one API that can run on multiple platforms.

Right now, it's not very popular since it only runs in the Apple eco system. It's a shame Apple doesn't open source more tech like they used to. Other than Swift I can't think of anything recent over the past few years.

 

[Chazzle]

WWDC 2020 should take place in June like usual, so we're just over six months out.

Just over 5 months, not 6.

 

[WozniakDestroyTimCook]

It makes more sense for Apple to enter the console market but they really don't stand a chance due to the absurd price of its hardware product.

 

[ksec]

Since the biggest macbook was already released....this is about an imac with better dGpu, thats all

I want both. iMac needs default SSD and much better dGPU. Basically they need an ever better than iMac Pro heat dissipation system across their iMac lineup.

It might be that or it might be a "Mac Pro mini"

Yes, Mac Pro may be with 1 MPX Slot and 1 more PCI-e Slot. I actually think they could reuse the old Mac Pro Trashcan design instead with improved thermals.

 

[maflynn]

I'm not sure how many gamers will want to spend 5,000 and up for a computer that doesn't play many games. Windows is the clear winner in supply. As a for instance, I picked up a RTX 2060 Super, and an EGPU, the cost was about 600 and I'm getting much better performance then what any mac can provide.

 

[mdatwood]

I’m a bit embarrassed that I bothered doing a quick duck duck go search just to confirm I wasn’t crazy- that statement is so obviously intensely incorrect!

FYI, since I already did the legwork:
$43.4 billion + $19.1 billion is NOT less than $2.25 billion.

afterthought:
to be fair - in statistics that add all gambling machines revenue to “video games profit” that does indeed change the statistics immensely... however, I don’t think anyone here thinks Apple is going to start manufacturing one arm bandits for the casino industry, so that’s probably a bit moot

2.25B can't be right. Activision alone has 6.88B in revenue, EA 5.08B. EBITDA of both those companies together is already over 3B.

Here is an article about revenue from 2016. How they separate xbox and ps numbers from their respective companies is unknown.

Investing in Video Games: This Industry Pulls In More Revenue Than Movies, Music

The video game industry has undergone significant changes from the early days of Atari. It now covers multiple sectors and generates more revenue.

www.nasdaq.com