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Valve Drops Mac Support for SteamVR Less Than Three Years After WWDC 2017 Announcement
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I expect to see a lot more of this when Apple transitions to ARM.
Valve on Thursday announced that SteamVR no longer supports macOS so that its team "can focus on Windows and Linux."
As noted by UploadVR, Mac users will still be able to use SteamVR by running Windows with virtualization software like Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. Valve says legacy builds of the virtual reality platform will also remain accessible on the Mac by right-clicking on SteamVR in Steam and selecting Properties > Betas.
Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi announced that SteamVR was coming to the Mac at WWDC 2017, but a recent Valve survey indicated that more than 95 percent of Steam users are running Windows or Linux.
Multiple reports have indicated that Apple plans to release a combination AR/VR headset by 2021 or 2022, followed by sleeker AR glasses by 2023.
Article Link: Valve Drops Mac Support for SteamVR Less Than Three Years After WWDC 2017 Announcement
Mac: Hey PC! What are you doing?
PC: Just playing some games.
Mac: Cool, what games are you playing?
PC: Oh, you know, Half-Life: Alyx, the latest virtual reality stuff.
Erm. That is part of the 'truth.'
'Started?'
There was a moment of time when the PC was a heap of junk playing tetris in black and white. And Macs were the gaming platform. It didn't last long. But Lucas Games had a game on the Mac and both the Mac and the game in question signalled a bright future.
...and if we cast ourselves further back. Apple II, C64 and Atari were the hardware support in the 8 bit era gold age.
You have Marathon (my personal example) from the PPC era...and this...
From the 'PC' 'man' himself. 'Apple finally has its act together in 3D.' J.M.
As the leader of Valve stated. 'Apple doesn't follow through.' That's why Mac is a 3rd rate gaming platform. Behind Windows and even Linux it now appears.
'Our goal is to have the best games machine in the world.' Steve Jobs.
Virtual Playstation gaming.
An Apple from another life. Another universe. Gaming towers. Proper 3D gpus. Doom 3 on the Mac. Virtual Playstation.
'We are totally committed to make the Macintosh the best gaming platform in the world.' Steve Jobs.
There have been several opportunities for Apple/Mac gaming. I think that Steve Jobs keynote was the last 'serious' attempt or inflection point. And they didn't follow through with that.
Open GL was left to rot on the vine. Until it was finally dropped or deprecated to the 'trash' can.
Metal and a consolidated iOS/Mac ARM platform will finally crack the nut. But we're looking at another year for that to happen.
But Apple Arcade, iPad API to Mac conversion and rumours of this Mac ARM appearing 2021 tell us where Mac gaming is going.
A traditional paradigm of Mac towers £1500-£2500. It hasn't happened for 19 years. You have to pay at least £2k to get a decent spec iMac wiht a lower end gpu and then Apple will charge you £400 more for a mid-range card.
The (or my hope) is that the new iMacs will be the last Intel/AMD Radeon hurrah before the transition to Mac ARM.
Seriously, though, just buy a PS5 for gaming at a fraction of the price of Mac or PC. It will be far better equipped to offer a great gaming experience than Mac or PC. One of which is a creative machine and the other is an office machine.
Azrael.
I got his point. You have to pay alot of money to access low end or mainstream gpus.
'Toxic.' I guess you don't like what I have to say. But you don't have to.
Yeah, 'people just don't care, people buy what they need and what the can afford...'
And that's why Valve have kicked Apple to the curb. 'People don't care.' You get the platform you deserve. If Apple customers don't know or don't care then they'll get Mac Minis that ship with junk iG.
Apple clearly understands business that's why they ship their Macs ranging from £800-£2000 with a mere 8 gigs of ram, have largely closed off access to the Ram upgrading. They know full well what they are doing. And save money on screws by using cellotape on their iMacs. And they skimp on GPUs. Whether other vendors do that in entirety is up for debate. But if Apple are purporting their Macs are as good as they insinuate through their marketing why is the lastest OS release so buggy and why has Valve dropped them like a stone and why don't Apple have the conviction to offer a 3 year warranty with their expensive Macs...
I understand business quite well, enough to know 'sales' rather than 'product' guys. Clearly, Apple under Cook have largely left the Mac platform sit and rot whilst using up sell to get 'a deal.'
Learn how business works. Yes. Let's look at the intro' iMac, an apology of a machine with an ancient HD in it.
6k pounds to access a 580 gpu is part of why Valve have kicked Apple to the curb.
6k limits access to customers. Especially the customers that used to buy the G3, G4 and G5 and Intel Mac towers.
If we take the Mac Mini or iMac as examples you have to go up that upsell ladder to access even modest gpus.
People have the free choice to choose that. But you can't complain when Valve or other developers leave the platform.
This isn't anything new. Apple have always been the high cost low gpu company. I only recall one time where Apple customers rebelled vocally over the gpu in the iMac and Phill Schiller had to come out publically and say Apple was going to offer a better gpu option (ironically, it was Nvidia.)
It's been 19 years and probably longer in the making. Unless Apple customers (or desktop Mac customers hold them to account, then you have to look in the mirror.)
Most have given up the ghost and just bought PC windows/linux for 'PC' gaming. Or just bought a Playstation. The latter of which is far better value.
Azrael.
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It's ill-equipped because Apple makes it that way.
Steve Jobs left Apple a great OS legacy and an iOS business plan to take Apple forwards. I won't deny Tim Cook executed on that. But statements like 'iPad is the only computer you'll ever need' tells us all we need to know.
And leaving the Mac Pro to rot for 6 years as a figment of our fertile imaginations was even more damning.
Yeah, we get it. 'Milk the Mac platform for all it's worth and move onto the next best thing.' Steve Jobs.
Ironically, the most 'toxic' statements about Macs or 'Mac gaming' come or came from the very top of Apple themselves.
When even the 'Office guys' Microsoft have conquered not only PC Tower gaming but also (give or take the Playstation) the console gaming market as well as swooping in and taking Halo from right under Steve Job's nose...you know that Apple can't be taking seriously as a 'gaming platform.'
Apple were beaten hands down by the office guys. Ironic, considering Apple is 'supposed' to be the 'creative' platform which, again, ironically, they don't supply decent GPUs at prices most gamers or creatives can access.
And the real success they've had in games with the 'new era Macs' eg iPad and iPhones (just smaller screened Macs...) was largely down to the osmosis of market forces. Ie. They fell into gaming.
And that's because? They sold alot of iPads and iPhones at decent prices before the recent move to upsell and increase prices across the board with more machines to access even higher price ranges using designations like 'Pro' (more marketing than substance.) Still. They sold alot of iOS. If you sell a billion of something, that's why you get games. I don't recall Apple having that much to do with it as a 'gaming platform' per se. But credit to them (or Jobs) they offered a great iPhone/iPad platform at (initially) fair prices that showed a future where the Mac as we currently know it will be obsolete or, in English, just a bigger screened iOS Mac ARM eventually.
The Blue and White G3 tower days will not return whether I like it or not. Open GL was initially decent as were the said G3 towers...but Steve Jobs didn't carry through on his promise. This became a chicken and egg dynamic. ie. If you don't offer fairly priced Mac ('towers?') to move enough units then it will never (and didn't) happen. That's why you get 2nd rate GL. Even Apple didn't eat their own Open GL dog food. (Though it was welcome reprieve from Quickdraw 3D at the time...) So why should Valve or the other leading edge PC developers? You're always going to be a 2nd class citizen this way. And it's compounded by shipping expensive machines that don't match the insinuation marketing of Macs being 'the best' whilst offering mediocre components. ie. it's May. And we still don't have a serious desktop offering from Apple this year.
That's why Valve are leaving. You're not going to generate volume with 6k machines that use low to medium end gpus (or combo ones that have reality warping pricing.)
But Apple gaming is not over. The new dawn will be a consolidated 'Mac' platform on iOS. That's where the market forces are. And 'Mac' will born again. Apple may not take it 'seriously,' (in the way I wanted them to with Steve Jobs, Johm McCarmack on stage with teh latest Doom Eternal and sexy G3 blue and white towers...I have a dream where that actually worked out for the last 19 years...but tis but a dream) but the osmosis of billion plus devices will ensure that developers do. And Apple, ofc, will follow the money.
Azrael.
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If you have absolutely no clue afa the computer world, just admit it. The X-Box One S is $250 because it has reached end of life, and everybody is trying to clear the channels for the next generation of consoles.
AFA the computer parts, are ALL name brands. MSI, AMD, Corsair, EVGA, Sabrent. Want to pay extra for a "Name Brand" case? Sure, that would be an extra 5 - 10 dollars. Mine is a Rosewill - I got it because it came with no RGB. I do wish I could have gotten the earlier version of the case - it came with 2 E-Sata connectors - I need that functionality.
The MSI B450 Tomahawk is pretty much considered the Gold standard for midrange Ryzen boards. You can spend more, you can spend less. The top of the line AM4 board, IMO, is the Asus WS X570 board. No RGB, ECC memory support, 3 PCIe 4.0 slots that are user configurable.
If you are going to do SSD - Go PCIe 4.0, or you are literally wasting time.
Oh, wait - Macs can't do that, can they?
Yeah, but while completely understandable now, it still stings. There was a very long stretch in which Linux was but a twinkle in mainstream developers’ eyes.
If you do content creation, be it 3D modelling, architecture, animation, or indeed, if you’re a traditional artist, and you try VR tools, your life will change. Your practice will hit a marker, dividing everything you have done in the past, from everything you can plan to do for the future.
There is nothing so mind-opening, so paradigm re-shaping, as stepping into a VR workspace, and realising how much of your digital work time, and mental loading is spent on maintaining the mental model of how the 2D screen is just a proxy for the 3D work. It’s the mental and creative equivalent of going from doing all your manual tasks in life with a pair of remote Waldo arms, to directly manipulating with your hands.
I almost wept the first time I tried Tilt Brush, literally the entire history of steel sculpture has been a desire to draw in 3 dimensions, steel being the only material strong, and thin enough to do it, and now the tools are here to drop into pure creation environments... if you use (primarily) Windows.
Yeah, you can run 20 year old binaries-- as long as you didn't use 16 bit drivers to access a DB. (personal experience with that one). Do you thing gaming devs want you running their 20 year old games, or buying their latest titles? Judging by how gaming companies shut down servers, fail to patch bugs, and so on, I kinda think they prefer you buy NEW titles rather than continue to enjoy old ones.
Deprecating openGL in favor of a better system? Not a bad idea.
Ending 32 bit support and all its limitations? Again, not a bad idea.
By focusing on the best ideas, macOS is still leaps and bounds more stable than Windows. Remember when WinXP-x64 came out and wouldn't let you use unsigned drivers? Everyone complained, but it was because unsigned drivers were causing tons of crashes (and because crashes are caused by by a few thousand electrons, it takes a LOT of them to equal a ton).
I love how Apple makes some change that everyone moans is so stupid that Apple will soon go away, only to have everyone copy it within a 2-3 years:
Remove the floppy disk? Check
Replace serial and parallel ports with USB only? Check
Remove the CD/DVD rom drive? Check
Notch on the phone? Check
Remove Headphone jack? Check
USB-C? Check
End 16 bit driver support? Check
Introduce iPad? Check
Sell music on iTunes? Check
If Apple follows a similar pattern in moving to ARM that they did in moving to Intel, it will come with a "Rosetta" to run legacy content for 7 or 8 years. Is there that much money being made on 8 year old games that devs want to keep working on those titles rather than newer ones?
That's a good question. Let's ask Bethesda.
Or GOG, whose entire business model is supporting old games.
Or EA, who still supports Ultima Online 23-years after release. Or Blizzard who keeps updating StarCraft 22-years after release. And, of course UnReal World which is still selling well on Steam 28-years after first being released.
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I guess, but a more interesting way to look at it is to compare Switch, Xbox, and PS4 against PC, iOS, and android. After all, the former are consoles and the later are computers. Price wise an iPhone 11 Pro Max, or an iPad Pro are closer in price to a high end gaming PC while the iPhone SE is in line with what an entry level PC would cost. In which case, computers are hands down more popular for gaming than consoles.
But if the question is 'are there more people playing XBox, PS4, and Switch or PC games', than I still think the PC wins. Sure, 90 million active Steam users vs 200 million total console sold? At least half of those consoles are no longer being used either because they broke, the owner got bored, or they switched from one console platform to another.
Worse case half of gaming is PC, I refer back to my previous point. PC gaming isn't that fragmented. Sure, you can game on Mac and Linux, but most people don't. Where as even if you have a PS4 half of console gamers don't have the same system as you. One is almost forced to consider each console as it's own little ecosystem with it's own game library and online play platform.
And lets consider the average sale price of console vs PC games. PC games are far cheaper. Often 60 to 90% cheaper. Developers are not in the business of losing money. (Not most of them at least. /s) So the presence of persistently lower prices on PC is highly supportive of a larger userbase that supports game development via a greater overall number of purchases.
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No doubt that VR has some great functionality for different uses. I have seen some great applications in teaching, therapy, content creation, and yeah, even games. I believe you if you tell me that this tool has changed your workflow, but what I wouldn't believe is if you told me it changes it for everyone. I saw your provision of the context of content creation, so I am not suggesting you you are saying that. But as of right now there is no VR application that has had the same impact on sales as Mario or Excel. VR needs something that pushes the masses to get justify the hardware expense.
And I am not convinced we will see it. The idea of AR on the other hand solve so many of the issues with VR, without losing many of the benefits. If hololens increased its field of view and battery life, and cut its price by a factor of 10 this conversation might be different. I think the game changer won't come until we have a low cost AR headset that has the ability to be switched into VR via software and can use fingers to reliably control the virtual environment.
The iPad Pro inclusion of Lidar may be a first for Apple - they introduced a hardware feature that had no practical implementation by them yet. I have never seen that before. Apple usually introduces hardware only when they have a great implementation of software. TouchID and FaceID are both good examples. Other vendors do this all the time - hardware with half baked software just so they can check a box. Very weird to see Apple going down this path.
Aren't the next gen of AMD cards supposed to be more powerful than the Nvidia cards? That's good for mac gaming right?
Heh! MSI is the gold standard? Yea, if you value low-quality! Me personally, when I use to build systems I stuck with ASUS, Gigabyte, and Intel boards. Lower failure rates in my experience.
Thanks for confirming the price points on the console. The other guy had difficulty surfing the web on his custom PC apparently.
My Samsung SSD comment was aimed at what I installed in my console. I could care less about PCs unless it is a Mac. Personally, Macs offer more value. They can last a decade or mire and I can install a new OS on it for 7 years. Windows Based PC can last but the components typically fail within a few years especially if we are talking about gaming video cards and such. I prefer using the right tool for the job and when it comes to gaming, why not use a platform designed and dedicated for gaming? It's really a no-brainer.
Yes - but it won't matter because:
1. OSXwon't get the Adrenalin drivers.
2. Doesn't mean that developers will suddenly start to use Metal.
Do I believe you - or do I believe the rest of the world?
Based on actually doing things that are CPU/GPU intensive, the mac computer line up is garbage. Full stop. There is no special sauce for Apple hardware - it is the exact same stuff made for PCs.
The hardware can last - but you aren't upgrading OSs without jumping through a LOT of hoops - go visit the Mac Pro forums here if you want to see the lengths people will go to keep decade+ hardwware going. I got tired of it, especially when in Windows 10, It just works......
Would you like to poke through all of my Apple hardware that died because Sir Idiot Boy never did learn the concept of heat dissipation? That would be 2 Apple TVs, 2 Time Capsules, 1 Macbook Pro, 1 iMac.
As some one that owns a dead GT 730, 3870 (Made for Mac), 4870 (Also made for Mac). Ask the trashcan owners about the D700. I wouldn't talk too much about dead video cards.
My Mac Pro lasted a decade - See sig. An $800 Ryzen 2700 system outperforms it - a last gen Zen system, not a Zen 2. It is within shouting distance of a base 7,1 Mac Pro. Think about that.
When that sweet 3950x drops in, Katy, bar the door. And unlike the Mac userbase (Not including the Hackintosh community, of course), I have the ability to do a drop in replacement with a Zen 3 CPU, should I choose to do so. Or an actual, modern AMD GPU, or an Nvidia GPU - which the Mac community doesn't have.
Today, the most powerful OSX based system is a Threadripper based Hackintosh. Unfortunately, that one has to stop at 32 cores because OSX can't go beyond that.
Actually I think Excel is a really good candidate for VR - because one of the things that limits spreadsheets, is the scale of display. Same with mind-mapping / flowchart type software.
If you look at Leap Motion's Project Northstar demos, that's pretty much the cutting edge of AR, and it's bulkier than VR. Personally, I don't think a portable AR solution any smaller than current VR headsets is achievable, just due to the distancs required for lenses necessary to refocus at such short range (Northstar achieves this by offsetting the projection to the side afaik).
VR to me is a private office, AR an open-plan shared workspace. But, the creeper-dream of an always-on camera-equipped pair of ordinary glasses that you wear all the time while out in the world, for a HUD etc, I think that's simply not going to happen, for reasons that go beyond technical difficulty.
This is why I think that if the rumours of Apple developing "thin" profile "AR Glasses" are based on any actual object seen by anyone, it's not what people are assuming - a wearable self-contained headset.
Apple likes to present hardware as purposeful - features with a use-case. Right now, there isn't a practical use-case for AR in a headset - the non-miniturisable optical physics require scale to work, so unless you're able to practically wear something the size of a hololens (and in industrial settings, you can - AR Welding Helmets are going to be a big thing), glasses-based AR isn't a thing for the next 5-10 years, if at all.
But, Apple makes monitors again, big, expensive, high-brightness monitors, and a technology that is somewhat mature, but can stand to be improved, is the glasses-based 3DTV system.
I could easily see Apple using that as a way to make a normal display - computer, iPad etc a "deep" box, with the traditional 2D ui at the front, and then a projected 3D space within that. If the glasses have LIDAR dotfield projectors, a product designer at a workstation could look at a table, flooding it with a keying dotpattern, that an iPad could pick up on, and then use its LIRAR to accurately place & maintain an airdropped 3D model, which would look 3D on the iPad's screen, if the person holding it is also wearing the glasses.
That's an integrated workflow you can sell to someone today.
I guess for me, I don't need the latest video card or the beefiest CPU ever to do the things I need to do. I want my system to work reliably every time I use it and I don't want to have to tinker and troubleshoot. Windows OS is a hot mess to me. Plastic laptops don't work for me. I prefer the solid build of Apple products and the synergy. Obviously our use cases are different and again one size doesn't fit all. I've had my share of Microsoft and Google products and if those companies aren't abandoning their products after right after release then they are putting out half baked products/services. For now, Apple is my cup of tea.
Excel might be, but I think there are three issues with it being a killer app for VR.
1. It doesn't exist. (Which could be solved by existing)
2. Hardware limitations make reading normal size text difficult. (Which could be solved by improving screen resolutions and refresh rates)
3. People who work on Excel typically have to combine looking at paper and screens. (which can't really be solved with VR)
Now... mind mapping software I could see. Although it still suffers from #s 1 and 2.
I might not be looking at the right stuff, because what I found tagged as Northstar is larger and clunkier than Hololens. You might be right, but I am a little more optimistic about AR opportunity.
I don't think we need ray-bans with screens. And I don't think anything close to it will have cameras. By making a publicly available demo of Google Glass they killed that direction of hardware.
And number 3 is really the biggest issue with VR. By making VR a personal only experience it loses a lot of its value. Sure, smartphones are primarily one use devices, but they can be shared in a when it's absolutely necessary. When I have people over (had people over?) VR is a short lived distraction because everyone wants to be involved. But watching someone in VR on a TV just isn't the same as being in it. Pretty quickly people notice that being in VR removes them from the group - and that's a bad thing - so they stop using it. Which, I gather was sort of the take away of your assessment. And I agree, but I think the social capacity of VR significantly dampens the value of the the tech.
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I suspect others might suggest the following.
- Neither Mac nor Windows works reliably every time you use it. And for many people if it doesn't work once than it isn't reliable. I suspect, thought I don't know for sure, that is why you think Window's is unreliable.
- Plastic laptops do feel lower quality these days. Thankfully both Mac and Window's machines are available in sold construction metal cases.
- I too like the idea of synergy. In reality, neither platform really has it.
- Yes! An iissue many people have is that one size doesn't fit all. But Apple makes it really difficult to find alternative hardware solutions if you don't fit their version of all.
- I think your assessment unfairly groups Microsoft and Google. Microsoft is infamous for supporting things for longer than most people actually need. You know who does cut support and features? Hold on, let me use 3D Touch to emphasize my point.
I agree, but I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt. I hope that they either needed an established user base for an update or they new they had to refresh the iPad and it’s part of the next round of software updates.
But I agree, I too found it a strange decision.
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Well that's the great leap for SteamVR 2.0 - you can have multiple people in a shared virtual environment.
But then again, the days of in-person group collaboration... what's happening now isn't going to be a blip that ends, it's the start of a new normal. I know people in big companies that specialise in hotdesking equipment, they're losing sleep over whether their business model is sustainable, trying to figure out if they can spin shared infrastructure as being cleaner, because cleaners will clean it, as opposed to private offices which they won't. Office partition companies are selling out their current stock, and future production capacity.
Apple is a company that bet the house on meatspace - including their trainwreck new campus, and black swans are coming home to roost.
iOS and Android are more like consoles than PC's, iOS especially with the strict control over the software that runs on it and both, unlike PC's, are not upgradable. Just like consoles.
Grouping by price doesn't work because the PS4 would be at the same level as the iPhone SE, so then you'd have to include PS4, iOS, Android and PC in one group (by price) and Xbox and Switch in the other. Better, I think, to separate PC's into OS's as that's how Valve is doing it when speaking of their Steam efforts (macOS, Windows, Linux). Mobile devices into OS's as that's also widely accepted (Android, iOS/iPadOS) And then the rest by vendor (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo).
I DO agree that ANY group that includes iOS will be the group that encompasses the majority of gaming happening right now, though. Switch and iOS versus Windows PC? Switch and iOS. Linux PC and iOS versus macOS? Linux PC and iOS. Neo Geo Pocket and iOS...
At least half. Which is still 100 million. Which is more than the 95 million for Steam, and that's even before considering that active Steam users has only grown 5 million from last year, when, from March 2017 to Jan 2020, the Switch alone has sold 52.48 million.
I'd guess that Windows gaming is at best a quarter of all gaming simply because "all gaming" includes iOS and iOS is a massive juggernaut that absolutely dwarfs everything else. I'm sure that someone somewhere has a handy chart for this. Maybe I'll google for it later.
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So, back in the day, it was pretty common for a company to drop macOS support first right before throwing in the towel on an effort altogether. In a recent report Steam has said that, even with how well Alyx did, less than 2% of Steam users own VR headsets. Perhaps they plan to continue to push VR but have decreased funding and the Mac team had to be cut.
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Exactly. Anyone serious about gaming on their home computer will naturally use Windows. Not a Mac. Never a Mac.
Regarding 'heat dissipation'...I speak from personal experience. The 1st year I pushed the iMac's gpu (playing some really old 2004 game...) even moderately? The iMac's 'cooling' and case couldn't handle it. Fried.
I doubt this machien would have lasted 7.3 years if I'd been 3d rendering, streaming and/or gaming at the same time or separately.
I hear you re: Threadripper. Intel are getting spanked. 32 cores. 64 cores. Why aren't they in a Mac 'Pro?' Or an Nvidia Super Duper Titan?
And I think your Ryzen 2700 comment vs the 'shouting distance' of a base Mac 'pro' says it all. I'd rather pay $800 for a 2700 Ryzen system and Hackintosh it or move to Windows full time.
I didn't mind when G3 towers were within 20% of PC hardware under Jobs back in the Blue and White tower days. But now? The £1k 'stand' Apple? I think even Steve Jobs would have struggled to keep a straight face with that one. And it was telling that the presenter stumbled quickly past it. It's a 'pish' take.
I'm not mortgaging my soul for Apple or Apple's shareholders.
Azrael.
We already have attempts at a shared VR environment. It's terrible. Everyone needs their own headset and they have to be in different rooms. That's the exact opposite of what makes other technology social.
The rest of what you said I can't take seriously.
Not being able to upgrade isn't what makes it a console. Being designed first and foremost for playing games is what makes it a console. iOS and android are not designed to be gaming machines.
My point was that gaming PCs have the same price range as iPhones. It goes along with the point I made earlier that PC gaming can be cheaper than console gaming.
Are you including the Switch Lite? That isn't a console, it's a portable that plays console games.I DO agree that ANY group that includes iOS will be the group that encompasses the majority of gaming happening right now, though. Switch and iOS versus Windows PC? Switch and iOS. Linux PC and iOS versus macOS? Linux PC and iOS. Neo Geo Pocket and iOS...
At least half. Which is still 100 million. Which is more than the 95 million for Steam, and that's even before considering that active Steam users has only grown 5 million from last year, when, from March 2017 to Jan 2020, the Switch alone has sold 52.48 million.
Even still, you are comparing three platforms against one store. When you add it all the other stores, HTML5 games, and DRM free games that cam on CD/disk the PC is still much higher than consoles.
Honestly, if you are going to include mobile devices than you have to include everyone who has played the google t-rex game or solitaire.
Sure. VR isn't turning out to have mass market appeal because it's not a social experience. In order for any sort of entertainment to do well it needs to have an easy reliable way of sharing the experience with a friend. VR requires two people with two PC's and two headsets and two separate rooms with space to engage in VR. It almost necessitates online play where each person is in their own home. And that kills VR for most people. If you force its use in a social gathering people kills its engagement from both angles. The person in VR becomes isolated and doesn't want to play and there is always one person who gets motion sick and when they don't want to play other people stop because they don't want the motion sick person to feel left out.
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The iMac has always been a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none device. It was clearly designed to target casual computer users, but now that market is being filled by ipads. The MacBook is a great device, not perfect, but Apple is a leader in laptops. Desktops however are different story.
I almost purchased a iMac Pro, but my previous experiences with iMacs has turned me off. I purchased a fully loaded Late 2009 iMac under the promise that when it becomes unusable its target display mode would allow it to become a second display for its replacement. That never happened because the 2009 iMacs had faulty GPUs and the Mac had to boot into macOS to enagle target display mode. I expected 10 years out of a Mac and only getting 4 left me feeling ripped off.
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