Apple is expected to highlight the gaming capabilities of its M3 MacBook Pros at its next event. The brand is becoming more and more interested in video games.
Apple MacBook Pro M1 // Source: Arnaud Gelineau for Frandroid
If you’ve been following the previous episodes, the rumor shouldn’t surprise you. Apple’s “Pro” and “Max” chips rely heavily on their graphics circuitry to differentiate themselves from classic M1 and M2 chips. To highlight the power of a graphics circuit, there’s nothing better than video games. The company has also brought gaming to the forefront of macOS Sonoma by adding a dedicated gaming mode and tools for efficiently porting Windows games to the Mac.
Apple seems ready to step it up a gear on October 31st.
Turn your Mac into a gaming PC
According to MacRumors, Apple’s “Scary Fast” event dedicated to the Mac planned for October 31 will have a big focus on video games. We expect the M3 Pro and M3 Max chips to be presented from the beginning of 2023, which should provide a large increase in computing power compared to the M2 chips.
Like the Apple A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro, this new generation will benefit from TSMC’s move to 3nm and use some of its silicon for ray tracing. To illustrate this, we can easily imagine Apple announcing the launch of several leading games for the Mac. One of the best games of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3, was recently released on macOS. The game Resident Evil 4, already announced for the iPhone, is now listed in the Mac App Store. We also know that Assassin’s Creed Mirage is planned for the Apple ecosystem.
When you put all of these elements together, there’s reason to believe that Apple is preparing to move up a gear in video games. The price of equipped MacBooks remains, which could remain an obstacle. Currently, an Apple computer capable of running video games is very expensive. It will be necessary to watch in the coming years whether the company manages to apply its technologies to more accessible products while compromising on other elements such as the screen.
To be convincing, Apple also needs to demonstrate that its investments in video games are long-term and that the Mac won’t exit the sector within a few years. This would potentially require the company to produce games in-house like other platform publishers do: Epic Games with Fortnite, Valve for Steam launch, Microsoft with Xbox, etc. That’s what Apple is doing with its SVOD TV+ offering.
This week Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon X Elite with big promises for video games. It appears that the battlefield for portable PCs in 2024 has been found.
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