It seems like these sorts of defenses will be written even when Nvidia is worth $2 trillion more than Apple. Here's a reminder why people are mad:

Apple can support both. There's no reason they shouldn't, as a competitor on the open market; AMD, Nvidia and even Qualcomm are supporting both DirectX and Vulkan in software. It would not require Apple to retool their hardware (as Asahi has shown) and would not require them to depreciate Metal (as their OpenGL support shows). The only significant sacrifice Apple has to make is their unforgiving monopoly on modern GPU APIs that they have meted out against everyone's will but their own.

macOS will be depreciated on Apple's roadmap by the time developers take it seriously as a gaming platform. It's outrageous that people like me have to abandon the Mac because Apple expects me to satisfy myself with iPad games instead of the full range of experiences available on the software market. They have a monopoly, Apple is throwing a temper tantrum because they know Steam has the better experience and they can't compete any better than Microsoft does. Their best strategy is to kill the Mac and pretend the iPad is a console with computer-like features, which should outright terrify you if you own a Mac.

> Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X

Certainly they were a company that boosted OpenGL, but the company? During the early years OSX had less market share than Linux does today, and OpenGL was already well established by gaming and professional software before OSX ever came out. Quake supported it (not on release), Quake II and Half Life supported it on release, Quake III required it. Heck, Quake III released on Linux shortly before MacOS (classic), making it arguably as influential then, and of course the OSX port of that only came a few years later. But point is, that Id dared to release their new flagship with only OpenGL support shows that OpenGL was already firmly established and supported before OSX existed.

> So, instead of relying on supporting 3rd party rendering APIs Apple spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.

I have been using a MacBook Pro for decades (Linux/Windows PC for gaming). I haven't seen this happening.

Apple have, in recent years, sponsored a few triple A titles to add MacOS ports but the vast majority of games don't run or run so poorly it doesn't matter.

With CrossOver there are a handful of games that work well, most don't. I tried to play Fallout New Vegas and it wouldn't start. Tried to play Raft with some friends and it didn't start. Borderlands 2/3 didn't start. Democracy 4 started but ran at 2 fps.

Some games like EU4 and Dark Souls 1 remastered work pretty well. I ended up buying an ROG Aly because I travel a lot and want a portable gaming experience. I use game streaming to my MacBook to play games - I wouldn't have bought the Ally if my MacBook could just game.

IMO - if the Asahi team were able to implement Vulkan with no documentation or references - Apple could do so in a weekend if they so desired. I'd like to see Apple write Windows or Linux drivers for their hardware so we can use official Bootcamp and run games on platforms that care about it.

Games on Mac are a multifaceted problem, but IMO the main issue stems from Apple treating games like they do apps. They expect developers to continue to support them, to update them as APIs get depreciated.

Apple can spend all the resources they want, but they'll never be able to convince enough developers to foster a gaming ecosystem that could ever be taken seriously when there's other platforms that have 20+ years of back catalogue titles available. This has largely been enabled on Linux through wrapping D3D to Vulkan and if Apple put in the work to support Vulkan all that work could be used for free. Or if they more permissively licensed GPTK's D3D>Metal wrapper, but as it stands it's still not as good as DXVK/VKD3D. Practically speaking Steam on Mac would be considerably more useful if there was native Vulkan support.

Of course, Apple wouldn't want that given their desire for vertical control of software distribution, though notably they don't do the same for video or audio. I mean they support MP3s right? That's what games should be treated as, a piece of media. MP3 might not be the best quality, most would prefer AAC or FLAC, but sometimes an MP3 is all a user might have, so they should let users play it. But they can't seem to break free from this delusion that game software should be treated the same as Uber Eats.

Did anything I say is actually untrue?

Maybe there's subtleties on why the situation is like it is, but the matter of the fact is that most developers need to go out of their way to support Apple (maybe even to a larger extent even than to support linux).

> spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.

This is news to me, is there some writing about it somewhere?

> However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their products map, i.e. switching new OS X to newer OpenGL revision would require to drop support for older Macs.

How does mesa manage then if apple cannot?

The question is, how long it will be working for?

My Steam account has numerous games in it that supposedly work on macOS, but not really because they shipped 10+ years ago and weren't updated since. Some don't launch at all. Some do, but with various more-or-less-breaking bugs. Of the remaining ones, many don't advertise hi-DPI support so macOS renders them at 1080p instead of 4K.

It desperately needs a stable API for games. Which Proton could provide, except there's also that whole Apple Silicon thing meaning that x64 Windows binaries aren't easily runnable.

Releasing Game Porting Toolkit aimed at developers wanting to make a quick and dirty shim and not users getting their own windows games working is such typical Apple hubris.

I'm interested in alternate explanations if you have them, to be clear this is only my theory.

While Valve might make up a big part of CodeWeavers book of business now, that was not true when the original contract was signed.

They advertise gaming as a use case for CrossOver (there used to be a separate CrossOver Games product, even, which I was a customer of), and it would not surprise me if the linux build of CrossOver sells so little they wouldn't care.