OPINION : Apple ’s release of the iPhone 15 Pro range was warmly welcomed not only because of the upgraded titanium chassis and introduction of USB - 100 , but because of the chipset power it . That chipset , the A17 Pro , could bethekey to mellow - end AAA gaming on a Mac – something Apple has never managed to achieve .
TheApple A17 Pro chipsetis the most powerful mobile chipset the company has produced to date . The headline characteristic is that it ’s built on a newfangled 3 nm physical process that results in a pretty seismic public presentation boost , allowing Apple to match an unbelievable 19 billion transistor onto the processor – a 3 billion cost increase on the A16 Bionic of the standardiPhone 15 .
More specifically , it run around a 6 - core CPU and a new 6 - magnetic core GPU that Apple claim boasts a 20 % increase in peak performance . While those claim are hard to assert , we ’ve find both theiPhone 15 ProandiPhone 15 Pro Maxto be absolute fauna in benchmark tests , outfox the eminent - end Android equivalent by quite some room in both the CPU and GPU departments .
This begs the question , then , what ’s the point of all that power ? It ’s not like there are games and apps designed to take advantage of such high performance as they ’d be restrain to just the two top - ending iPhones . Well , not yet anyway .
You see , as well as announcing the iPhone 15 Pro at an effect in early September , Apple confirmed that several AAA games – let in Resident Evil 4 , Resident Evil Village , Assassin ’s Creed Mirage and Death Stranding – are set to come to the App Store in the coming month . These will be exclusively available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max on the iPhone side of thing , requiring every bit of power that the A17 Pro has to power the experiences .
But what does this have to do with play on aMac ? regard Apple has such a wide collection of huge third - party game usable for the iPhone , it has never managed to crack high - oddment play on a Mac , at least to the same scale as Windows . sure as shooting , some secret plan are uncommitted for Mac , but these ordinarily come months , if not years , after release .
There have been multiple roadblocks for gaming on Mac . first of all , developers seemingly do n’t think there ’s enough of an incentive to optimise game keep for macOS or Apple Silicon , with the vast bulk of the user base unlikely to spend big on AAA play – most people concerned in gaming would simply grease one’s palms a Windows machine alternatively . Macs are certainly popular , butaccording to Statista , Macs only made up 13.3 % of all PC sales in the United States . And there ’s no guarantee that all of those users would desire a Mac for play .
It ’s possible that the iPhone could solve this effect . The iPhone is implausibly democratic , withStatista claimingthat the iPhone accounted for almost 49 % of all smartphone users in the USA back in 2021 . By making games available on both iPhone and Mac , it would substantially increase the user base of potential gamers using Apple Silicon to such an extent that it could abruptly become more worthwhile for secret plan developer to commit in a port .
In fact , Capcom has already confirmed that the Resident Evil 4 Remake will indeed be available on Mac , along with any M1 - powered iPad or later , and it ’s the same story with Death Stranding too .
reckon on how well these initial AAA game releases are received on iPhone , we could see more developer let in both iPhone and Mac as cardinal platforms for AAA games at release .
This would n’t have been possible when Mac was bunk on Intel Saratoga chip . With the switch to Apple ’s M - series silicon , new Macs are not only much more powerful and power effective than their Intel - based counterparts , but also boast compatibility with iPhone and iPad apps due to both the M- and A - series chipsets using the same underlying architecture .
This means that any M - serial Mac can theoretically run any iPhone or iPad app on Mac , and Apple has in the past claimed that it ’s as simple as clicking a single button for developers to make their apps available both on iPhone and Mac . This is seemingly the same case for secret plan too .
That ’s an exciting candidate that could see even lightweight options like theM1 MacBook Airturned into a lightweight gambling human dynamo rarely hear on the Windows side of things .
Of course , this is all surmisal for now and it ’s possible that , with such AAA experiences , there ’s more to it than simply pressing a button to make them available for macOS , but we ’ll find out for sure in the coming months as those predict title slowly make their way to the App Store .
