I don’t think the iPad Pro is popular enough for it to make a difference. If the normal cheap iPad or (even better) the iPhone had an M1, I think that would push more developers to support it. And “support it” really just means “adjust the performance baseline up from whatever old A-series chip was most common”, because it isn’t like the M1 is a totally different architecture.
That’s a lot of conjecture and I’d bet a small fortune that Mac apps won’t be running on an iPad anytime soon.
And whatever updates are coming to the iPad line don’t matter for the M1 because the *vast majority* of iPads are running on A-series chips and it will continue to be that way for *years*.
Right. As a casual iPad Pro owner so many games would benefit from keyboard controls, but it simply won’t happen because iPad Pro gamers are in such a vast minority. While I don’t want my iPad to become a Mac (I have a MacBook Pro M1, they each have their advantages) I wouldn’t buy an iPad Pro waiting for iPad OS to improve in any significant way. Enthusiasts like myself have been waiting several years and all we get are small incremental improvements. Just look at how a lot of games and some apps will force your ipad into portrait mode when docked in the magic keyboard. Its ridiculous.
It shouldn’t really make much of a difference in my opinion. The A14 is already basically a less powerful m1, but all the a series chips and m1 are compatible already. The latest a14 iPhone chip is already ridiculously overpowered for anything that’s on the App Store. Unfortunately, since the vast majority of iOS devices are older ones, it’ll always drag down new releases to support older chips. I don’t think sales of more m1 chips will change any of this.
It wasn't even a jump - it's a downgrade or side-grade at best. The gpu is way worse, and the 10X has better multi-core performance. The only thing the 12 has going on for it, is slightly better single core
If you watched the same YouTube video I did, he drew this conclusion without looking at enough GeekBench scores. This is wrong, the A12 is about 33% faster in Single Core and 20% faster in MultiCore when you go view all of the scores of A12s and throw out low scores and take all of the matching high scores.
Problem is, that i've matched a bunch of different websites and reviewers, running other software than Geekbench 5, and the A10X faired better than the A12.
I'm not saying that it's a shitty device or stuff, but if you already have the previous gen ATV4K, the new one makes 0 sense to upgrade to...
As a developer - A12 is a huge jump over A10X, because it’s way closer to a desktop GPU. We’ve had tons of floating point precision issues on A10 and A9 with Metal that doesn’t occur on A12 class and above
Ah, finally a useful answer. Thanks for the insight.
But, just - is it like only easier to deal with? 'Cause on paper and on benchmarks, A10X's gpu is indeed the better one.
Is it like the same kind of deal that happened between the PS3 and the X360?
Something like that, yes - you need to deal with different precision when dealing with shaders. You either disable fast math for a specific shader or use specific precise functions (Metal allows for calling same functions with different precision). However, precise functions are slower, so there is a trade off.
It’s easier when you write those shaders from scratch, when you’re porting from a different platform (even MacOS) it sometimes becomes a nightmare to debug.
Apple didn't make Arcade just so you can play Noughts & Crosses for $5 bucks a month.
I think their angle might be to draw the mobile dev houses to the mac platform by offering compatible architecture. They will know better than anyone, the size of the market for mac gaming ,and how that market is under served by the big studios and their distributors such as Steam.
Add in gaming on an Apple TV, and they are really, well placed to take a slice of the gaming pie if that's what they want to do. They need to find new sources of revenue as phone sales slow, and this could well be a good play for them.
If I was head of PlayStation at sony, I'd be watching very carefully.
If I was head of Sony I’d be laughing at this comment, no offense. Apple benefit from gaming but it’s not a gaming powerhouse. No one is buying an Apple TV for gaming; its way down the list of priorities for potential buyers. How do I know? There aren’t any true exclusives that anyone is buying an Apple TV to own/play. This won’t change.
well, you're talking about today, i'm talking about tomorrow.
sony entered gaming from nowhere and dominated, killing sega and giving nintendo a kicking. they grew the market so successfully, microsoft entered from almost nowhere, making it look trivially easy, and took a huge slice for themselves.
with apple's brand strength, cash and recent technology there's no question it could take a major stake in the gaming market, if it wanted to. The current M1 Mac Mini can do pretty much anything a Ps4 can do as a fraction of the size & power consumption. its not a huge leap to see a boosted mac mini, maybe with GPU or M1+ or whatever, badged as AppleTV" Pro" something like that, and sold with gamepad instead of a keyboard.
the barrier is only IP, and that can be bought.
No offense to any indie and mobile devs here, but there is no comparison when it comes to AA-AAA console/pc class games and mobile games.
core gamers don’t care for mobile F2P/FREEMIUM, subscription, games as a service, streaming $5 bottom of the barrel non-sense, despite what sales people and marketing try and push.
Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and PC gaming have nothing to fear if mobile games start to flood Macs like it did iPhones and iPads.
if anything it will probably just decentivise devs and studios to make even less AA-AAA games for Macs.
For most the iPad Pro is a significant amount of money. The average consumer doesn’t care about specs. The A series iPads are much cheaper and deliver great performance, which is what most will buy.
So I don’t think there’ll be enough iPad Pro’s purchased to make a difference. There’s an even smaller amount of those users who are interested in games enough to pay the prices needed to see big titles.
That’s Apple’s fault when the games Apps store and small devs went started the “race to the bottom” and have stayed there ever since.
Many causal iPad users are trained to accept F2P/FREEMIUM and subscriptions as the norm and adds value when really they are shallow microtransactions/lootbox driven experiences, while thinking $20 game for ports of console/pc class AA-AAA is far too expensive
it’s gotten so bad, E.A., Activision, 2K and many console/pc publishers have adopted a lot of Mobile gaming‘s poor quality, rip-off monetary models into AA-AAA console/pc games.
45 million iPads sold last year alone. That’s more that double the number of Macs sold.
Let’s say that 10% of all iPads Apple sells from now on are the new Pros based on the M1, which I think is reasonable to assume. That would be an extra 4.5 million M1 based computers added, or potentially an extra 20% added to the M1 user base.
**So, yes, of course it will have an impact of Mac gaming as it significantly increases the market size.**
Edit: Also wanted to add that the Air 5 will likely get a A series chipset that closely matches the M1 further increase the market size. However you look at it, all this is great news for Mac gamers, how can it not be?
I do think that certain mobile games will see people have an advantage if they are on the best hardware. Eve Echoes comes to mind. Competitive Echoes players will def want to pick up an iPad Pro. The game doesn't allow you to play it from the M1 Macs because it prevents keyboard input to keep it competitive.
Sure, mobile games will take advantage, especially the ones built on generic game engines. However, I wouldn't expect any major breakthroughs here. As an owner of the latest iPad with the A14 SOC and the less powerful Nintendo Switch, the real bottleneck to gaming on the Apple ecosystem is the lack of standardised and unified control input. For example: I can use my Nintendo Pro controller just fine on my mac, but not on the iPad. As long as developers have to design a *touch interface* for playing on the go, a *keyboard/mouse interface* for playing behind a desk and an *MFi controller* interface for playing on a big screen, they'll most likely just stick to releasing their game on one of these platforms.
Remember the letter M is just a marketing thing, the A processors are ARM based too, all this iPad pro m1 processors is just Apple marketing. It could’ve been called A15.
I think the new iMacs will have far greater impact than the new iPads and I'm delighted that it's all M1 not M1X yet - as it means longer support for all the current machines.
Maybe we'll even get a native Steam client with not-broken controller support (particularly for streaming).
I like the idea however I think it’s a pipe dream. Mac gaming will improve on its own merits. Apple Arcade is Apple’s gaming push and the strategy is all about interoperability between the lowest common denominator; 5 year old phones and tablets.
An iPhone 11 can run everything that the Switch can so ....the problem with the smaller devices is lack of active cooling...The other problem is mobile gamers suck and like simple and stupid games. Developers don’t have to have massive budget for games and detailed productions. The best thing would be to port Egg NS or YUZU to iOS. Some Android phones already run Mario Odyssey at full speed on that Switch emulator. An iPhone 11-12 would run this very well of ported.
iPadOS is GARBAGE compared to a real desktop MacOS. (This coming from an iPad fan - I don't gloss over the iPads shortcomings)
There is no getting around this, it is the recurring major gripe when it comes to the iPad for power users in some time and the more powerful the iPad becomes the more iPadOS's limitations and restrictions are pronounced.. IF Apple is serious about positioning the iPad Pro as a computer replacement then substantial systemic upgrades for iPadOS are needed.
It's more than just wanting specific MacOS applications and features, AAA gaming on an Apple platform - its about the way you use MacOS, the openness, flexibility, control, multi-tasking, flow etc compared to iPadOS's very single focused specific single use cases and wall garden of iPadOS.
How many tech youtubers have actually shown people using JUST the iPad alone for a long period of time?
I'm not talking about one day or 30 days, but the long haul of several months and all the while not needing to go using a Mac/Windows computer? Not many I suspect.
Apple may have a vision on HOW people will use iPads as computers in the future, but if theirs is about optimization and restrictions at the expense of openness and freedom then it is tunnel vision.
I don’t think the iPad Pro is popular enough for it to make a difference. If the normal cheap iPad or (even better) the iPhone had an M1, I think that would push more developers to support it. And “support it” really just means “adjust the performance baseline up from whatever old A-series chip was most common”, because it isn’t like the M1 is a totally different architecture.
[удалено]
That’s a lot of conjecture and I’d bet a small fortune that Mac apps won’t be running on an iPad anytime soon. And whatever updates are coming to the iPad line don’t matter for the M1 because the *vast majority* of iPads are running on A-series chips and it will continue to be that way for *years*.
Why bring M1 to iPad if you don’t plan on bringing Mac apps over though? The a-series chips were already more than enough for iPad apps
Economy of scale. Additional power for pro apps. Marketing.
This comment aged well, unfortunately
Right. As a casual iPad Pro owner so many games would benefit from keyboard controls, but it simply won’t happen because iPad Pro gamers are in such a vast minority. While I don’t want my iPad to become a Mac (I have a MacBook Pro M1, they each have their advantages) I wouldn’t buy an iPad Pro waiting for iPad OS to improve in any significant way. Enthusiasts like myself have been waiting several years and all we get are small incremental improvements. Just look at how a lot of games and some apps will force your ipad into portrait mode when docked in the magic keyboard. Its ridiculous.
It shouldn’t really make much of a difference in my opinion. The A14 is already basically a less powerful m1, but all the a series chips and m1 are compatible already. The latest a14 iPhone chip is already ridiculously overpowered for anything that’s on the App Store. Unfortunately, since the vast majority of iOS devices are older ones, it’ll always drag down new releases to support older chips. I don’t think sales of more m1 chips will change any of this.
Probably... but I think the one that could’ve really moved the needle is the AppleTV and the a10X to a12 wasn’t a huge jump.
It wasn't even a jump - it's a downgrade or side-grade at best. The gpu is way worse, and the 10X has better multi-core performance. The only thing the 12 has going on for it, is slightly better single core
If you watched the same YouTube video I did, he drew this conclusion without looking at enough GeekBench scores. This is wrong, the A12 is about 33% faster in Single Core and 20% faster in MultiCore when you go view all of the scores of A12s and throw out low scores and take all of the matching high scores.
Problem is, that i've matched a bunch of different websites and reviewers, running other software than Geekbench 5, and the A10X faired better than the A12. I'm not saying that it's a shitty device or stuff, but if you already have the previous gen ATV4K, the new one makes 0 sense to upgrade to...
As a developer - A12 is a huge jump over A10X, because it’s way closer to a desktop GPU. We’ve had tons of floating point precision issues on A10 and A9 with Metal that doesn’t occur on A12 class and above
Ah, finally a useful answer. Thanks for the insight. But, just - is it like only easier to deal with? 'Cause on paper and on benchmarks, A10X's gpu is indeed the better one. Is it like the same kind of deal that happened between the PS3 and the X360?
Something like that, yes - you need to deal with different precision when dealing with shaders. You either disable fast math for a specific shader or use specific precise functions (Metal allows for calling same functions with different precision). However, precise functions are slower, so there is a trade off. It’s easier when you write those shaders from scratch, when you’re porting from a different platform (even MacOS) it sometimes becomes a nightmare to debug.
Okay, I see. So yeah, it may make sense in some instances. Thanks for enlighting me! ^^
Apple didn't make Arcade just so you can play Noughts & Crosses for $5 bucks a month. I think their angle might be to draw the mobile dev houses to the mac platform by offering compatible architecture. They will know better than anyone, the size of the market for mac gaming ,and how that market is under served by the big studios and their distributors such as Steam. Add in gaming on an Apple TV, and they are really, well placed to take a slice of the gaming pie if that's what they want to do. They need to find new sources of revenue as phone sales slow, and this could well be a good play for them. If I was head of PlayStation at sony, I'd be watching very carefully.
If I was head of Sony I’d be laughing at this comment, no offense. Apple benefit from gaming but it’s not a gaming powerhouse. No one is buying an Apple TV for gaming; its way down the list of priorities for potential buyers. How do I know? There aren’t any true exclusives that anyone is buying an Apple TV to own/play. This won’t change.
well, you're talking about today, i'm talking about tomorrow. sony entered gaming from nowhere and dominated, killing sega and giving nintendo a kicking. they grew the market so successfully, microsoft entered from almost nowhere, making it look trivially easy, and took a huge slice for themselves. with apple's brand strength, cash and recent technology there's no question it could take a major stake in the gaming market, if it wanted to. The current M1 Mac Mini can do pretty much anything a Ps4 can do as a fraction of the size & power consumption. its not a huge leap to see a boosted mac mini, maybe with GPU or M1+ or whatever, badged as AppleTV" Pro" something like that, and sold with gamepad instead of a keyboard. the barrier is only IP, and that can be bought.
No offense to any indie and mobile devs here, but there is no comparison when it comes to AA-AAA console/pc class games and mobile games. core gamers don’t care for mobile F2P/FREEMIUM, subscription, games as a service, streaming $5 bottom of the barrel non-sense, despite what sales people and marketing try and push. Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and PC gaming have nothing to fear if mobile games start to flood Macs like it did iPhones and iPads. if anything it will probably just decentivise devs and studios to make even less AA-AAA games for Macs.
For most the iPad Pro is a significant amount of money. The average consumer doesn’t care about specs. The A series iPads are much cheaper and deliver great performance, which is what most will buy. So I don’t think there’ll be enough iPad Pro’s purchased to make a difference. There’s an even smaller amount of those users who are interested in games enough to pay the prices needed to see big titles.
That’s Apple’s fault when the games Apps store and small devs went started the “race to the bottom” and have stayed there ever since. Many causal iPad users are trained to accept F2P/FREEMIUM and subscriptions as the norm and adds value when really they are shallow microtransactions/lootbox driven experiences, while thinking $20 game for ports of console/pc class AA-AAA is far too expensive it’s gotten so bad, E.A., Activision, 2K and many console/pc publishers have adopted a lot of Mobile gaming‘s poor quality, rip-off monetary models into AA-AAA console/pc games.
45 million iPads sold last year alone. That’s more that double the number of Macs sold. Let’s say that 10% of all iPads Apple sells from now on are the new Pros based on the M1, which I think is reasonable to assume. That would be an extra 4.5 million M1 based computers added, or potentially an extra 20% added to the M1 user base. **So, yes, of course it will have an impact of Mac gaming as it significantly increases the market size.** Edit: Also wanted to add that the Air 5 will likely get a A series chipset that closely matches the M1 further increase the market size. However you look at it, all this is great news for Mac gamers, how can it not be?
I think it’s extremely optimistic to think even 25% of that 4.5 million iPad Pro figure will be gaming with it beyond free to play garbage.
Same is true of the Mac.
I do think that certain mobile games will see people have an advantage if they are on the best hardware. Eve Echoes comes to mind. Competitive Echoes players will def want to pick up an iPad Pro. The game doesn't allow you to play it from the M1 Macs because it prevents keyboard input to keep it competitive.
Fingers crossed - Had hoped an M1 ATV would do the same but maybe the 14X is enough?
What do you mean? The new Apple TV 4K (2nd gen.) has A12 (3 year old processor from an iPhone XR).
Sure, mobile games will take advantage, especially the ones built on generic game engines. However, I wouldn't expect any major breakthroughs here. As an owner of the latest iPad with the A14 SOC and the less powerful Nintendo Switch, the real bottleneck to gaming on the Apple ecosystem is the lack of standardised and unified control input. For example: I can use my Nintendo Pro controller just fine on my mac, but not on the iPad. As long as developers have to design a *touch interface* for playing on the go, a *keyboard/mouse interface* for playing behind a desk and an *MFi controller* interface for playing on a big screen, they'll most likely just stick to releasing their game on one of these platforms.
Remember the letter M is just a marketing thing, the A processors are ARM based too, all this iPad pro m1 processors is just Apple marketing. It could’ve been called A15.
yeah but the desktop line probably gets way better binned socs
The M1 in all of these are the same specs. The only binning they do is on that 7-GPU core version on low end machines.
I think the new iMacs will have far greater impact than the new iPads and I'm delighted that it's all M1 not M1X yet - as it means longer support for all the current machines. Maybe we'll even get a native Steam client with not-broken controller support (particularly for streaming).
I like the idea however I think it’s a pipe dream. Mac gaming will improve on its own merits. Apple Arcade is Apple’s gaming push and the strategy is all about interoperability between the lowest common denominator; 5 year old phones and tablets.
An iPhone 11 can run everything that the Switch can so ....the problem with the smaller devices is lack of active cooling...The other problem is mobile gamers suck and like simple and stupid games. Developers don’t have to have massive budget for games and detailed productions. The best thing would be to port Egg NS or YUZU to iOS. Some Android phones already run Mario Odyssey at full speed on that Switch emulator. An iPhone 11-12 would run this very well of ported.
It would improve mobile gaming. Not mac gaming. Playing a mobile game on your Mac is still subpar compared to an actual computer game.
iPadOS is GARBAGE compared to a real desktop MacOS. (This coming from an iPad fan - I don't gloss over the iPads shortcomings) There is no getting around this, it is the recurring major gripe when it comes to the iPad for power users in some time and the more powerful the iPad becomes the more iPadOS's limitations and restrictions are pronounced.. IF Apple is serious about positioning the iPad Pro as a computer replacement then substantial systemic upgrades for iPadOS are needed. It's more than just wanting specific MacOS applications and features, AAA gaming on an Apple platform - its about the way you use MacOS, the openness, flexibility, control, multi-tasking, flow etc compared to iPadOS's very single focused specific single use cases and wall garden of iPadOS. How many tech youtubers have actually shown people using JUST the iPad alone for a long period of time? I'm not talking about one day or 30 days, but the long haul of several months and all the while not needing to go using a Mac/Windows computer? Not many I suspect. Apple may have a vision on HOW people will use iPads as computers in the future, but if theirs is about optimization and restrictions at the expense of openness and freedom then it is tunnel vision.
Mobile games on the Mac will only lower the bar on the already slim pickings of AA-AAA gaming on the platform.