Comment by funimpoded
17 hours ago
That might make room for Apple to finally try. The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go. Most of what's missing is a first-party controller and a marketing push. Disk space is tight, too, I guess. Still, they're most of the way to having a horse in the race, if they want to.
I reckon a successful launch of the Steam box (or whatever they're calling it) with its enormous library could develop into something that really challenges what's left of Microsoft's piece of the console market (and threaten Sony a little, for that matter) though it's looking like the memory shortage is gonna kneecap that by forcing the price too high. Bad timing.
>The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go
What benchmarks are you talking about? CPU-wise the A15 Bionic just barely beats the Ryzen 3700X in single-core and gets absolutely destroyed in multi-core (Geekbench). As for the GPU, the Radeon RX 7600 (closest thing I can find to a "modern console") does >10x the TFLOPS in FP32.
The only reason why they look like they're "in a similar tier" in ported games is because the A15 Bionic is usually tested on 5-6" screens that can be upscaled from 360p without any measurable loss in visual quality, with a massive downgrade in model and texture quality for the same reason. The only modern console the Apple TV "may be" similar to is the Switch 1
Apple is fundamentally incompatible with "serious" gaming. Games are largely not regular software platforms which receive endless updates and maintenance. Every few years Apple makes a breaking change and expects every app to update or break, which is fine for Photoshop and electron apps, but most games just end up unplayable. This happened when Apple killed 32 bit support and tons of games that used to work on Mac never worked again.
It doesn't seem like a market they have any interest in. The real money is in mobile slop games with micro transactions.
I use Steam Link on my AppleTV which lets me play games on my PC. It works great as long as the game works well with a PS5 controller (and lots of them do).
I dont want a locked down living room, not from apple nor anybody else (but everybody else uses open standards so not really possible).
Simply no, thank you.
That’s… the game console market. Even the NES in the ‘80s tried to lock out unauthorized (by Nintendo) software. When the screen flashes over and over on boot, that’s the lockout chip not seeing what it expects (due to a poor connection, usually, if it’s a cartridge that should work). Though I hear the latest Xbox is notably more open than the norm, and of course a living-room PC from Valve would buck that trend entirely.
The Apple TV 4k is nowhere near a PS5 in performance
> The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go
[citation needed]