In the past, if you wanted to play PC games, you needed to buy a Windows PC (or build a Linux PC if you were brave). Although you might have loved to buy a Mac, you can’t game on them, right? Well, judging from Apple’s “Scary Fast” event today, that isn’t true anymore. For the first time, Apple focused much of its promotional energy on positioning its newest Macs as gaming powerhouses.
Of course, for a Mac to be seen as a truly viable gaming PC, it needs support from developers. But Apple took time to highlight more than a few games running on Macs, including Baldur’s Gate 3, which runs natively on Apple silicon. Could this be the first significant step the company makes towards becoming not just a productivity PC company but a gaming PC company?
It does have a new starting price, though. Since the previous 14-inch MacBook Pro started with an M2 Pro processor, it landed at $1,999. The M3-powered 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,599, which gives it a bit more affordability at the expense of performance. Unfortunately (and this is where Mac fans will get mad), this $1,599 model does not come in Space Black. To get that new color, you’ll need to spend at least $1,999 on the M3 Pro model with 512GB of internal storage. The sole 14-inch model with an M3 Max costs $3,199.
As with the new MacBook Pros, the updated 24-inch iMac is very similar to the previous model outside of its new silicon. Because of the new silicon, though, it now supports up to 24GB of unified memory. The previous model with an M1 processor only supported up to 8GB of unified memory, so this is a nice perk. Confusingly, though, Apple is not yet offering an iMac with this much unified memory. All the options cap out at 8GB, at least for now.
This content was originally published here.
