By Dan Moren

April 18, 2024 8:20 AM PT

Apple’s emulator about-face is good for everyone

Less than two weeks after Apple changed its rules on emulators, Riley Testut’s Delta game emulator climbed to the number one spot in the U.S. App Store within twelve hours of its launch. If Testut’s names sounds familiar it’s because he’s also the purveyor of the recently launched Alt Store PAL, the first third-party app marketplace in the European Union, enabled by the Digital Markets Act.

On Mastodon, MacStories’s John Voorhees described Delta’s success as “what pent up demand looks like.”

I’d go further and say it’s not pent-up but penned up. This wasn’t merely a case of waiting for a company to release a product it hadn’t gotten to yet—like when Apple released the iPhone 6 amid desire for a larger phone—but of a product that was actively withheld as a matter of policy. Nothing technical prevented Delta from running on iOS three weeks ago, or even three years ago. (To that point: Delta was already available for those iOS users who wanted to engage in the necessary circumventions.) Apple had merely decided, as a matter of policy, not to allow emulators on the App Store for its own reasons.¹

The reversal was less capricious: with the launch of third-party marketplaces in the EU, of which the previously mentioned Alt Store PAL (with Delta as its marquee offering) is at the forefront, Apple is attempting to neutralize one of the biggest advantages of those competitors. Emulators like Delta are often used as an example of something that Apple wouldn’t allow in its own stores that third-party marketplaces could offer instead. There’s probably no other category of apps that replaces it in that regard.² With emulators now available on the App Store worldwide, it will be interesting to see if there’s anything else that draws users towards third-party stores in Europe.

One view of this is that Apple allowing for emulators on its platform is competitive. And that’s true…but it’s equally true that it was dragged kicking and screaming into this competition by outside forces.

Think different, compete better

Last week, I wrote that the change of Apple’s policy was that regulation—or the threat of regulation—works. My pal John Gruber suggested that should be revised to “regulation can work” or “regulation sometimes works”. That seems to me to go without saying: not all regulation is good or implemented well any more than all business decisions are. But let me take my own shot at revising my thesis: regulation—or, more broadly, the existence of regulatory bodies—is necessary.

There are those who think that all problems in business should be solved by the market, as though envisioning a mano-a-mano, no-holds-barred, winner-take-all cage match between corporations.

But this specific case of emulators would seem to point out the shortcomings of that view. Clearly, there was plenty of demand for emulation apps—take Delta’s success as evidence—but Apple steadfastly refused to meet that demand by allowing for supply. It didn’t do so until essentially forced into it by regulatory changes in the European Union.³ Without that change, the chances that Apple would have eventually made the decision on its own is vanishingly small.⁴

One of John’s recurring points is that Apple is consistent: “Apple’s own needs first, users second, developers third.” An astute observation, if not particularly surprising for any profit-seeking corporation, but this situation also makes clear that no amount of combined demand from users or developers will outweigh Apple’s own needs. What makes the emulator situation particularly strange is that offering them on the App Store doesn’t actually seem to hurt Apple at all—and probably even helps it, given the evident popularity of the category. This is the rare situation that’s good for everybody.⁵

This is why the existence of regulatory bodies and use of regulation, even if it isn’t always universally good or correct, is a necessity to get the best out of competition—to keep the system honest, the playing field level. Checks and balances are just as important for business as for a system of government, and the bigger and more powerful companies get, the even more important it is.

Recent comparisons of Apple to Boeing may not be entirely apt, but here’s one place where I think there is some similarity: Boeing operates in an industry where it is (in the U.S. at least) the market share leader, and together with its largest rival, Airbus, dominates the field as an effective duopoly. As of 2018, the two manufacturers accounted for about two-thirds of all commercial airlines in use in the U.S.; those numbers go even higher if you’re talking about just larger airplanes like jumbo jets—or perhaps we could call them “performance aircraft.” I don’t think anybody would argue that Boeing’s in need of less regulation.

Or, if I can be permitted another analogy, much as we get mad at the umpires for bad calls, they’re on the field to keep the teams honest and to provide impartial accountability. John and I would probably both find a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees without any umpires to be entertaining, but I’m not sure either of us believe it would show off the real spirit of competition.⁶

The success of Delta illustrates that perhaps it’s time for both Apple and the App Store to evolve. Despite our fond memories of the team that once hoisted a pirate flag over its campus, a trillion-dollar corporation is not a bunch of maverick upstarts. The idea of Tim Cook putting up the Jolly Roger on the roof of Apple Park⁷ is not only risible in the extreme, but displays a lack of self-awareness for the current state of affairs. Let’s not root for Apple to win—let’s root for Apple to do better.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Dan Moren

April 11, 2024 8:56 AM PT

Want Apple to change? Regulation works.

Lately you can’t throw a digital camera without hitting a story on the various regulatory and legal challenges Apple’s been facing. While some have decried these actions as interference in the internal operations of a company, there’s one salient detail that I think those opinions often overlook.

Regulation works.

Here are just a handful of examples from the past few months of Apple changing its policies due to regulations—or, in some cases, the mere threat of regulation:

• In January, Apple announced that it would now allow developers of game streaming apps to submit a single app containing the entire game catalog. That had previously been a sticking point for Microsoft bringing Xbox Game Pass to the platform in 2020—and, as we later found out, was one of the areas of concern in the antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice just a couple months later.

• Late last week, Apple changed another of its longstanding App Store rules by allowing “retro game console emulator apps”. Interestingly, one of the only other announced third-party marketplaces coming to the EU is AltStore, the marquee title in which will be Delta, a Nintendo emulator developed by AltStore proprietor Riley Testut.

• Just today, Apple announced that it would it relax rules around used parts for repairing iPhones. Apple’s Self Service Repair program, which was put into place to comply with Right to Repair legislation passed in some states, launched in 2021. But critics pointed out that Apple’s initial foray still required a restrictive “parts pairing” process that made third-party repairs more limited and more expensive, and Oregon recently made a law that bans the approach. Today’s change effectively undoes that process, though it does still include provisions to prevent stolen parts from being used.

None of this even takes into account the massive changes made to iOS as the result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which may already be resulting in consumer changes.

Apple is unquestionably a behemoth in the technology industry, one of a handful that dominate our lives. And while there are places that those companies butt up against each other and compete, it’s also apparent that corporations of this size are not subject to the same degrees of competition that much smaller players might be. Their core businesses are relatively stable, even if they skirmish around the edges: Apple and Amazon can, for example, squabble over the (relatively small) market of smart home speakers, but Apple’s no more likely to come up with a killer retail site that unseats Amazon than Amazon is to make a world-class smartphone.¹

More to the point, these handful of tech companies are so large that the chances of being upset, or even threatened, by small upstarts is vanishingly small. (And in the rare cases where it might happen, it’s a simple matter for the large companies to simply acquire the smaller ones.)

That means the only entities powerful enough to impose any sort of pushback against the companies are government bodies.² Apple details this in its annual 10-K filing, which lays out risk factors to the company’s business. One entire heading in that section is “Legal and Regulatory Compliance Risks”, which includes the follow sub-heading:

The Company is subject to complex and changing laws and regulations worldwide, which exposes the Company to potential liabilities, increased costs and other adverse effects on the Company’s business.

The simple fact is that, without some sort of threat, Apple was never going to change any of its business practices, because there was absolutely no reason to do so. Apple would happily have never offered a self-service repair program or allowed emulators or changed its policies about game streaming—we know because there were literally years of people asking for these changes without the company lifting a finger—until governments got involved.

It’s not just Apple, either. Broadband companies weren’t about to start giving customers clearer and more accessible information about their plans without regulatory intervention from the FCC.

The absence of meaningful challenges breeds complacency. And complacency leads to the temptation to collect increasing revenue without corresponding innovation because, well, it sure is a lot easier, isn’t?

Much as some might pooh-pooh government intervention in the market, these regulatory and legal threats are ultimately efficacious because Apple ended up changing its behavior. In some cases, it may take months or years for the impacts on the consumer to be felt—and, in some cases, as detractors point out, it may not happen at all if users decide they don’t want these capabilities or alternatives. And you know what? That’s totally fine—because then it’s users choosing to stick with the status quo, as opposed to having no other option than the one that they’re given.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Dan Moren

March 26, 2024 10:19 AM PT

Apple announces WWDC 2024 takes place June 10-14

It’s that time of year, when young developers’ fancies turn to thoughts of platform updates. Probably because Apple has announced the dates for its 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, which will take place between June 10 and 14.

As with last year, the event will happen both online and in person with a special “all-day event” taking place at Apple Park on Monday, June 10. Those in attendance will be able to watch the keynote—presumably led by CEO Tim Cook—at Apple Park, as well as meet with Apple team members, and join in for some “special activities.” Those interested in participating in person can apply for one of the limited slots available.

Apple’s also once again offering a separate track for students via the Swift Student Challenge; those who have applied will be notified on March 28, and will then be able to apply to join the festivities at Apple Park.

Rumor has it that this year’s platform updates will be amongst the biggest in some time, including a big push in generative AI. But Apple will also be holding the event against the backdrop of challenges from its recent legal troubles in both the European Union and the US.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Dan Moren

March 25, 2024 7:01 AM PT

EC investigates Apple and other tech gatekeepers over DMA compliance

Europe’s Digital Markets Act continues to be the gift that keeps on giving—a gift Apple probably wishes it could return. The European Commission today announced that it was opening a slew of investigations into big tech companies over their non-compliance with the DMA, including Alphabet, Meta, and Apple.

Apple, in particular, has found itself in the crosshairs for three different areas. First, that the company may have put too many restrictions on developers who want to steer customers outside of the App Store. (Apple recently relaxed those rules, including ditching mandatory design templates.)

Secondly, in the area of user choice, the EC is concerned Apple has not done enough to allow users to choose what software is installed on their phone. That includes the ability to uninstall built-in apps, change default app settings, and provide screens allowing users to choose between alternatives. The EC’s announcement particularly calls out the browser choice screen, though it doesn’t specifically details its concerns beyond saying it “may be preventing users from truly exercising their choice of services within the Apple ecosystem.” The screen currently shows up when users first launch Safari on iOS and provides a list of the eleven most popular browsers in the region, in random order. However, Apple does impose some restrictions on what it takes to be included in that list, including a requirement that the app has been downloaded 5000 times in the EU over the past calendar year.

Finally, and perhaps most contentiously, the EC says that it is investigating the fee structure of Apple’s new business model in the EU, saying that it “may be defeating the purpose of its obligations under Article 6(4) of the DMA.” That decision was hinted at this past week by Margrethe Vestager, the executive vice president in charge of competition policy, when she said in an interview with Reuters “if the new Apple fee structure will de facto not make it in any way attractive to use the benefits of the DMA. That kind of thing is what we will be investigating.” This also comes on the heels of an EU-Apple workshop about the DMA last week, during which developer and AltStore proprietor Riley Testut asked Apple representatives how they would protect creators of free apps if those apps went viral, putting them on the hook for Apple’s new Core Technology Fee. Apple’s Kyle Andeer said the company was likewise concerned and that it was “something we’re working on,” though no further information has been provided.

These investigations aren’t going to be speedy: the EC says they will be concluded within 12 months, at which point the body will tell the companies what changes if any need to be made. The companies may also be subject to fines of up to 10 percent of annual global revenue, or 20 percent in cases of “repeated infringement.”

Apple, for its part, said in a statement provided to several outlets, including The Verge: “We’re confident our plan complies with the DMA, and we’ll continue to constructively engage with the European Commission as they conduct their investigations.”

Dan’s take

The DMA and the EC are clearly proving to be a thorn in Apple’s side. Despite the company trying to get ahead of these kinds of issues, apparently its attempts to do the minimum needed to comply weren’t quite enough. The specific issues over anti-steering policies and user choice are certainly annoyances, but seem like issues that can be tweaked by Apple without serious impacts to the company.

But the big risk here is the investigation into the fee structure. Big companies like Meta and Spotify seem unlikely to ever have used Apple’s new business terms as proposed: they would go from paying Apple nothing under the current App Store terms to paying Apple quite a bit—a scenario that Apple wins either way. While those companies might want more control over the distribution and monetization of their apps, they’re not going to do so at the literal expense of millions of euros. Likewise, while small developers might find the new terms comparatively more attractive, especially for types of apps that will never get approved by Apple, the risk of “hitting it big” and triggering the CTF could likewise be too high. And though Apple opened up the avenue for web distribution, the strictures it put on place as to who is allowed to use the feature—such as a calendar year threshold of one million downloads—certainly limits a lot of small developers. While that last isn’t specifically mentioned by the EC, I have a hard time imagining it’s not part of the overall investigation into the fee structure.

The real challenge for Apple will be in trying to figure out what changes it can make in the near term to both avoid the heavy end of the EC’s hammer and dodge further pitfalls along the way. Gee, sure is tough when your business is entirely subject to the whims of a seemingly capricious organization who won’t tell you exactly what rules you need to follow, isn’t it?

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Dan Moren

March 18, 2024 4:46 PM PT

Apple’s still thinking about the Core Technology Fee in Europe

Developer Steve Troughton-Smith watched all of today’s workshop between Apple and the EU on the Digital Markets Act and posted some highlights on Mastodon.

Of particular interest was an exchange between Apple’s representatives and Riley Testut, the developer of AltStore, an existing third-party places to get apps for jailbroken iPhones. Testut has already announced that AltStore will be available as a third-party app marketplace in Europe under the DMA. I’ll embed the post with the video below because it’s worth watching, but 9to5Mac has transcribed it as well.

During the workshop, Testut used his time to ask about the Core Technology Fee. Under Apple’s new business terms in Europe (required for apps looking to be distributed via non-Apple app marketplaces or the web), there’s a €0.50 fee per app install over the first million. Testut rightly points out that a free app, such as the one he made in high school, that becomes popular could easily accrue enough costs to ruin a young developer’s life.

Apple VP of Legal Kyle Andeer responded sympathetically, saying that the company is continuing to try and find a good solution, and to “stay tuned.”

Obviously, we’ve already seen plenty of alterations in Apple’s original DMA plans, including the late addition of Web Distribution, but this certainly seems to suggest that further changes are coming.

The CTF has been a point of contention amongst developers; it certainly provides a potential disincentive for those looking to distribute apps outside the App Store—especially in cases where those apps derive revenue from other places, such as subscriptions not available via in-app purchase or advertising. (And yes, to be clear, that is exactly why Apple is putting that fee in place.)¹

But free apps in particular seem to be the biggest sticking point. When the App Store debuted with the commission model, it was a relatively simple matter to say that if an app made no revenue, then Apple charged the developer nothing. But not all free apps are created equal, as the boom for in-app ads and subscription services have shown. That’s a bed of Apple’s own making, but it shouldn’t be surprising the company is trying to course correct to close those loopholes—that same impetus has been at the heart of a lot of its questionable App Store policy decisions over the past decade-plus.

Still, apps that are completely free—including open-source apps—certainly don’t seem like they should be subject to the Core Technology Fee. The question, from Apple’s perspective, is how to police that? What about, say, an app that’s distributed for free outside the App Store but has a big Patreon community that brings in a lot of money?

That in turn leads to the root of the question: does Apple deserve to get a cut of apps not distributed from its marketplace? There’s no arguing that the company has benefited from the huge ecosystem of software available for its devices, especially the iPhone. And as the CTF is currently structured, it could very well lead to a chilling effect amongst young developers who can’t risk the downsides—a category of people who Apple has made a big deal of specifically championing

I’m skeptical the entire CTF will end up discarded, but I do suspect that there will be additional carve-outs to come, especially for free/open-source apps (or perhaps Apple will greatly increase the amount of installs before the CTF is triggered, thus even more specifically targeting its biggest rivals). It’s been almost a week since the last changes, so keep your eyes peeled to see if a new batch is incoming.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Dan Moren

March 12, 2024 12:23 PM PT

Apple adds Web Distribution for iOS apps in EU, loosens other restrictions

It’s been a seismic few weeks for Apple in the European Union, and the company’s approach to distributing iOS apps continues to evolve. On Tuesday, Apple announced a few further changes to its rules, all of which stand to make significant changes to the marketplace for iOS apps. Let’s break them down.

One-stop developer shop

When Apple initially announced third-party app marketplaces on iOS in Europe, one restriction it put in place was that a company could not create a store that featured only its own apps. If Meta or Epic wanted to build a third-party app store, it would have to offer software from any developer that essentially met its criteria.

But that restriction has now been abolished. Which means that if a company wants to gather all its apps in a third-party store, thus reducing its dependance on Apple and avoiding the company’s 30-percent cut, that’s now a possibility. (Granted any extremely popular apps, such as Meta’s, would likely trigger Apple’s new Core Technology Fee.) I’m sure that Meta, Google, and some other large tech companies are doing the math right now to figure out if this new rule works in their favor or not.

An external link’s awakening

One element of Apple’s business practices that has gotten a lot of attention worldwide is its restrictions on apps linking out to the developer’s site in order to offer discounts or promotions. (The company’s harshest restrictions on those external links have gotten them in legal hot water in the U.S. and elsewhere, leading to some relaxing of terms.)

Previously, apps in the EU would have had to adhere to Apple-provided templates in order to provide links out. These templates carefully controlled the way such links would look and where they would appear.

But Apple has now demoted those templates from requirements to optional guidelines, allowing developers to fully choose for themselves where and how they link to their own sites. There’s obviously benefits to that for developers who don’t want to be told where and when to put their links, though it remains to be seen how users will feel if apps start to abuse this ability by getting in people’s faces.

A tangled web

The biggest change that Apple enacted is the addition of Web Distribution, coming later this spring. For the first time, this lets developers distribute apps outside a store for the first time, directly via the web.

If you’re saying “whoa, whoa, wait a minute, that sounds like sideloading“, well, you’re not wrong, but before you get too carried away, I’ll point out that developers need to jump through a number of hoops before Apple will allowed them access to this feature.

Those include being in the Apple Developer Program in the EU, having had two years of tenure within the program, and having an app with “more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.” Additional strictures include only offering apps from your developer account, corresponding with Apple about safety and security issues, publishing your data collection policies, and other legal and governmental compliance.

So not just anybody is going to be able to slap together a website and put their iOS apps up for download. Apple’s trying to do something similar to what it’s done with third-party app marketplaces, providing some degree of assurance that users aren’t going to be hit by bad actors and that entities providing web distribution will be able to handle customer service, user privacy, and so on. Apps distributed via the web will still require notarization by Apple and can only be installed from a limited number of domains provided by the developer.

These rules also mean that many small and independent developers likely won’t be able to opt in to web distribution—that one million threshold is still pretty high. Do those shops deserve to be restricted from developing their apps on the web? It’ll be interesting to see if those rules stick.

Times they are changing

Web distribution does seem to open up another avenue for developers of a certain level, but it’s still certainly different from the wide-open nature of the Mac, where apps have been distributed on the web forever, with very little (if any) oversight by Apple.

In terms of why those disparities between macOS and iOS app distribution exist, Apple points to its recently issued security whitepaper. One of the company’s big arguments is that our phones are much more personal devices, carrying everything from our bank info to our health data, and protecting them is even more important than on the Mac. And the company sees the decided lack of widespread malware incidents on iOS under the App Store-only distribution as evidence of its success.

That said, while the Mac has been subject to more malware than iOS in recent years, it still remains a pretty secure platform overall.

Of course, we’ve already seen numerous changes to Apple’s DMA rules in just the last couple weeks, and there’s no telling what further alterations might happen as the rubber meets the road. It’s difficult to put legislation this large into effect without adapting it as you go.

Apple, for its part, says that it’s taking into account feedback from developers and other stakeholders. That presumably includes the European Commission, which certainly has a vested interest in the process.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Dan Moren

March 8, 2024 10:16 AM PT

Epic’s App Store developer account restored in Europe once again

This week has been a heck of a roller coaster for Epic. After the game-maker’s Sweden branch reportedly had its developer account restored so that the company could launch its alternative app marketplace in Europe, the company was subsequently banned again by Apple. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney posted the exchange with Apple’s Phil Schiller, as well as the ensuing message from Apple’s lawyers saying that Epic would not be allowed to have a developer account in the EU.

But now Epic’s been returned to the App Store again, due in some part to an intervention from the European Commission, with Sweeney saying “a swift inquiry” led to Apple agreeing to reinstate Epic’s account.

The DMA went through its first major challenge with Apple banning Epic Games Sweden from competing with the App Store, and the DMA just had its first major victory. Following a swift inquiry by the European Commission, Apple notified the Commission and Epic that it would relent…

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) March 8, 2024

Apple, for its part, issued a terse statement, saying only, “Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our DMA policies. As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple Developer Program.”¹

This whole series of shenanigans has been an own goal by Apple, which seems to have largely taken issue with Sweeney’s criticisms of how Cupertino changed its rules to accommodate Europe’s Digital Markets Act. It doesn’t really end up looking great for Apple, which now seems both petty and ineffective. Just another reminder that optics are important.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Dan Moren

March 7, 2024 12:17 PM PT

Europe gives Apple a chance to change its tune…but will it?

Here’s a ruling that isn’t music to Apple’s ears: the European Commission this week levied a fine of $2 billion against the company for violating antitrust regulations in the EU, specifically in terms of the distribution of music streaming apps.

Apple, unsurprisingly, was not happy, issuing a scathing rebuke of the kind rarely seen since the days of former CEO Steve Jobs. That missive insists that the EU found “no evidence of consumer harm” and “no evidence of anti-competitive behavior,” arguing that the digital music market in Europe is stronger than its ever been, in large part thanks to the App Store.

Arguments about this will be continuing ad infinitum, not least of all because the company is appealing the decision. But it’s worth taking a look at Apple’s response from a couple different viewpoints.

Continue reading “Europe gives Apple a chance to change its tune…but will it?”…

By Dan Moren

March 4, 2024 5:34 AM PT

Apple updates 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air with M3 chips, support for two external displays

If you’ve been keeping your powder dry for Apple’s most popular laptop models to get its latest processors, well, time to light that candle. The company announced on Monday that it has updated its MacBook Air line with M3 processors, bringing not only faster performance but also a much desired new capability: support for two external displays.

The new 13-inch model comes in three basic configurations: all three feature an 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. While the $1099 base configuration includes an 8-core GPU and 256GB of storage, the $1299 and $1499 versions include a 10-core graphics processor and a 512GB SSD—you can get up to 2TB of storage on any model. Just to mix it up a bit, the two lower configurations start with 8GB of memory, compared to the highest model’s 16GB—all are configurable with up to 24GB of memory at max.

Meanwhile, the 15-inch model also comes in three configurations, though all use the same 8-core GPU/10-core GPU configuration. As with the 13-inch version, the lower two models both includes 8GB of memory with the highest offering 16GB and the higher two configurations have 512GB SSDs with the lowest having only a 256GB.

There should be very little surprise about these options, given that they mimic the same versions of the M3 chip found in the latest version of Apple’s iMac, including the 16 core Neural Engine, hardware ray tracing, and 100GB/s memory bandwidth.

Where they do differ is one place that many vocal users have been upset: the new M3 models not only support an external display at up to 6K resolution but now also support a second external display at up to 5K resolution…if you close the MacBook Air lid. While that may not appease all critics of the display limitations, it’s likely to make many users happy.

The only other change is the addition of Wi-Fi 6E (aka 802.11ax), which offers better performance. Otherwise, specs—including size, weight, and available colors—are unchanged across the line.

There’s one last footnote, though: in true Apple fashion, the 13-inch M2 Air has been kept around to hit that sub-$1000 price point. For $999 you can get a 8-core CPU/8-core GPU model with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage; there’s also an $1199 configuration with the 8-core CPU/10-core GPU model with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. That means there’s effectively a configuration at every $100 interval, so you can buy as much MacBook as you need. The M1 Air, meanwhile, has shuffled off this mortal coil, bidding adieu to its Intel-era design.

All models are available for order today and will ship this Friday. The company also announced a new assortment of Silicone iPhone cases and a refresh of Apple Watch bands as it generally does in the spring.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Dan Moren

February 28, 2024 2:22 PM PT

To embrace gaming, Apple needs to level up its game porting toolkit

Aa a longtime Mac user, I’m just as aware of the platform’s limitations as I am its strengths. Chief among those limitations is—and has been for many years— gaming. Personally, though I played my fair share of Mac games throughout my teens and college years, I haven’t been an avid Mac gamer for a couple decades, first leaving for the greener pastures of PC gaming and then, eventually, the simpler world of consoles.

That’s why I found last year so interesting. Not only did Apple spend some significant time talking the talk about games with the release of its M2 Pro and Max chips and how good they were for gaming, but it even walked the walk with the WWDC release of its game porting toolkit.

As this year’s annual platform updates grow closer, Mac users are left wondering whether this is another flash in the pan from a company that has historically never gotten games, or if Apple might instead be poised to demonstrate that its commitment is more than just lip service.

Coming into port

Last summer I tried giving the game porting toolkit a whirl on my M1 MacBook Air, which was then running the required macOS Sonoma beta. At the time installing the toolkit meant following a series of technical instructions, involving no small amount of command line work. Though I’m no stranger to spending time in Terminal, I ultimately didn’t even manage to get to the point of firing up a game.

This week, though, I noticed that one of the classic games of my teen years, Star Wars: Dark Forces¹, had gotten the remastered treatment. That updated version was available for many of the consoles, as well as for Windows…but not for the Mac.

An updated version of a many years-old game seemed like ideal pickings for another stab at Apple’s toolkit: the gameplay wouldn’t be very demanding, but would also no doubt highlight any shortcomings in Apple’s technology.

What a difference eight months makes. That’s in no small part due to Whisky, an app that wraps both Wine, the tool that translates Windows API calls to their Unix-like equivalents, and Apple’s game porting toolkit into one very friendly interface. That removes pretty much all of the work out of the process, to the point where all I had to do was download Whisky and drag it into my Applications folder. It installed all the necessary under-the-hood software, leaving me with nothing but time on my hands.

So I grabbed the standalone installer for Dark Forces that I’d purchased from GOG.com² and simply ran it. Less than ten minutes later, I was running around blasting pixelated stormtroopers.³ I even connected the Xbox controller I keep in my office and it worked seamlessly, with no additional setup (I was surprised to see that even Dark Forces‘s in-game UI knew I was using an Xbox controller and changed to reflect that).

The only issue I ran into was that the MIDI sound stuttered somewhat—all the sounds and music were intelligible, just with this additional audio artifact. Some digging around suggested workarounds involving replacement DLLs, which I gave a half-hearted shot at but had no luck.⁴

The once and future king of Mac gaming

Windows gaming on the Mac is hardly new: over the years enthusiasts have used tools ranging from Apple’s Boot Camp to emulators like Parallels and VMware Fusion to translators like Wine and CrossOver to finagle PC games into running on Mac hardware. But all of those solutions were cumbersome to different degrees and served to alienate the people who just wanted playing games to be as simple as everything else on the Mac—nobody wants to hear that games work great if you just install these four pieces of software and tweak endless settings.

Apple’s said that its game porting toolkit is designed specifically for developers, to help them enable running their titles on the Mac. The idea being that it takes care of a certain base-level compatibility—to make sure titles are optimized and run well, companies have to put in some time.

What I wonder is just how well that’s paid off. There certainly hasn’t been an explosion in Mac gaming in the past several months, though, to be fair, games have long development timelines and large shops are probably not about to throw caution to the winds and embrace the Mac after all these years.

But has Apple done everything it can? I think the company’s only fighting half the battle here. The Mac has always suffered from a chicken-and-egg gaming problem: developers don’t want to commit resources to making games for a platform because there aren’t enough customers there; but the reason there aren’t enough customers is because there aren’t enough games.

The game porting toolkit attacks the developer side of the equation, but only brushes up against the other side: consumers.

If Apple really wants to jumpstart gaming on the Mac, it should bake the underlying technologies of the game porting toolkit directly into the system. Make installing and running a PC game as easy as if it were a Mac native title.

Are there risks with this approach? Definitely. As I mentioned, the audio in my version of Dark Forces was sub-par and, from what I can see online, these kinds of edge cases are not uncommon. It’s not hard to imagine blame being leveled at Apple’s hardware and software for “not being up to the task” when the truth is that the titles simply need some extra care and attention to play at their best. Whisky already does a good job of trying to package in a lot of the ancillary software that can help make the right tweaks; there’s no reason Apple couldn’t apply a similar approach.

In the end, I’d argue that the potential benefits outweigh the risks: running PC games on the Mac at all is a pretty big coup, to say nothing of them running pretty well. If Apple’s really worried about a bad experience reflecting poorly on its products, it can throw up a splash screen disclaimer—come on, you guys love splash screen disclaimers!

The more demand from folks who are willing to play their games on the Mac, the better the chance that developers will be willing to at least invest the time to make sure their titles run well. And if that ends up being a gateway to making games that run natively on the Mac, well, then, mission accomplished. As impressive as Apple’s tools are, just chucking them at developers and expecting them to jump at the chance of being on the Mac doesn’t cut it.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]