Apple's reportedly working on three new Macs — updated laptops and a desktop (the exact models weren't specified) — for launch this year, according to Bloomberg.

Apr 19, 2019  I had the 6-core one with D700's and it was pants as a gaming platform. Even in bootcamp. A new 27' iMac with the Vega 48 would probably be your best bet, but even then you might need to drop the resolution a bit. If that isn't good enough, then it's a Hackintosh with a. Mar 28, 2019 With an Intel 8th-gen Coffee Lake processor and Intel UHD Graphics 630 integrated card, the new Mac Mini is capable of decent gaming. It can run DiRT Rally at a good 46 FPS but it struggles running the graphically intensive Rise of the Tomb Raider at only 16 FPS. So, is the Mac Mini good for gaming?

New Macs shouldn't surprise anyone. All of Apple's Macs are due for an update and the company already told us a new Mac Pro will arrive by the end of the year.

Righting misfires like the Touch Bar and flat keyboard on the MacBook Pro are two easy wins, but the most exciting new feature for this year's Macs could be something people will never see at all: a co-processor.

SEE ALSO: Why Apple's upcoming iPhone battery update is a bad idea

Most computers come with a single processor (also called CPU) made by either Intel or AMD. The processor is the brain that controls all of the other parts of the computer and handles all of its instructions.

The more powerful the processor, the more computing power you have. In a nutshell: You want a really powerful processor because you can crunch more things at once.

But as we've all learned from the Spectre and Meltdown exploits, a single processor also means a single point of attack through which your device could be compromised.

This is where a co-processor could make all the difference.

Since 2016, Apple has slowly added secondary co-processors into some of its computers. The revamped MacBook Pro has a 'T1' chip that controls the Touch Bar, the Secure Enclave that securely encrypts and decrypts a user's Touch ID fingerprint data, and also the microphone and FaceTime HD camera.

And last year, with the iMac Pro, Apple went even further. The iMac Pro has a 'T2' chip that, in addition to controlling the microphone and FaceTime camera, is responsible for securely booting it up — the chip checks to see if macOS has been tampered in any way before letting the Intel processor take over — and encrypting the data that's stored on its internal solid-state drive storage.

It's all really, really techie and nerdy stuff that most people will never need to think about. But it all adds up to a much more secure computer that keeps hackers away.

A co-processor on Apple's Macs could also pave the way for

Face ID

to arrive on the platform.

But security isn't the only benefit a co-processor would bring to new Macs. For MacBooks, battery life could improve significantly. In the same way that Apple gets more battery life out of iPhones without increasing battery capacity by offloading accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass data processing to motion co-processors, MacBooks could see battery improvements if the main processor isn't constantly firing up to control less important background tasks.

Basically, by splitting up tasks between two processors — an Intel one for the heavy-hittings Macs could also pave the way for Face ID to arrive on the platform. On the iMac Pro, the T2 chip already controls the FaceTime camera.

Here's how it works according to according to Macworld:

Like its cousin processors that drive the iPhone, the T2 has an Apple-designed image signal processor that detects faces in order to properly set exposure and white balance, dynamically adjusts exposure, and a whole lot more—all in the service of producing a better image, just like what happens when you shoot photos or video with your iPhone.

With the T2 already packing this kind of intelligence borrowed from iOS devices, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine a newer, more powerful Mac co-processor that borrows from the iPhone X.

Windows 10 already has Hello sign-in, which lets users log into their computers with their face. If Apple were to include Face ID login on a Mac, it'd do so only if it could make it extremely secure. A co-processor would be the only way Apple would do it.

Are New Macs Good For Gaming Computer

It's easy to get caught up in new features you can see and compare to previous models such as the screen, ports, and keyboard. But maybe it's time we appreciate the inner beauty that's actually working to protect us.

Gaming on the Mac is terrible, right? That has been the consensus among gamers for a decade-plus—Ars even declared Mac gaming dead all the way back in 2007. But in reality, the situation has gotten better. And after Apple dedicated an unprecedented amount of attention to Mac gaming at WWDC 2017, things might be looking up for Mac gamers in the coming years.

When Apple announced new Macs and a major update to its Mac graphics API at this year’s developer conference, there was an air of hope amongst Mac gamers and developers. Gaming on a Mac may look more appealing than ever thanks to the introduction and gradual improvement of Apple’s relatively new Metal graphics API and a better-than-ever-before install base. On top of that, discrete Mac graphics processors have just seen some of their biggest boosts in recent years, VR support is on the way, and external GPU enclosures promise previously impossible upgradeability.

Are New Macs Good For Gaming Windows 10

So gaming on the Mac is improving, but is it good or still terrible? Are we on track to parity with Windows? Speaking to game developers who specialize in the Mac about the state of Mac gaming in the wake of WWDC, Ars encountered plenty of optimism. Still, there’s plenty to be cautious about.

Decades in a niche

In gamer communities on forums and Reddit, Mac gaming is often the subject of jokes and snarky comments. Again, such snark was not always without justification. There just weren’t many good games on the Mac for years. Nevertheless, a few companies have continuously worked to fill the niche. Two in particular emerged as leaders in the marketplace—Aspyr Media and Feral Interactive.

Aspyr was founded way back in 1996, originally as a retail distributor. The porting aspect of its business came later, with the first game it ported in 1998—Eidos’ Tomb Raider II. Feral got started in 1996, too. And in addition to the Mac, Feral has ported games to Linux and iOS (it plans to expand to Android in the near future).

“We’ve dealt firsthand with all the big changes to the platform that have taken place over the last two decades,” Edwin Smith, Feral’s head of production, told Ars. He cited changes like the advent of dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs), the move to a UNIX-based operating system, and the transition from the PowerPC processor architecture to Intel.

PowerPC-based Macs in the '90s and early '00s used a different processing architecture from the Windows PCs for which most games were primarily developed. It didn’t help, either, that Microsoft’s Direct3D (part of the DirectX suite of APIs) became the industry standard graphics API. The cross-platform OpenGL API used in Apple computers struggled to keep up in the meantime. And frankly back at that point in time, Macs weren’t very popular, so the audience was small. It was abundantly clear to gamers that the Mac was not a competitive platform in the PowerPC days.

“In the years leading up to the transition to Intel CPUs in Macs, the porting process entailed converting games to run on PowerPC hardware,” said Smith. “This was difficult because the existing code was written with x86 architecture in mind, and since this didn’t always have a 1:1 relationship with how PowerPC architecture worked, we had some interesting problems to solve.”

Climbing out into the sun

Players using today’s Mac offerings live within a different landscape. Things became much rosier over the past decade for a number of reasons.

First, there was the switch to Intel. By adopting the same architecture used in most Windows PCs, Apple moved the Mac out of a software engineering wasteland. Second, Mac sales figures grew significantly at the same time. According to data aggregated by Statista, 3.29 million Macs were sold globally in 2004. By 2015, that number had reached more than 20 million.

“Apple today sells in a quarter what they used to sell in a year, so the total market opportunity has grown from what used to be normal,” Elizabeth Howard, vice-president for publishing at Aspyr, told Ars.

The hardware situation looked better, too. Macs enjoyed what Howard called a “halo effect” from the previous generation of consoles. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 remained gaming hardware standards for nearly a decade—longer than many other console generations. That longevity allowed the Mac’s laptop-grade graphics hardware to catch up to this industry standard.

Gaming On Mac

“Most video games are developed with console or PC as the lead platform, and the system requirements are naturally targeted around what those platforms can handle,” she explained. “Since Mac is a downstream port of these versions, and Macs were well-aligned with last-gen console specs, we were able to easily move games from PC and console over to Mac.”

Finally, Howard and Smith cited the shift to digital distribution. While this was disruptive and concerning for the industry at first, it turned out to be a major boon for Mac-centric gamers.

Best Mac Laptop For Gaming

“2011 was the last year Apple carried any physical game boxes in their stores,” Howard said. “There was a time we thought this would mean the demise of Mac gaming.” Within a few years, Apple was no longer shipping computers with physical media drives at all; the platform abandoned them more quickly than the PC market did. But rather than hurt Mac developers, it helped. Digital marketplaces like Steam and the Mac App Store “made it much easier for us to get our games to end users,” said Smith. “And as a result, our customer base has grown.”

Howard also sees the new marketplace as an improvement: “Digital distribution had a huge impact on our business. It’s obviously much easier for people to buy games, we had a big catalog to leverage with this new audience, and it’s much easier on cash flow with no cost of goods. It was a huge shift.”

Are New Macs Good For Gaming Pc

And all this has made the Mac a more vibrant gaming platform than ever before. Mac games have a substantially larger addressable market, the economics of scale are more favorable, and for a while, the hardware was in a sweet spot. With plenty of great games available on the Mac, gamer snark has been looking less and less applicable in recent years.