Gaming laptops are my favorite kind of computer, so what would it look like if Apple made a dedicated gaming laptop?
The best gaming laptops bring high-performance hardware in a portable package to allow you to game everywhere you go (at least as long as their batteries last), so it’s obvious that they would be a hit with PC gamers of all stripes. Even dedicated gaming rig builders wouldn’t scoff at an Alienware laptop with an RTX 3080 Ti and 32GB RAM, but pretty much every gamer would look at you sideways if you told them to buy MacBook Pro. Even though many of the best PC games are also the best Mac games, Apple has had a gaming blind spot in its MacBook lineup since the very first iBook was announced in 1999. Over the years, MacBooks and especially MacBook Pros have become more and more categorized as premium, general purpose laptops or professional equipment that treated gaming as an afterthought, if it even considered it at all. This has allowed the gaming space to be almost entirely filled by Windows PCs and laptops running third-party hardware, which is how things have been for more than 20 years. That has started to shift, however, and for several reasons. While there hasn’t been a Mac gaming revolution (yet), Apple itself has taken an interest in competing in the gaming space for the first time in decades and it has a lot of things going in its favor. But PC gaming isn’t the kind of thing you can do effectively with half-measures, however, so Apple would need to go big if it plans to make a play for one of the fastest-growing consumer markets in the world. It has the hardware and the incentive to do so, so what would it look like if Apple said “Screw it, let’s do a gaming laptop”, and how could it win over skeptical PC gamers? Some Apple fans will be quick to point out that the current line-up of MacBook Pros make excellent gaming laptops, especially as you move higher up the configuration stack to the M1 Pro and M1 Max. They aren’t wrong on that point, at least as far as the hardware is concerned. I’ve recently taken a MacBook Pro 14-inch with M1 Max and 64GB unified memory, and I have worked through a lot of games with dedicated Mac support on Steam to see how well they perform against their Windows counterparts ( Full disclosure: Apple was kind enough to loan TechRadar the device for testing purposes; and while 64GB memory is a huge amount of memory, its impact on gaming performance over a 32GB RAM gaming laptop would be negligible given the demands of current games). In my experience with Total War: Three Kingdoms and Shadow of the Tomb Raider – both of which have built-in benchmarks making it easy to test multiple devices for comparison – the MacBook Pro with M1 Max is absolutely capable of high-end gaming. On an RTX 3080 laptop with an Intel Core i7-11800H processor and 32GB RAM, Shadow of the Tomb Raider averaged 50 frames per second (fps) at 1440p and the highest settings. With the MacBook Pro, it was averaging 45 fps at 1600p with the highest settings, so well within striking distance of one of the best processors and GPUs for gaming laptops out there. The MacBook Pro running Total War: Three Kingdoms at 1600p on ultra settings only got about half the fps of the Windows laptop at 1440p and ultra settings on average: 31 fps to 57 fps, respectively. Scale back the resolution to 1920 x 1200p, which is where many gaming laptops max out, and you get 43 fps on average for the MacBook Pro on ultra settings. And, if you drop the settings down one notch to high at 1200p, you’re averaging 60 fps easily, while similar settings on the RTX 3080 laptop scored about 83 fps. Still,60 fps is the bar you need to clear with PC gamers, and the MacBook Pro with M1 Max does so with what is essentially integrated graphics.
