Apple's Shifting Differentiation

Software is the key for me. I am by no means a power user but I really am loathe to give up even more of my software library to swap to Apple Silicon after Catalina cratered my gaming library in Steam and some older apps from companies long gone.

I don't expect I am alone in this observation but the number of software companies they highlighted during the M1 debut was very slim and to be honest I have not heard of half of them until then and don't remember them now.

So to me it matters not how much faster AS is, what matters is if I can run want I want to run. I am not going to own two separate machines to do what I want to do. If AS machines cannot do all I need I will keep my current Mac till support runs out and look again

It's interesting to think about gaming specifically. Genuine platform exclusivity is rarer and rarer these days, as the underlying engine market has become more and more commoditised. It is relatively cheap to port a game built in Unity or Unreal engine from PC to Xbox, PlayStation, etc.

Mac has always lagged because the market wasn't big enough to warrant investment. Catalina wouldn't have cratered your gaming library if there was enough incentive for the developers to update the game. Now that iOS apps (read: games) can run on Mac with relatively low effort, and we already see PC games being easily ported to iOS (eg: Fortnite, legal challenges notwithstanding), I feel that this is the best thing to happen to Mac gaming in years.