
Valve Drops Mac Support for SteamVR Less Than Three Years After WWDC 2017 - tosh
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/01/valve-drops-steamvr-mac-support/
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coldpie
Gaming on macOS is a joke. They really burned a lot of bridges with developers
and customers when they dropped 32-bit support, and refusing to support the
next generation graphics API in favor of their own, dumb thing isn't doing
them any favors, either. You built this bed, Apple, enjoy laying in it.

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alfalfasprout
Dropping 32 bit support frankly was a good idea and a step in the right
direction in not carrying legacy cruft for generations... but Metal just
doesn't make much sense. OSX is already a super niche market for gaming
anyways and having a completely separate API just didn't garner any favors
especially once Vulkan came around.

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teruakohatu
> Dropping 32 bit support frankly was a good idea

No it wasn't. Apple has the resources to support 32bit apps. Wine is looking
at adding support in userspace for mac osx. If it can be supported in
userspace they could have added a translation layer themselves if they really
couldn't stomach keeping it in the kernel.

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pornel
I have a VR headset, but it hasn't even crossed my mind to check if SteamVR
would even work on my Mac.

Apple puts very low-end GPUs in Macs. Most models can't even be upgraded to a
GPU that's decent for VR. The base $6000 Mac Pro comes with a $170 GPU! Latest
maxed out top-of-the-line MBP has a weaker GPU than the last-gen lower-end GTX
1060.

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Rebelgecko
There was a point where it seemed like Apple was going to throw its support
behind eGPUs. Unfortunately it looks like they kinda half-assed it (new OS
releases don't even work with modern Nvidia GPUs because Apple won't let them
update the drivers)

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kalium-xyz
I suppose that valve saw a too small userbase for it to be an attractive
target for further VR games on macOS? Afaik VR is windows.

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McTossOut
I personally applaud Valve for braving to support as much hardware as they do.
Even having built their own VR headset, they support a wide variety for their
latest software a tacit show of support for the relationship of their
customers and the VR ecosystem.

Perhaps this is anticipating Apple's upcoming move to a potentially new micro
architecture that's been reported on -- I suppose if Apple thinks they need a
software moat, they'll find a place to trench one up.

