Steam Survey Hints Apple Is Secretly Testing Gaming Chops Of Two Unreleased Macs

When you think gaming, you think Mac, right? Yeah, we didn't think so. That doesn't mean you can't game on a mac, it's just not particularly ideal compared to the PC or even Linux experience. Still, that hasn't stopped some users, possibly Apple itself, from submitting to the Steam Hardware Survey and creating a not-so-clear indicator that there are more Macs on the way.

The individual devices are labeled as the "Mac 14,6" and "Mac 15,4." We would wager that these correspond to new 14-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models, respectively, but it is anyone's guess.


According to MacRumors, these models have shown up recently in GeekBench scores alongside an M2 Max chip. The M2 Max is yet to be released, however it does seem to be the next step in Apple Silicon development. Exactly which games Apple is testing on their new MacBooks, we cannot say for certain. It's not like Halo Infinite is a key Apple demographic product, even though the original Halo was planned to be available for Mac. That said, the M1 chip is a pretty solid powerhouse in it's own right in terms of compute power. Things like software compile times are often much faster than for their desktop counterparts. These chips are just not particularly strong in the GPU side of things, despite dedicating cores to specifically that. The M2 was unveiled back in June but Apple has not really emphasized gaming on its products lately.


The Steam Hardware Survey and GeekBench scores seem to indicate that we might start to see these new devices hit store shelves "soon." Who knows, maybe the M2 Max will compare more favorably against high-end discrete GPUs. Probably not, though we'd love to see Apple try. Intel is having a hell of a time themselves trying to compete with Team Red & Team Green.