Can I tell you a dirty secret? My M1 MacBook Air is probably the best gaming laptop I’ve ever owned. Oh, don’t get me wrong, most things don’t run on it and the most recent game it can reliably run is probably about half a decade old, but as someone who mostly just wants to play golden oldies—KotOR, Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Planescape—this thing is a fanless dream with battery life that goes and goes and goes.
What I would never think of doing is playing something recent on it. Some kind of gleaming graphical showcase that can make my RTX 4080 sweat. Something like, oh, I dunno, Cyberpunk 2077, which is apparently coming to Mac “early next year.”
So congratulations to the quiet soirée-worth of people who were waiting for that. The port will include both the CP2077 base game as well as its rather excellent Phantom Liberty expansion, which have been ported to take “full advantage of Apple silicon and advanced technologies of Metal.” That’s Apple’s Metal graphics API, rather than an announcement CDPR is entering the Bronze Age.
And hey, I poke fun, but why not? Cyberpunk is an excellent game—one of the top 100, some might say—and being able to play it in more places is an unalloyed good. Plus, I am kind of curious to see how it runs on Apple’s fancy chips. We ourselves recently noted that Cupertino’s new M4 Pro chip would make for a stonking handheld gaming PC, and if Tim Apple sees fit to dip his $3 trillion company’s toe a bit deeper in those waters, maybe making that very unlikely prospect slightly less very unlikely? I say go ahead.
Apple is slowly starting a habit of this kind of thing. After recently realising videogames exist, the second-most valuable company in the world has been throwing all sorts of money at deals as it tries to find something to actually do with those very impressive and powerful Arm chips. It wheeled Hideo Kojima out at last year’s WWDC to announce that Apple’s hardware was finally powerful enough to render Norman Reedus, you can play Resident Evil 8 on your iPhone for some reason, and now? Cyberpunk on Apple Silicon. It’s a brave new world. Perhaps soon my MacBook will be the best gaming laptop I’ve ever had for more than just RPGs from 2003.
