Apple’s ‘Scary Fast’ event came and went as its name implied on October 30. The company announced the M3 chip series, alongside a new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro, a new M3 iMac, and that was it.
Rumors had been swirling that the reason why the event aired at 5 PM PT, was due to the time difference in Japan. It would have been 9 AM there, and it was apparently due to a ‘big game developer’ who would likely appear at the event.
That didn’t come to pass. Instead, it was all about hardware announcements from Apple only. It was great to see some focus on gaming, such as ray tracing and ‘Dynamic Caching’. This is where the GPU side of the M3 chip will give out the required workload for the task at hand.
Yet that was all that ‘Scary Fast’ had to offer. While I’m glad there wasn’t another unfunny skit like ‘Mother Nature’, I’m now questioning the point of a half-hour event from Apple in the first place.
Why?
First of all, if you’re shocked that an M2 Pro MacBook Pro has already been replaced after nine months, Apple has done this before. I speak from experience, as I bought an iPad 3 way back in 2012, and it was replaced by an iPad 4 with a Lightning port six months later.
I’ve been burned before, so to see these new chips be announced so soon after an M2 Pro simply didn’t surprise me. In fact, it’s great that the 13-inch MacBook Pro is no more. It didn’t make much sense in the lineup, as it was based on a design from four years ago.
Perhaps the reason why there was an event at all, was to showcase how big a deal the M3 series is. Apple made sure to mention the gains compared to M1, instead of M2. This was likely because M2 Pro MacBook Pros were released in February this year, so to compare against models from two years ago would make some sense.
However, features like ray tracing and Dynamic Caching are big wins for game developers who may be looking to the Mac as another platform to bring their games to. If you’ve seen a video of Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation 5, the reflections and lighting abound. So one day, we may see a similar game appear on M3 Macs in all its ray tracing glory.
However, this still doesn’t explain why the event aired when it did. Was it really just so Tim Cook could say ‘Good evening’ for once, or was there another meaning that we’re yet to find out?
In any case, I hope this isn’t a new standard for keynotes in the future. A half-hour event at night for two new products didn’t seem worth the fuss, even though it was impressively filmed with a bunch of iPhone 15 Pro Max devices. Yet I also feel like it missed talking about a great opportunity in gaming.
Gaming was mentioned but barely seen
Everything seemed to line up that ‘Scary Fast’ would be gaming-focused. Resident Evil: Village came out on iPhone the same day, and with no word on a release date for Resident Evil 4 Remake, it felt obvious that we’d hear more about this at the event.
It wasn’t to be. Nothing was mentioned, nor of any new games to take advantage of the M3 chips. No game developer appeared to chat about a commitment to the Mac, and yet ray tracing and Dynamic Caching were being heralded as big features for M3 for gaming.
Did a developer have to pull out at the last minute? Did a deal between them and Apple break down, which is why we got a half-hour event instead?
It makes sense, but it does seem unlikely. Apple plans everything months in advance. Features in iOS 18 are likely being locked in right now, with WWDC 2024 being planned as we get ready for Black Friday on November 24. This could all have been a quick event that Apple wanted to do, just to make a big deal of the arrival of M3.
But I can’t help but feel like there’s something else that should have happened on October 30, and it didn’t.
Whatever the case, it’s great that a bunch of features in the M3 chips will appeal to game developers. I just wish that we saw this as the main topic on October 30, and at an earlier time. Instead, we got something that could have been a press release on Apple Newsroom that we could have read in five minutes, instead of watching a pre-recorded video for thirty minutes.
If Apple wants to be serious about gaming, it needs to show it, and this event was a fantastic opportunity to. It feels like it missed an open goal, and now my faith in its plans for console-quality gaming has all but diminished.
