Gaming

This is something I know about.

The new ARM-based macs are actually very powerful, but as another commenter mentioned, the ARM architecture would normally be a bad fit for gaming as not much runs on it.

That said, there are ways around it.

I'm personally gaming on an M2 Macbook Pro, and am able to play almost my full Steam library of Windows games using a tool called Whisky

Whisky uses Wine (a longstanding Windows emulator commonly used on Linux) along with other toolkits to translate DirectX graphics instructions into Mac-native 'Metal' graphics instructions. There is a performance hit in doing this, but the end result is actually pretty good.

The result you get will depend on your hardware. I'm personally running a high-end M2 Max configuration and get 50 FPS on high settings in Deep Rock Galactic (a first-person shoooter game) but lower configurations would be okay for casual gaming.

There is another product that does the same thing as Whisky called Crossover. It is paid (unlike Whisky which is free) but is otherwise similar. You can watch this YouTube video on Crossover to get some idea on how it works, how to set it up, and the performance you might expect.

As for Minecraft, I personally play that too, and it actually runs natively on the new Apple Silicon macs anyway and doesn't need anything special :)

The main issue with new Macs is that they use ARM processors and most games, even for Mac, were made for x86 processors. Minecraft works fine as it is CPU-independent Java code, but you aren't going to have access to a wide library like you do with Linux. I think there have been efforts to game on Wine with Mac but it will likely require x86 CPU emulation through Rosetta 2, possibly slowing things down. I remember I got Skyrim to run on my Mac Mini M1 somehow but it wasn't a good experience.

Sims 4 and Minecraft play just fine. My ex wife played Sims 4 without issue on her 2012 MacBook Pro without a problem for years.

I have a 2021 MacBook M1 Pro and tbh, I do most of my gaming on it anymore. It has no trouble with even modded Minecraft, although I haven't been able to use shaders without the fps dropping lower than I'd like. I can't imagine it'd have any trouble with Sims 4 either

I know Sims 4 and Minecraft java edition ran fine on mac 10 years ago, so I would hope they still do.

There’s potentially some cloud-based options for this, if someone doesn’t want to maintain a gaming device.

Basically, it seems like Game Pass Ultimate will let you play games like The Sims 4 and Minecraft using a constant video connection to an Xbox server. If I’m right, these are in fact the mouse/keyboard version of the game. Probably not as moddable though.

It’s not a great option especially considering the subscription, but it sometimes feels more hassle-free depending on the user.

Work your communication skills. Let her have gnu linux.