While the cost of a pro level Mac has certainly gone down over the years, I wouldn't exactly call it cheap yet. But that is why I bought this, the cheapest Mac Studio I could find on Amazon. How bad could it possibly be? Let's open it up and find out. And right off the bat, this is supposed to be a refurbished Mac Studio and there's a big old goopy sticker or something on the top. All right, Amazon refurbished is fairly strict with like what that means. It's supposed to look really good. The whole top of the computer, it's a little hard to see on camera, but it's covered in just kind of grime and mild scratches. On the front of the Mac, you can see some scuffs and scratches around the ports here. And on the bottom here, there's a bunch of nicks and marks. None of these are the end of the world, but while this is the cheapest Mac Studio on Amazon, it's still like $1,500. So, kind of expected something a little better than this. Surprisingly, the back of the computer actually looks pretty decent. And so does the bottom. All right, anyway, let's go ahead and plug it in and see if it works. What is this cable by the way? It's so short. Like Come on now. All right, everything's plugged in. I'm going to go ahead and hit the power button. It makes the noise. Oh, that's uh that doesn't look right. >> A few minutes later. >> Okay, I I I unplugged and replugged things in and and now it's working. That was scary for a second. It looks like this Mac is factory reset. That's good, I think. Hey, look at that, it's working. It's also on like kind of a recent firmware. It's got like that weird liquid glass thing going on. All right, guys, we're back. Got everything updated. Got some games installed. We're ready to start testing this bad boy. And that's actually a big part of what I want to do here with this Mac Studio is check out how good the Mac gaming performance scene is here in 2026. But if you really want the full Mac gaming setup, you'll definitely want a nice webcam for streaming or hanging out in Discord calls using the sponsor of today's video, the Obsbot Tiny 3. Like the name implies, this thing really is tiny. It works for anything you need, whether that's live streaming, conference calls, or even on a Switch, too. It even has a built-in interface for tripod use. And now, I know what you're thinking. It's just a webcam. How good could it really look? For reference, here is my laptop webcam. Meanwhile, the Obsbot Tiny 3 is clearly a massive upgrade. We're talking a full 4K 30 FPS or 1080p 120 FPS, all from this tiny package. One of the features I love the most about the Tiny 3 is the AI tracking mode. Look at this, it's following me around. No clicking, no editing magic, no nothing. It even has voice commands like, "Hi Tiny." Wow, track me. And can we talk about the audio quality for a sec? It's hard to believe, but everything you're hearing is from the OBSBOT Tiny 3. I'm also using the webcam spatial audio mode and as I move around, it naturally follows the direction of my voice. Instead of just grabbing everything in the room like a normal webcam would. And this is all because of the integrated MEMS silicon microphones. I don't know what that really means, but clearly this is the type of silicon to be smoking. There are also different mic modes depending on what you're doing like directional, omni, spatial, but the point is that this is a mic that you can use for real things like what I'm doing right now rather than it feeling like an afterthought like it is in most webcams. Now, the Tiny 3 does have a lot of features that are worth exploring, but what you really need to know is that it has great video and audio in a truly tiny package. So, if you want to upgrade from your crappy laptop mic or your webcam you've been using for the past 12 years, make sure to check out the link below to grab the OBSBOT 3 for yourself. Okay guys, we're going to play some games. Before we do that though, I want to test the Wi-Fi speeds on this. They should be pretty good, but I just want to make sure. After all, you never know what a sketchy Amazon seller's doing. Oh yeah, this is great. This is over 5 GHz Wi-Fi, so yeah, this is about the speeds I would expect with gigabit internet. And not surprisingly, playing YouTube works fine. You should be able to go all the way up to the 4K's. Oh gosh, I scrolled the wrong direction cuz by default your scroll wheel goes the opposite for what you'd expect. It's great, it's good stuff. Thank you, Tim Apple. Yay, we can skip around and it works. This is expected behavior on a $1,500 PC. I'm just saying I'm used to really, you know, terrible computers, so it's pretty nice for me. And now guys, let's get into the games. Now, before we do this, I got to talk about nerdy stuff, so um skip ahead like 30 seconds if you don't want the nerd stuff. Here's what's going on. The M1 Mac here uses a new Apple technology, different type of chip than normal. This means that old Mac applications don't always work very nicely with the newer Macs. This even includes games. Now, here I think we'll be mostly fine cuz everything that's going to show up on the store probably is vetted to work on a modern Mac, but there are definitely applications that just straight up will not work or require like a translation layer to work, which Apple says they're going to stop supporting eventually. It's a whole thing. Why does all this matter? Well, Steam. If you want to play Steam games, this is an issue because to even run the Steam program, you need to run it through a translation layer. But in the meantime, as long as you can still open Steam here, you'll see all your games show up except a lot of them will have these little uh these little X symbols next to them, these little cross out symbols. These are usually older games that are 32-bit and just straight up will not work at all. I do have one installed cuz for some reason they let you do that. Let's just see what happens if we try to run it. And it crashes instantly. Yeah, that's not surprising. There might be a way you can run some of these games using like a virtual machine running an older version of macOS or maybe Windows or something, but like if you got to go through that much effort to play Half-Life, like what are we doing? Most games end up being like this here. Devil May Cry 5, it just says available for Windows, will not let you install it at all on this computer. Thankfully, Steam provides a little button up here, show only games that run on macOS. This is not fully true. These games will run through the translation layer to make Intel-based games on old Macs run on a modern Mac, which is good. They mostly work, but like it's not quite the same as a native Apple Silicon game. What the heck do I mean by that? Well, if you go to the App Store like on an iPhone, which is weird, you'll find that there are full-on like real games, not like mobile games, but like, you know, a real PC game you would play like Control here, five bucks by the way, kind of a steal. And yeah, you just buy this, play it on your Mac Studio like a normal PC game. We'll try that here in a moment, but you also have situations like Cyberpunk 2077, which is $82.90. Please someone explain to me what the heck is going on there. This is clearly using like the Apple Silicon version of the game, but I already have the game on Steam. If I install this version, is this also the Apple Silicon version or is this running the version made for old Macs that's going through translation to run on this thing? I'm confused. Are you confused yet? Anyway, we'll try to play this game. I installed it. I don't think it has an Apple Silicon like patch or anything like that. Let's just see what happens. Oh. Looks like it's working. I see a little thing down here. And yeah, we're in the game. This is running fine. And I hope that this is the experience for most games you're going to try to play that show up under that list. But the list is already a problem, right? I don't know if you guys saw, but uh something like 1/4 of my library is all that's showing up here. These are the games that'll even allow you to install them on your Mac. I just This This is awful. Anyway, let's try to play Cyberpunk and see what happens. Game mode on. Okay. All right, let's check out the settings. Uh quick preset for this Mac. It recognizes it as a Mac. That's pretty good. Metal FX. It's kind of cool we get like Apple special settings that I've never seen before. Why is ray tracing on? Let's turn that off. Requires a GPU with hardware accelerated ray tracing support. But But we have that. That's a thing we have. >> [music] >> A little bit of rough if it doesn't considering it's a $1,500 computer, but hey, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the game doesn't even run that well to begin with. No, no, you know, this actually looks really good and is running quite nicely. Let's really crank the settings. Um we'll just set it to quality scaling, sure. And I went ahead and set all the settings to high. Okay, we dropped a little bit of performance. We're going down to like the 50s. So, that preset they had seemed kind of perfect for the level of hardware we got here. Oh, also, we're only running at 1080p, by the way. So, 50-something FPS with this level of quality at 1080p, I wouldn't call that amazing performance. By comparison, we're going to try out Control Ultimate Edition here. It's on the App Store. It's got to run a little better, right? Press Let's to start. Uh-oh. Oh, the controller works. I I had this plugged in, too. Wait, except it doesn't. What? It detects the controller, but it doesn't work with the controller. What? Alt tab is not working. Guys, we're on the title screen and I can't get it to work properly. What do you mean alt TAB ISN'T WORKING? AH! OH, I forgot it's it's it's command tab. My bad. It's been a little while since I used a Mac. Don't don't yell at me. Now, I saw some reviews down here for the game that mentioned some issues. Buggy Mac version, don't buy yet. It's been out for a little while now. Okay, I I also grabbed a Resident Evil 4 here. This is a free I think it's just a demo and then you probably buy the game inside of the application. We'll see how it works. Game mode on. What? What just happened? It just closed. Oh, no. iCloud Drive is not available. Please check Restart application. Canceling application startup. What? Okay, I went to the the Mac settings and and signed in to Apple and and got iCloud working. Why do I need iCloud to run Resident Evil 4? I don't know. Let's try again. Play data not found. Yeah, sure, whatever. I guess at least I'm giving you guys an accurate experience of what Mac gaming is like in 2026 cuz this is kind of trash. And here we are in the game. Doesn't look too bad. We're getting some stuttering. A lot of stuttering. To be fair, that's an issue pretty much no matter where you play these days, honestly. But hey, it looks pretty good. Running pretty well, too. Now that we have that like iCloud stuff set up, I'm going to try control again. Maybe that's what was going on. Oh, look at that. That is what was happening. That's so strange. They didn't even like put an error message or anything unlike Resident Evil did. Like this game just didn't work. Like that just feels lazy. Regardless, let's see how this game runs out of the box. Pretty well. The settings seem like they were kind of low if I'm being honest, especially for 1080p. So, I'm not too surprised it's running relatively smooth, but we! Now, everything we've been covering has been like modern PC gaming stuff. We've been trying to get that going on the Mac, but what about emulation? This is where things get much much better. Many many emulators work perfectly fine. Just as like a catch-all for what you can expect, I have PCSX2 installed here. It's a PS2 emulator. And uh as you can see, I have a disk drive attached. We're just going to open that up. We're going to throw in a game here and then just go up to system and start disk. And it's loading up. Well, it it was working, but we have black screen now. Uh oh, there it goes. There it goes. Okay. I don't really know what was going on there, but it's working. Oh oh oh. I didn't I think I could could ever get an emulator to display this screen, but sure. Unknown game. Oh, finally. There it goes for absolutely no reason. Okay. Anyway, I have nothing to any configuration other than like the normal setup stuff for PCSX2. I do have a controller here. Plug this right into the Mac. It's working fine. Anyway, I I as you can see, it's working great. And I'm I'm sure with some tweaking you could get it to run even better than this. Anyway, this is kind of a a great representation of the performance you can expect for all the consoles before PS2, I'd say. From looking into it, it seems like PS3 and stuff is also possible to be emulated on the Apple Silicon Macs here. Oh, yeah. Overall, this is pretty decent and I'm glad I was actually able to play off a disk, although it was a little inconsistent. Either way though, guys, let me know down in the comments what you think of the Mac Studio here. Um this specific one from Amazon, I can't recommend it less enough. It was really bad. Really awful. And if you're interested in gaming, please don't don't. You already know this. You know not to get a Mac for for gaming, but this is proof. Double don't. Double don't do it. But what about an older Mac, a retro Mac, if you will? Click the video right here. I for some reason wanted to test Halo on that. It was really weird and interesting. And also, there was stuff on that computer from like a prior user. It was a whole story. Click the video.