Granted this is just my personal spend, but Apple has lost out on something like $12k of hardware sales from me over the past six years because they don’t support gaming. I switched to Linux in 2020 because it meant I could have a proper development environment AND play games. Before I was split between Windows and Mac, having to buy two machines— one for gaming and one for development.
If Apple didn’t treat gaming like a red-headed step child I’d have never made the switch. Now, it’s an incredibly steep uphill battle to win me back to MacOS. Linux slaps and NVidia has way better performance (though I wish I could get more than 32GB of VRAM without forking over $10k).
So yeah, while they might not like stereotypical gamer[1] types, I’m sure they’d like their money. For me the only Apple device I buy is a new iPhone once every 4-5 years. My lifetime value (to Apple) is essentially roughly 25%-33% of what it would have been if they supported gaming.
[1] I think more people play games now than ever before. While 20 years ago gaming might have been niche, we have multiple generations at this point who have been playing video games their entire lives. Realistically, it’s only boomers who haven’t played video games (or had access to them) the majority of their lives.