Well, you mentioned to not use this thread for bashing Apple systems, but I just need to tell you this one thing. In another thread, someone was asking about PC vs Mac for UE4, so I decided to do a little bit of research. I ended up finding some benchmarks for the maxed out Mac pro (~$9000). It turns out that in Cinebench (OpenGL), the Mac Pro gets about 75 fps, while my rig gets about 110 fps. For the CPU test, the Mac Pro got about 1450 score, while my rig got about 900 (I’m not surprised, my CPU is proportionally my weakest component). Even if the benchmark results were largely innacurate on the Mac, it still costs 5x as much as my PC. Keep in mind that the Mac Pro used in these benchmarks is the best product as Apple sells, and costs about $9000, while my custom built rig costed me about $1500. I’ll assume your Mac costs nowhere near that of the Mac Pro, so if you are wondering why the performance is so bad, hopefully what I just said makes sense.
My rig is way overshooting it for simple game development, and is capable of developing the next GTA game for all it cares. As long as you aren’t doing anything open-world or too graphically intensive, a custom built $800 - $1000 PC would be more than enough and would last you several years. Comparatively if you wanted a laptop instead of a PC that price would hop up to around $1100 - $1400 for the same performance.
As for performance for your end users, you could easily cap the FPS at 24, 30, 60, etc. in order to keep the game looking smooth, or just lower scalability settings.