Like clockwork, and just as we reported on Tuesday, game publisher CD Projekt Red has officially released the popular Cyberpunk 2077 video game on the Mac, which is now available starting today in various application stores for macOS including Epic Games Store, GOG, Steam, and Apple’s own first-party Mac App Store.

Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition, which features all the game’s downloadable content (DLC), is only available in the Mac App Store for $82.90, while the other storefronts offer the base versions of the game only. Of the three aforementioned non-Mac App Store storefronts, only GOG is running a special price of 53% off.

Those that already own Cyberpunk 2077 on these storefronts for Windows can download the base version of the game on macOS for free, but Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition is unfortunately a separate download from the Mac App Store only and isn’t a free download even if you already own Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition on another platform.

Worthy of note, CD Projekt Red has spent a lot of time optimizing Cyberpunk 2077 for the Mac, and it’s specifically designed for Apple Silicon-equipped Macs with M1 and newer chips inside of them that sport at least 16GB of unified memory. The game harnesses Apple’s Metal API to take full advantage of the hardware in Apple’s latest machines.

While Cyberpunk 2077 has notoriously been coined as a hardware-intensive game that makes even some of the highest-end gaming PCs struggle with high performance, the team has targeted at least 60 FPS on macOS systems, and the presets for various Apple Silicon setups should help with that. Obviously, Macs equipped with higher-end chips like the M4 Max will perform better than those with the base M1, but that’s to be expected.

Thanks to its Apple Silicon-optimized presets, Cyberpunk 2077 runs surprisingly well on the Mac. While some of the announced features to the game are already implanted, others will come in a future update. Among the features that CD Projekt Red has incorporated (some ready at launch, and others not) are path tracing, AI upscaling, frame generation, HDR monitor support, Spatial Audio, and head-tracking with AirPods.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a fantastic game with dynamic gameplay that many players find extraordinarily entertaining. It features an open world exploratory experience with not only first-person shooter gaming dynamics, but also car driving and RPG dynamics. Player response in the Steam store, for example, is overwhelmingly positive – a badge of honor for any game publisher to receive.

Apple certainly seems to be taking gaming a little more seriously now than they ever did, and we think that the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 on the platform is a welcomed change that could attract more gamers to the macOS platform – but it’s still a far cry from the Windows gaming experience with higher end graphics hardware as of right now.

Are you planning to take advantage of Cyberpunk 2077 on the Mac? Let us know in the comments section down below.

Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/07/17/cyberpunk-2077-officially-launches-on-the-mac/

The Unicode 17 specification brings new emoji like Bigfoot, a fight cloud and orca, but Apple definitely won’t bring them to the iPhone and other devices before 2026.

The Unicode Consortium announced today new emoji that will make their way to your keyboards, including Trombone, Treasure Chest, Distorted Face, Hairy Creature (aka Bigfoot), Fight Cloud (as seen in cartoons and comic books), Apple Core, Orca (aka killer whale) and Ballet Dancers.

“These new emoji have long-standing symbolic meanings, are visually distinctive, and contain multitudes of expression,” reads the announcement. These fun emoticons were first drafted in November 2024.

Other changes in Unicode 17 include new skin tone sequences for the existing people with bunny ears and people wrestling emoji. Selecting a skin tone is a feature that some emoji support, like the hand emoji. If an emoji supports this feature, touch and hold it on the emoji keyboard to select a skin tone.

Apple will add the new Unicode 17 emoji to iOS 26 next year

While the new emoji characters will be officially available this fall, don’t expect Apple to add them to the initial versions of iOS 26 and the other “26” operating systems scheduled to launch this fall.

That’s because big platforms like iOS, Android and Windows need time to implement newly certified emoji in their own design style. If history is anything to go by, don’t expect the new Unicode 17 emoji to appear until an iOS 26 update around the spring of next year. It will most likely be iOS 26.3 in March or iOS 26.4 in April.

Happy World Emoji Day!

Today is World Emoji Day. If you haven’t heard about it, that’s because World Emoji Day is an unofficial holiday intended to celebrate the emoji. Many brands time their product releases or other emoji-related announcements to coincide with World Emoji Day. For example, Apple has moved the release of Emoji Game on Apple News to coincide with World Emoji Day instead of the original plan to launch the game alongside iOS 26 in the fall.

The development of new emoji characters is in the exclusive domain of the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit that develops and maintains Unicode. Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that enables devices to process and display text correctly, no matter the language or platform, which includes emoji characters.

Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/07/17/unicode-17-emoji-iphone-coming-with-ios-26-update-next-year/