Can My MacBook Play The Sims 3?

"lisamwitt;c-17353324" wrote:
My guess is that the person who said it was indeed able to close the error popup because it was just a warning of the impending update, and that they hadn't actually updated yet. But, as I chose not to press the issue, I don't know.

That's probably it, that this person is running Mojave and gets the warnings about 32-bit apps needing to be updated. Sims 3 doesn't run in Catalina, no matter what people say. It doesn't even install, since the installer is also 32-bit. What some people have been doing is installing Mojave on an external hard drive or USB stick and booting into that when they want to play. It works reasonably well, considering.

As to the OP's question, Sims 3 wouldn't run particuarly well on that hardware, in any operating system. But the game was never optimized for macOS, meaning it takes more resources than it should. Whether this will change with the 64-bit version is anyone's guess; I have no idea how it will run when it's released. It's unlikely to be a whole lot better though, since even Windows systems with the same hardware don't handle the more demanding packs particularly well.

I don't know that I'd say it isn't safe for your Mac to run the game. The biggest danger is overheating, as Airs have only one fan and aren't built to dissipate the heat generated from running even moderately demanding games. Other than that, TS3 would probably just crash, a lot, if you tried to run Pets or Seasons, or most of the other EPs together. (Exact performance is difficult to predict in this category.) MacOS is pretty good at throttling performance to protect the hardware, so it's unlikely that you'd damage your laptop just by playing.

P.S. The Mac section might not get a lot of traffic, but there's always someone paying attention.