{"id":357,"date":"2006-04-06T23:51:46","date_gmt":"2006-04-07T06:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/blog\/?p=355"},"modified":"2006-04-06T23:51:46","modified_gmt":"2006-04-07T06:51:46","slug":"additional-thoughts-on-macs-as-gaming-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/2006\/04\/06\/additional-thoughts-on-macs-as-gaming-machines\/","title":{"rendered":"Additional thoughts on Macs as gaming machines."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a PC-user, and I will remain so until the day that I die, no matter how they try to <a title=\"Penny Arcade\" href=\"http:\/\/www.penny-arcade.com\/comic\/2006\/03\/03\">subvert me<\/a>.  In my <a title=\"Dancing Librarian\" href=\"http:\/\/www.exlibrius.org\/?p=34\">last post<\/a> I cited Eric&#8217;s snark regarding running City of Villains on his Macbook Pro.  Evidently the dual-core intel processor coupled with the innate powers of Mac video-processing made the game practically purr with a sparkly ebullience.  A fair amount of people mention that the new Mac desktop may run two (2!) dual-core processors.  And of course, EVERYONE in the Mac corner mentions how gosh-darn pretty they are.  Despite all this, I don&#8217;t see Mac taking over the computer-gaming arena, and I even have a few decent reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Cost<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Macs are expensive.  With the iMac starting at $1299, the PowerBook G4 at $1499, and then MacBook Pro at $1999, you&#8217;re automatically spending a lot of money on that fine gaming machine.  Oh right, and don&#8217;t forget that to run those games you&#8217;ll need to spend <a title=\"Windows XP Professional OEM - Newegg\" href=\"http:\/\/www.newegg.com\/Product\/Product.asp?Item=N82E16837102062\">at least another $100<\/a> to buy Windows XP.  For $1299 I can put together a nice PC with all the parts I would reasonably need to run any current game without a hitch.  I mean, I should know because I just put one together for my friend <a title=\"Theo Porter\" href=\"http:\/\/iffyatbest.net\">Theo<\/a>, and it&#8217;s gorgeous.  For $1999, I could build a gaming god.  And I wouldn&#8217;t have to dual-boot the damn thing.  But the biggest cost issue is that Mac&#8217;s are difficult to upgrade.  When your Mac gets old, you buy a new Mac.  If your PC gets old, you can seperately buy the parts that are getting dated, and maintain your machine&#8217;s performance even on a meager budget.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Hassle<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>No matter how easy Apple makes it to run Windows, dual-booting is a pain that won&#8217;t be worthwhile to a majority of people.  Sure, you can run a Windows &#8220;window&#8221; in OS X, but if we&#8217;re talking about gamers (and I am, currently), they&#8217;re not going to get the performance the machine is capable of, and gamers are interested in nothing if not performance.  In a way, the Apple Matters post I linked to previously has a point that if people are consistently running Windows on their Macs, simply because it allows them to play the games and run the apps that OS X doesn&#8217;t support, eventually they may get used to Windows, and wonder why they need OS X at all.  Which is not at all to say that Windows is better than OS X, but it&#8217;s compatability is a juggernaut that may be hard to overcome, and a great many of us &#8220;PC users&#8221; not only use it, but enjoy it.  There must be something to that, right?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Customization<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you buy a Mac, you&#8217;re pretty much buying whatever specifications that Apple happens to be offering.  In the case of the MacBook Pro, you have a mind-blowing <a title=\"Apple - MacBook Pro\" href=\"http:\/\/store.apple.com\/1-800-MY-APPLE\/WebObjects\/AppleStore.woa\/wo\/0.RSLID?mco=A9B2084&#38;nclm=MacBookPro\">two options<\/a>.  I can&#8217;t even begin to think of how many options there are for building a PC between $2000 and $2500, but my god there are a lot, and by PC I mean laptops as well.  Do-it-yourself laptops are possible, for the hardware afficianado, and the process for building one was even outlined very clearly in a recent edition of Maximum PC.  But even if you don&#8217;t want to build it yourself, there are a thousand websites out there, at least, that give you a ton of options on everything from screen size to memory to video cards to processors.  Bear in mind that Macs don&#8217;t hold the patent for dual-core intel processors.  Heck, they just switched to a processor-type that PC-users have been enjoying for years.  And PC-users have something Mac doesn&#8217;t have, which is AMD.  Right now AMD has <a title=\"AMD Athlon 62 X2 3800+ Manchester\" href=\"http:\/\/www.newegg.com\/Product\/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103562\">dual-core 64-bit processors <\/a>for the PC, and they&#8217;ve announced the release of the same for laptops in the near future.  Also, and contrary to the Mac &#8220;we&#8217;re so pretty ideology&#8221;, you can customize the look of your PC.  A pretty case?  There are a ton of them out there.<\/p>\n<p>So my question, then, is this: Why buy a Mac as a gaming rig running Windows when the PC offers so much more in the way of cost and customization, with less hassle?  The answer is that you won&#8217;t; not unless you&#8217;re already a Mac enthusiast, and hey, there are plenty of you out there and that&#8217;s great.  But for the rest of us, PCs make a whole lot more sense in a lot of ways.  Apple&#8217;s &#8220;Boot Camp&#8221; may pull a few people to the dark side who were previously on the fence, but the people that have chosen their sides likely won&#8217;t be swayed.<\/p>\n<p>As for me, the next computer I buy will likely be a laptop and a PC, and will probably come in pieces.  They&#8217;ll be small, complicated, fragile pieces that will need to be carefully nurtured and placed into the appropriate places at the appropriate times with an extreme amount of care.  I&#8217;ll nurture them, place them, build a machine out of hopes, dreams and expensive parts from very particular namebrand retailers, and I&#8217;ll be damned if I won&#8217;t enjoy it.  I&#8217;m a PC-user, hear me roar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a PC-user, and I will remain so until the day that I die, no matter how they try to subvert me. In my last post I cited Eric&#8217;s snark regarding running City of Villains on his Macbook Pro. Evidently the dual-core intel processor coupled with the innate powers of Mac video-processing made the game [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}