It's hardly astonishing that a lot of Mac users don't seem to be interested in games, but are using stuff Apple is strong at every day. That's probably because you chose the Mac because you knew it was strong at what you needed to get done.
Had you been interested in games, you probably wouldn't have chosen the Mac.
Thus, the apparent lack of Mac gamers is more of a proof of Apple's weakness in gaming, rather than Apple being right about not caring about games. Games is and has been a huge market for at least 15 years and Apple has failed to realize that so far. And that might very well be also due to the fact Steve hates games. Problem is, Steve isn't everyone.
I don't follow though. Are you suggesting that people get addicted so they can meet others at support groups? That's the only reasonable interpretation to your response that I can conjure, but that is clearly absurd. Even suggesting that people can choose what they get addicted to is shaky. Getting your impressions of a group from a parody is silly too. Should people get what they know about Mac users from Penny Arcade's early strips?
I believe he was trying to be funny, but maybe the joke got lost on you...
If Apple would release a smaller, lower spec Mac Pro with some decent graphics and drivers then it would become the fastest selling Mac in Apple's history.
/agree
Even if apple aren't chasing native game development, they should at least have the decency to put decent gpu's in their systems so we can bootcamp and play.
I've always enjoyed games, all the way from Atari 2600, ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga 500 and then finally onto a windows PC. Recently i tried the x-box 360. Before that the ps2 and psp (and yes, i do actually have a social life and a proper job etc).
The problem is, i really like the mac's os. I have a mac mini and it's great for email, web browsing, iPhoto and so forth. I even recommended the previous (white) iMac to my folks when they wanted their first computer. I set it up for them, played WoW natively under mac os on it, booted to windows and played some decent windows games on it. All-in, i was sold, mac was the way to go for me.
I was holding out to buy the new iMac for myself and then along came the crappy GPU inside it - will i be booting to windows and running crysis, bioshock, half life 2 at native 24'' (or even 20'') resolution of the iMac...? Erm, no!
So here i am wanting a decent game-capable desktop pc that also can do work, social and entertainment things. The problem is nothing sold by apple for a reasonable price is any good for gaming. Sure i could buy a ££$$ mac tower, but it's overkill - i don't need quad core & ecc memory at ridiculous prices. I don't want a two year old graphics card that is stupidly expensive and underpowered by today's standards.
So what are my options? Buy a cheap Dell or spend a small fortune on a mac pro, upgrade the gpu and still have less gaming / upgrade flexibility than the dell? I know which machine i would rather have. Apple just have to make it...
We really need more punctuation to denote different tones in our speech. But until that happens I'll try to be a better writer.
While becoming a better writer is a good goal, I really don't blame you and I don't think you are a bad writer by any stretch of the imagination. I held no malice against you either way. Tone is very hard to put in without a silly emoticon, and those had the feel of being cheap anyway. There is no easy answer. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't.
To me (the only guy who gets to spend my money), games on a computer are like DVD players in a car. Not necessary for what I got it for. As for Apple making money off of it, I've bought over 200 Macs for business and pleasure. Frankly, I think I've been their target market more than computer gamers have.
Not saying that it's not an important part of a consumer market puzzle. Just saying that it doesn't hurt me a whit if I never see a game on a Mac.
I'd very much like to not having to pay for Vista or XP to run the Orange Box, thank you Mr. Jobs.
/Adrian
If you have an Intel Mac, check out Crossover. I refuse to put an XP partition on my Mac Pro. The latest version of Crossover (6.2) runs TF2 pretty well minus a few font and sound issues. Source plays almost perfect. Unfortunately, I haven't dug into HL2 enough to know how well it runs but I know folks play it using Crossover.
While I don't have a lot of time for gaming, I would love to see the Apple gaming market move up from it's anemic status.
For all of you that say PC gaming can be 100% replaced by a console, you're 100% wrong.
This has been debated over and over and over again.
Points for pc gaming:
A) You DON'T need a top of the line video card to play the newest games. As Crytek said in a recent interview, their specifications are made for computers 3 years old from the release date.
You DON'T have full control / accuracy on a console like you have a PC
C) With a console you don't have the speed of a PC for games. I'm talking about load times (my biggest complaint about consoles).
D) On RTS and FPS games Mouse + Keyboard smokes a game pad any day.
E) Mods. Some of the biggest mods I've ever seen was Urban Terror / Counter Strike. There were so many mods for Quake 3 and half-life. Impossible with consoles.
F) Communication for Multiplayer games is much easier on PCs vs consoles. Teamspeak, Ventrillo, X-Fire, Built-in communication, built-in chat communication.
I think it's beginning to be a common misconception that PC gaming is a niche market. The expansion pack to world of warcraft (burning crusades) sold over 2.4 MILLION copies in 1 day. Battlefield 2 has sold over 2.5 million copies. These are just 2 games.
PC gaming is alive and well. It will never die. Most of the innovation for consoles comes from pc gaming. It would be hard to have one without the other.
For all the people that want to switch to mac but can't because of games, it only hurts apple in the end. Why not create a small team internally in apple? Get APIs together, Listen to the developers, add at least low end graphics cards isntead of dedicated graphics cards to your lower class machines, and go from there.
/end rant
Most of those who say go buy a console have little concept of gaming. It's best to forgive their ignorance.
I can see no evidence that Valve understands Apple.
I don't think anyone understands Apple.
Quote:
Originally Posted by zanshin
To me (the only guy who gets to spend my money), games on a computer are like DVD players in a car. Not necessary for what I got it for. As for Apple making money off of it, I've bought over 200 Macs for business and pleasure. Frankly, I think I've been their target market more than computer gamers have.
Not saying that it's not an important part of a consumer market puzzle. Just saying that it doesn't hurt me a whit if I never see a game on a Mac.
Yes it does, the more people Apple turns away, the more it hurts all of us.
Quote:
Originally Posted by G-News
It's hardly astonishing that a lot of Mac users don't seem to be interested in games, but are using stuff Apple is strong at every day. That's probably because you chose the Mac because you knew it was strong at what you needed to get done.
Had you been interested in games, you probably wouldn't have chosen the Mac.
Thus, the apparent lack of Mac gamers is more of a proof of Apple's weakness in gaming, rather than Apple being right about not caring about games. Games is and has been a huge market for at least 15 years and Apple has failed to realize that so far. And that might very well be also due to the fact Steve hates games. Problem is, Steve isn't everyone.
That's the biggest problem. He isn't everyone but he thinks he has the right to decide for everyone. There are a few of us outside the creative fields who believe the advantages of Mac OS X outweigh Apple's quarks, but I know of many who aren't exactly sold on windows who won't buy a Mac because the entire gaming experience is mediocre at best.
I bought a Mac with the specific intention to forcefully limit my time and money spent on games. Nevertheless, I think it's bad business on Apple's part not to make more of an effort to attract gamers. Apple has a lot of appeal with young people, but lots of young people are gamers...
Yes it does, the more people Apple turns away, the more it hurts all of us.
That's the biggest problem. He isn't everyone but he thinks he has the right to decide for everyone. There are a few of us outside the creative fields who believe the advantages of Mac OS X outweigh Apple's quarks, but I know of many who aren't exactly sold on windows who won't buy a Mac because the entire gaming experience is mediocre at best.
Agreed. At what point does a lack of PCI slots for video cards stifle the desire of ATI and Nvidia to write drivers, software whatever for OS X then affect the video cards that are indeed needed for the professional market. I'm guessing we're reaching that point. Not my area of expertise, so jump in and correct me if I'm wrong.
well, it's going to be a long time before apple wakes from those fake surveys that suggest the mac platform is growing. not it is not, ilife is just not a market driver at all, every windows and linux can do what iLife does, sometimes even better. how much does the average folk spend on iLife anyhow? i just play music on itunes, and sort my photographs once every few months. my ibookG4 is prolly going to be the 1st and only mac i'll own for a long, long time.
that's because you won't need to upgrade it every year just to play the newest games...
Boy is this guy clueless! There aren't any games for the PC or Vista either! Games on the computer are dead.
Golly... how does Blizzard manage to pull in over $1 billion a year in revenue with just one PC game in a dead market space? They must be ninjas!
Quote:
People are not playing games on the computer anymore. The consoles are far more powerful.
I'm sorry, but as someone who up until recently WORKED in the console gaming industry, I can tell you that that is a bunch of utter crap/hype. \
When a new generation of consoles first gets released, yes, they are on par with high-end PCs running monster graphics cards. But consoles exist on a 4-6 year cycle, and aren't upgradeable, performance-wise. Not long after a console is released, it is ALWAYS surpassed in performance by high end PCs, then mid-level PCs.
And by the end of a console's cycle, it's weaksauce compared to PCs, frankly. Compare what your Playstation 2 can do graphically compared to what a good PC or Mac can do. The console gets trounced.
Ya gotta stop believing the hype. Consoles are great in some ways, but they'll never completely replace PCs for gaming, simply because there's some kinds of games that the console just isn't suited or ideal for (like RTS, and to a lesser extent, FPS), and because consoles remain static (aren't significantly upgradeable) through their lifespan.
EFI support is required to be able boot on Itanium servers & workstations, and Microsoft supported both. There is no BIOS for Itanium that I've heard about. They have not taken that knowledge to the x86 versions. Their reasoning when they said that was because there's no point to putting any man-hours into porting it when there's no hardware to use it.
To boot an Itanium server into windows (as I mentioned in my previous post), you need an EFI boot manager. HP, Intel, IBM all worked on this together. This wasn't from M$.
And M$ is only partly right. All EFI versions of the motherboards are ready to go. Waiting for M$ on this one.
Games are "one of the biggest things holding them back in the consumer space," he said. "If you look at a Macintosh right now, it does a lot of things really well compared to a Vista PC, but there are no games. Why, I don't know. If I were a Macintosh product manager, it would be pretty high on my list."
I agree. Apple and gaming are like a train wreck.
Crap open gl drivers. Non-upgradable gpu slot in the iMac, non-mortal/consumer tower that doesn't start at £1700. GPUS that aren't a year out of date. A tower line up that isn't a year out of date. Prices that aren't a year out of date.
Letting Bungie slip into M$'s hands was an act of treason. THE Mac gaming house sold out. Their choice. But it was Apple's too. Symptamatic of their gaming neglect.
Macs/Apple never about gaming? Meheh. Whither the Apple II? Or the early days of the Mac?
When Mac gaming hasn't been this healthy in a while...when Apple has been doing so much great stuff in the consumer space? Why can't they take advantage of the millions who are buying Gaming towers, Wiis, PS3s, PS2s, 360s? THat is is the consumer space. AND Apple is with the iPod/iPhone, mini, iMac in the consumer space.
They just don't seem to have a gaming strategy in place.
I'd buy BLizzard and hook up those pay per play subscribers...there's alot of them! Next I'd hunt down Id games...then I'd be after Valve.
Apple could rock the gaming world. It's just bizzare that they aren't.
I'd like to dispell 2 other rumors / points brought up...
A) The iMac's graphics cards were "downgraded".
Excluding the NVidia 7600gt (128 bit graphics card), the iMac's main card in the previous generations were ATI x1600s. ATI typically has 3-4 card numbers during a generation. 300, 600, 800, & sometimes 900. Going from weakest to strongest. NVidia is the same way. Apple went from ATI x1600 -> 2600. It was a conversion to the new graphics from AMD. (I need to stop saying ATI). Anyways, it would have been a nice upgrade but during the transition from ATI and AMD was during the x1600 -> 2600 transition. And AMD totally screwed up the new cards. The 2900 does alright compared to some NVidia 8800s. But it wasn't all it cracked up to be. Apple naturally had to go with the 2600 because that was the next generation. Why they went with AMD over Nvidia remains a question. Most believe it was contract obligations. The NVidia 7600 and 8600 pounce the AMD 2600. This is the first time I know of that the MacBookPro / Powerbook is faster graphics wise than the iMac. (MBP has NVidia 8600 mobile). So blame this one on AMD here.
The other rumor / misconception is: PC gamers only have high end software and that's it.
I'm what I believe you'd call the average pc gamer. While I work 6-12 hours a day @ home doing web development, I like to casually play Battlefield 2, World In Conflict, etc games at night to unwind. My main gaming pc isn't what you'd call fantastic. I DO have a core2duo e6700 (but that was only because it was given to me), but the rest of my system is subpar. NVidia 7900GS graphics card. 1gig ram. For those who don't know, BF2 has some amazingly long load times compared to other pc games. It has to render a whole world to play on. So when maps switch everyone who was playing gets to wait for it to load. I am actually in the top 5 every time a game loads. This means everybody else (usually play on 64 person maps) has a slower system than I do. Most of the people I know that play BF2 barely have an AMD Athlon 64 (single core), a 128 bit graphics card, MAYBE 1gb of ram. Basically a 500 dollar pc. You don't need the most high end pc to play games. 3 year old pcs can play games just fine. Maybe not at the top graphics. But they can play and keep up just fine.
the need for a pc to play networked games is gone. the need for a $5,000 pc to get good 3d graphics is gone. i suppose if halo 3 were playable with my keyboard and mouse the way quake was i might try it. no, that would require a $450 console investment.
You are so way overplaying the cost of a game PC that it's not funny. If you want to look plausible in your arguments, stay away from the stupid hyperbole.
Very true, Jeff. Anyone who honestly thinks you have to spend $5000 to get good PC graphics obviously isn't a gamer, and does not know of what they speak. \
To boot an Itanium server into windows (as I mentioned in my previous post), you need an EFI boot manager. HP, Intel, IBM all worked on this together. This wasn't from M$.
And M$ is only partly right. All EFI versions of the motherboards are ready to go. Waiting for M$ on this one.
But if BIOS is sufficient to get the job done (it initializes the hardware, detects the boot device and loads the bootloader code from the boot sector, and provides a minimal hardware abstraction layer until everything is fully up and running and Windows' drivers are ready to take direct control of the hardware at full speed), then what is Microsoft's incentive to make the investment that would be required to write an EFI version of x86 Windows?
But if BIOS is sufficient to get the job done (it initializes the hardware, detects the boot device and loads the bootloader code from the boot sector, and provides a minimal hardware abstraction layer until everything is fully up and running and Windows' drivers are ready to take direct control of the hardware at full speed), then what is Microsoft's incentive to make the investment that would be required to write an EFI version of x86 Windows?
That's the thing, BIOS isn't efficient any more. With EFI you can get network connectivity and do bios updates, get drivers, fix viruses, fix windows. EFI allows more than 256 bits to the graphics card, allows full PCI speed. The BIOS can still get viruses.
Think of the EFI as a mini operating system. It's very powerful and much more useful than your standard BIOS. This is one of the big reasons Apple chose to go with EFI during the switch, (that and i'm sure Intel highly suggested it).
Comments
Had you been interested in games, you probably wouldn't have chosen the Mac.
Thus, the apparent lack of Mac gamers is more of a proof of Apple's weakness in gaming, rather than Apple being right about not caring about games. Games is and has been a huge market for at least 15 years and Apple has failed to realize that so far. And that might very well be also due to the fact Steve hates games. Problem is, Steve isn't everyone.
I don't follow though. Are you suggesting that people get addicted so they can meet others at support groups? That's the only reasonable interpretation to your response that I can conjure, but that is clearly absurd. Even suggesting that people can choose what they get addicted to is shaky. Getting your impressions of a group from a parody is silly too. Should people get what they know about Mac users from Penny Arcade's early strips?
I believe he was trying to be funny, but maybe the joke got lost on you...
Got to have some humour...
I believe he was trying to be funny, but maybe the joke got lost on you...
Got to have some humour...
That may be true. Sometimes it's hard to tell tone with text.
If Apple would release a smaller, lower spec Mac Pro with some decent graphics and drivers then it would become the fastest selling Mac in Apple's history.
/agree
Even if apple aren't chasing native game development, they should at least have the decency to put decent gpu's in their systems so we can bootcamp and play.
I've always enjoyed games, all the way from Atari 2600, ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga 500 and then finally onto a windows PC. Recently i tried the x-box 360. Before that the ps2 and psp (and yes, i do actually have a social life and a proper job etc).
The problem is, i really like the mac's os. I have a mac mini and it's great for email, web browsing, iPhoto and so forth. I even recommended the previous (white) iMac to my folks when they wanted their first computer. I set it up for them, played WoW natively under mac os on it, booted to windows and played some decent windows games on it. All-in, i was sold, mac was the way to go for me.
I was holding out to buy the new iMac for myself and then along came the crappy GPU inside it - will i be booting to windows and running crysis, bioshock, half life 2 at native 24'' (or even 20'') resolution of the iMac...? Erm, no!
So here i am wanting a decent game-capable desktop pc that also can do work, social and entertainment things. The problem is nothing sold by apple for a reasonable price is any good for gaming. Sure i could buy a ££$$ mac tower, but it's overkill - i don't need quad core & ecc memory at ridiculous prices. I don't want a two year old graphics card that is stupidly expensive and underpowered by today's standards.
So what are my options? Buy a cheap Dell or spend a small fortune on a mac pro, upgrade the gpu and still have less gaming / upgrade flexibility than the dell? I know which machine i would rather have. Apple just have to make it...
That may be true. Sometimes it's hard to tell tone with text.
I did join a friend at a CA support group. And yes the girls were pretty hot. But the rest was being silly.
We really need more punctuation to denote different tones in our speech. But until that happens I'll try to be a better writer.
We really need more punctuation to denote different tones in our speech. But until that happens I'll try to be a better writer.
While becoming a better writer is a good goal, I really don't blame you and I don't think you are a bad writer by any stretch of the imagination. I held no malice against you either way. Tone is very hard to put in without a silly emoticon, and those had the feel of being cheap anyway. There is no easy answer. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't.
Not saying that it's not an important part of a consumer market puzzle. Just saying that it doesn't hurt me a whit if I never see a game on a Mac.
Graphics card support.
I'd very much like to not having to pay for Vista or XP to run the Orange Box, thank you Mr. Jobs.
/Adrian
If you have an Intel Mac, check out Crossover. I refuse to put an XP partition on my Mac Pro. The latest version of Crossover (6.2) runs TF2 pretty well minus a few font and sound issues. Source plays almost perfect. Unfortunately, I haven't dug into HL2 enough to know how well it runs but I know folks play it using Crossover.
While I don't have a lot of time for gaming, I would love to see the Apple gaming market move up from it's anemic status.
For all of you that say PC gaming can be 100% replaced by a console, you're 100% wrong.
This has been debated over and over and over again.
Points for pc gaming:
A) You DON'T need a top of the line video card to play the newest games. As Crytek said in a recent interview, their specifications are made for computers 3 years old from the release date.
C) With a console you don't have the speed of a PC for games. I'm talking about load times (my biggest complaint about consoles).
D) On RTS and FPS games Mouse + Keyboard smokes a game pad any day.
E) Mods. Some of the biggest mods I've ever seen was Urban Terror / Counter Strike. There were so many mods for Quake 3 and half-life. Impossible with consoles.
F) Communication for Multiplayer games is much easier on PCs vs consoles. Teamspeak, Ventrillo, X-Fire, Built-in communication, built-in chat communication.
I think it's beginning to be a common misconception that PC gaming is a niche market. The expansion pack to world of warcraft (burning crusades) sold over 2.4 MILLION copies in 1 day. Battlefield 2 has sold over 2.5 million copies. These are just 2 games.
PC gaming is alive and well. It will never die. Most of the innovation for consoles comes from pc gaming. It would be hard to have one without the other.
For all the people that want to switch to mac but can't because of games, it only hurts apple in the end. Why not create a small team internally in apple? Get APIs together, Listen to the developers, add at least low end graphics cards isntead of dedicated graphics cards to your lower class machines, and go from there.
/end rant
Most of those who say go buy a console have little concept of gaming. It's best to forgive their ignorance.
I can see no evidence that Valve understands Apple.
I don't think anyone understands Apple.
To me (the only guy who gets to spend my money), games on a computer are like DVD players in a car. Not necessary for what I got it for. As for Apple making money off of it, I've bought over 200 Macs for business and pleasure. Frankly, I think I've been their target market more than computer gamers have.
Not saying that it's not an important part of a consumer market puzzle. Just saying that it doesn't hurt me a whit if I never see a game on a Mac.
Yes it does, the more people Apple turns away, the more it hurts all of us.
It's hardly astonishing that a lot of Mac users don't seem to be interested in games, but are using stuff Apple is strong at every day. That's probably because you chose the Mac because you knew it was strong at what you needed to get done.
Had you been interested in games, you probably wouldn't have chosen the Mac.
Thus, the apparent lack of Mac gamers is more of a proof of Apple's weakness in gaming, rather than Apple being right about not caring about games. Games is and has been a huge market for at least 15 years and Apple has failed to realize that so far. And that might very well be also due to the fact Steve hates games. Problem is, Steve isn't everyone.
That's the biggest problem. He isn't everyone but he thinks he has the right to decide for everyone. There are a few of us outside the creative fields who believe the advantages of Mac OS X outweigh Apple's quarks, but I know of many who aren't exactly sold on windows who won't buy a Mac because the entire gaming experience is mediocre at best.
I don't think anyone understands Apple.
Yes it does, the more people Apple turns away, the more it hurts all of us.
That's the biggest problem. He isn't everyone but he thinks he has the right to decide for everyone. There are a few of us outside the creative fields who believe the advantages of Mac OS X outweigh Apple's quarks, but I know of many who aren't exactly sold on windows who won't buy a Mac because the entire gaming experience is mediocre at best.
Agreed. At what point does a lack of PCI slots for video cards stifle the desire of ATI and Nvidia to write drivers, software whatever for OS X then affect the video cards that are indeed needed for the professional market. I'm guessing we're reaching that point. Not my area of expertise, so jump in and correct me if I'm wrong.
well, it's going to be a long time before apple wakes from those fake surveys that suggest the mac platform is growing. not it is not, ilife is just not a market driver at all, every windows and linux can do what iLife does, sometimes even better. how much does the average folk spend on iLife anyhow? i just play music on itunes, and sort my photographs once every few months. my ibookG4 is prolly going to be the 1st and only mac i'll own for a long, long time.
that's because you won't need to upgrade it every year just to play the newest games...
Boy is this guy clueless! There aren't any games for the PC or Vista either! Games on the computer are dead.
Golly... how does Blizzard manage to pull in over $1 billion a year in revenue with just one PC game in a dead market space? They must be ninjas!
People are not playing games on the computer anymore. The consoles are far more powerful.
I'm sorry, but as someone who up until recently WORKED in the console gaming industry, I can tell you that that is a bunch of utter crap/hype.
When a new generation of consoles first gets released, yes, they are on par with high-end PCs running monster graphics cards. But consoles exist on a 4-6 year cycle, and aren't upgradeable, performance-wise. Not long after a console is released, it is ALWAYS surpassed in performance by high end PCs, then mid-level PCs.
And by the end of a console's cycle, it's weaksauce compared to PCs, frankly. Compare what your Playstation 2 can do graphically compared to what a good PC or Mac can do. The console gets trounced.
Ya gotta stop believing the hype. Consoles are great in some ways, but they'll never completely replace PCs for gaming, simply because there's some kinds of games that the console just isn't suited or ideal for (like RTS, and to a lesser extent, FPS), and because consoles remain static (aren't significantly upgradeable) through their lifespan.
.
EFI support is required to be able boot on Itanium servers & workstations, and Microsoft supported both. There is no BIOS for Itanium that I've heard about. They have not taken that knowledge to the x86 versions. Their reasoning when they said that was because there's no point to putting any man-hours into porting it when there's no hardware to use it.
To boot an Itanium server into windows (as I mentioned in my previous post), you need an EFI boot manager. HP, Intel, IBM all worked on this together. This wasn't from M$.
And M$ is only partly right. All EFI versions of the motherboards are ready to go. Waiting for M$ on this one.
Games are "one of the biggest things holding them back in the consumer space," he said. "If you look at a Macintosh right now, it does a lot of things really well compared to a Vista PC, but there are no games. Why, I don't know. If I were a Macintosh product manager, it would be pretty high on my list."
I agree. Apple and gaming are like a train wreck.
Crap open gl drivers. Non-upgradable gpu slot in the iMac, non-mortal/consumer tower that doesn't start at £1700. GPUS that aren't a year out of date. A tower line up that isn't a year out of date. Prices that aren't a year out of date.
Letting Bungie slip into M$'s hands was an act of treason. THE Mac gaming house sold out. Their choice. But it was Apple's too. Symptamatic of their gaming neglect.
Macs/Apple never about gaming? Meheh. Whither the Apple II? Or the early days of the Mac?
When Mac gaming hasn't been this healthy in a while...when Apple has been doing so much great stuff in the consumer space? Why can't they take advantage of the millions who are buying Gaming towers, Wiis, PS3s, PS2s, 360s? THat is is the consumer space. AND Apple is with the iPod/iPhone, mini, iMac in the consumer space.
They just don't seem to have a gaming strategy in place.
I'd buy BLizzard and hook up those pay per play subscribers...there's alot of them! Next I'd hunt down Id games...then I'd be after Valve.
Apple could rock the gaming world. It's just bizzare that they aren't.
Lemon Bon Bon.
A) The iMac's graphics cards were "downgraded".
Excluding the NVidia 7600gt (128 bit graphics card), the iMac's main card in the previous generations were ATI x1600s. ATI typically has 3-4 card numbers during a generation. 300, 600, 800, & sometimes 900. Going from weakest to strongest. NVidia is the same way. Apple went from ATI x1600 -> 2600. It was a conversion to the new graphics from AMD. (I need to stop saying ATI). Anyways, it would have been a nice upgrade but during the transition from ATI and AMD was during the x1600 -> 2600 transition. And AMD totally screwed up the new cards. The 2900 does alright compared to some NVidia 8800s. But it wasn't all it cracked up to be. Apple naturally had to go with the 2600 because that was the next generation. Why they went with AMD over Nvidia remains a question. Most believe it was contract obligations. The NVidia 7600 and 8600 pounce the AMD 2600. This is the first time I know of that the MacBookPro / Powerbook is faster graphics wise than the iMac. (MBP has NVidia 8600 mobile). So blame this one on AMD here.
I'm what I believe you'd call the average pc gamer. While I work 6-12 hours a day @ home doing web development, I like to casually play Battlefield 2, World In Conflict, etc games at night to unwind. My main gaming pc isn't what you'd call fantastic. I DO have a core2duo e6700 (but that was only because it was given to me), but the rest of my system is subpar. NVidia 7900GS graphics card. 1gig ram. For those who don't know, BF2 has some amazingly long load times compared to other pc games. It has to render a whole world to play on. So when maps switch everyone who was playing gets to wait for it to load. I am actually in the top 5 every time a game loads. This means everybody else (usually play on 64 person maps) has a slower system than I do. Most of the people I know that play BF2 barely have an AMD Athlon 64 (single core), a 128 bit graphics card, MAYBE 1gb of ram. Basically a 500 dollar pc. You don't need the most high end pc to play games. 3 year old pcs can play games just fine. Maybe not at the top graphics. But they can play and keep up just fine.
the need for a pc to play networked games is gone. the need for a $5,000 pc to get good 3d graphics is gone. i suppose if halo 3 were playable with my keyboard and mouse the way quake was i might try it. no, that would require a $450 console investment.
You are so way overplaying the cost of a game PC that it's not funny. If you want to look plausible in your arguments, stay away from the stupid hyperbole.
Very true, Jeff. Anyone who honestly thinks you have to spend $5000 to get good PC graphics obviously isn't a gamer, and does not know of what they speak.
.
To boot an Itanium server into windows (as I mentioned in my previous post), you need an EFI boot manager. HP, Intel, IBM all worked on this together. This wasn't from M$.
And M$ is only partly right. All EFI versions of the motherboards are ready to go. Waiting for M$ on this one.
But if BIOS is sufficient to get the job done (it initializes the hardware, detects the boot device and loads the bootloader code from the boot sector, and provides a minimal hardware abstraction layer until everything is fully up and running and Windows' drivers are ready to take direct control of the hardware at full speed), then what is Microsoft's incentive to make the investment that would be required to write an EFI version of x86 Windows?
But if BIOS is sufficient to get the job done (it initializes the hardware, detects the boot device and loads the bootloader code from the boot sector, and provides a minimal hardware abstraction layer until everything is fully up and running and Windows' drivers are ready to take direct control of the hardware at full speed), then what is Microsoft's incentive to make the investment that would be required to write an EFI version of x86 Windows?
That's the thing, BIOS isn't efficient any more. With EFI you can get network connectivity and do bios updates, get drivers, fix viruses, fix windows. EFI allows more than 256 bits to the graphics card, allows full PCI speed. The BIOS can still get viruses.
Think of the EFI as a mini operating system. It's very powerful and much more useful than your standard BIOS. This is one of the big reasons Apple chose to go with EFI during the switch, (that and i'm sure Intel highly suggested it).