I was chattin with a friend of mine, and he was extolling the virtues of Macintosh hardware and all that good stuff. I countered with the classic “Nobody ports to Mac”. And while software designers are starting, I’m hard pressed to understand why people were so reluctant to port to it before. Does anybody know why?
Not enough people own a Mac and are also potential customers to make it profitable in most cases, I imagine. Your more popular titles, like MS Office or Warcraft 3, will sell enough to make it worth the programmers’ time, while Joe Blow’s Deer Hunting Fury ain’t gonna get the budget into the black.
Take into account that this trend is changing because of the fundamental modifications to the Macintosh operating system. As OSX is based on Linux it is now far easier for a developer to design a program that will not only run on OSX but all other Linux users as well.
I think that more and more programs are going to be ported to Mac eventually; does anyone see this trend ending with Macintosh eventually just allowing Windows to be put on its computers? It is my understanding that Macintosh hardware is excellent; wouldn’t that be a logical final step?
Unfortunately, I’m afraid Sqube is correct. One of the joys of running a Mac is, since programing is significantly different from other PC’s (read Windows) Virus’, Worms,and other heartaches are pretty much non-existant. I think that will change as the platforms come together.
Are you sure? I thought that OS X was based almost entirely on Darwin, which was based on BSD.
I do agree with your main point though - OS X is UNIX-like and it’s more cost-effective to make a *NIX version of a game than a Mac-only version.
A couple of decades ago, software development was something that a student, an unemployed man, or a hobbyist did in his bedroom all by his lonesome within a month or two.
This is no longer the case. Professional software projects require developments teams that easily scale to tens of collaborators, take years, and require millions of dollars worth of investment. Especially games.
Porting takes less investment and man-hours, but still requires significant risk. You can’t just port a big-name game or productivity package to a niche platform without an expectation of significant returns – whether financial, strategic, or otherwise.
Microsoft loses its shirt every time it ports Office to Mac, but it must continue to do so in order to stave off accusations about its desktop monopoly.
Adobe has far more PC customers than Mac customers, but it still ports to Mac, mainly because it wants to maintain its recurring revenue stream from Mac-only design shops, as opposed to fickle PC users who would readily switch to an equally feature-laden software package that’s cheaper. (Such as Paint Shop Pro) Having secured the loyal Mac userbase, Adobe in turn uses that asset as a word-of-mouth grassroots marketing agent to market its applications to new generations of PC users.
You get the idea.
At one time the Mac had about 15% of the PC market but now I’ve read it’s 5%. That’s not enough to be worth the trouble for most companies.
I’m pretty sure Excel was on a Mac before it was on Windows - the Mac came out in 1984 and Windows a few years later. Windows didn’t really catch on until version 3 came out in 1990. A lot of people never heard of Windows before version 3 - people mainly ran versions 1 or 2 just to run Excel and then they would do everything else in DOS. Excel came with a stripped down Windows so it would load Windows when you ran it.
I remember it the way YWalker does; Windows was really not a commonplace thing on a PC before version 3. When the video game “Balance of Power” came out for the PC, it requires Windows; at the time, reading the system requirements, I did not know what “Windows” was. I’d had a PC for years.
Having said that, at least with respect to games, video games are a high risk investment. One bad game can sink your company; ask Cavedog how “Total Annihilation: Kingdoms” went, or ask 360 how “Patriot” panned out. Oh no, you can’t - they were killed by those games. Porting to a new OS is an expensive proposition and is usually only done once the game is successful. Since the Mac generates far less demand for video games, it’s just not usually worth the effort.
It is already possible to run Windows on a Mac, using Virtual PC
Mac OSX is based on UNIX (a BSD variant - apple likes to call it Darwin)
Linux is based on UNIX.
So while both have UNIX heritage, MacOSX is distinctly NOT Linux.
Referencing some of the posts above…
Yes, Excel was a Mac-first product. I’m pretty sure Word was, too. I remember using both of them on Mac SE’s and Plusses before I’d ever heard of Windows 3.1 (the first “generally popular” Windows).
Early Windows was developed by copying the Mac Toolbox (the API) made available to Microsoft for development of serious office applications. Don’t debate this; it’s true but it’s too late to have any hard feelings about it one way or the other.
I’ll further attest that Mac OS X != Linux.
VirtualPC is an x86 virtual machine for the Mac. So, it’ll run Windows, Linux, pretty much anything you throw at it.
I’ve always heard that Office for the Mac platform is still a huge profit generator for the Microsoft Mac Development Unit. I don’t think Microsoft takes a killing on it at all.
Games are slow, but the cool thing about having a Mac for games is it’s hard to spend $50 on a crappy game you don’t like within a week. By time they make it to the platform, you know that it’s a damned good product.
I like not having everything ported over to the Mac. Keeps all the crap software away from my system. But as has been pointed out, it’s not profitable.
However, my experience has been that there hasn’t been any type of program I’ve needed that I could find a good solution for on the Mac. And easily. Games are another matter, but I don’t play games. But most of the big ones get ported over.
I’ve been hearing how Macs were going to catch up to PC’s (as far as user base) for at least 12 years. I’m still waiting. It seems the Mac zealots would like people to believe this.
As far as the hardware, I don’t read enough of the specifics to be a complete judge, but I can think of one example. About two and a half years ago a girlfriend was looking at a new G4. She is a graphic designer. She was telling me about the hot video card that came with the G4. I took a look at the specs. It was NVidia TNT2 based. This was exactly what I was replacing in my PC since it was outdated. She actually got mad at me for pointing it out. Zealots… what can you do?
RogueRacer, that has nothing to do with the OP, and approaches flamebait. The use of “zealot” in particular is omnipresent in USENET and other flame wars, and I imagine in the Pit which I try to avoid for this very reason.
Therefore despite the fact that I’m an expert user and owner of Win/Mac/Linux equipment, I won’t contribute any more at risk of getting banned.
Balthisar, I actually wasn’t intended to offend anyone. Please accept my apologies if that was offensive to you. Zealot applied to my girlfriend. I’m sure that most Mac users are more reasonable than she was. Although I now have a different girlfriend, as luck would have it, she is also a graphic artist and a Mac user. Maybe you can help me understand the appeal of a Mac?
For me, every time that I have looked at them, I find them to be too overpriced and proprietary for my tastes. For example, my current girlfriend is looking at picking up a Powerbook sometime soon. She’s looking at spending around $4K for something that while very nice, seems to have no more features or computing power than something I can buy for somewhere around $2K in the PC world. I quite honestly do not see the appeal.
I guess I do like one thing about her current Mac. They don’t have a large enough user base for virus writers to target them.
Please feel free to extol the virtues of the Mac for unbelievers like me! It might save me a relationship when this girlfriend goes to buy her Powerbook!
I think the problem with games has been there for a long time, and it predates Windows, and, perhaps, even the Macintosh. When I was a kid, we had an Apple //c (which came out the same year the Macintosh did). IIRC, there were many more games for PC’s and PC clones than for Apples even then. If you were a gamer, you wanted a PC. That’s all there was to it. Games for Apples tended to be “educational”, since Apple did have such a big chunk of the school market.
My theory is that the Apple tended to be thought of as an “educational” machine, and most of the “fun” computer games are not the sort that a school would want to buy, so programmers didn’t even bother developing them for the Apple. Thus, people who wanted to game bought PC’s. Etc., etc.
Emulators don’t count, IMO. I can get (and have) Mac emulators for my PC, but performance is poor, hardware compatibility is bad, etc. FWIW, though, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t more and more crossover in the future (between MacOS and Windows).
The appeal of Macs is similar to the appeal of cell phones. A Mac buyer is paying for a combination of usability, good looks, design sensibility and brand identity.
While I would have no compunctions about buying a cheaper cell phone from a lesser-known manufacturer that has a better set of features than the leading brands (Philips Fisio series or some of the latest Alcatel releases come to mind) some ditzy chick might swear by the latest cute thing that Nokia or Sony-Ericsson has released. The user interface might be well-designed and focus-group-tested, but it’s likely to be overpriced and under-featured. And that’s just fine for that demographic, mostly because the purchase is as much of a fashion item as a technology solution.
Make sense?
Former PC game developer chiming in. (I switched to working on Playstation games last year.)
Yes, the people who are saying it’s economic are exactly right. With Mac ports we expected around 10% of the sales of the PC version. We knew we’d see about $10 per unit. (That’s what we could count on as developers after the retailers, distributors, and publishers took their cut.)
Say we had a title that sold 200,000 units. (A moderate PC hit.) We could expect to sell about 20,000 units on the Mac. If it was going to cost us more than $200K to port it just wasn’t worth it.
In fact, since the programmers, artists and managers working on the port were being prevented from working on the next PC title, the upside had to be even bigger. In general we preferred to have them working on the next potential blockbuster, instead of chasing after marginal dollars.
The result was we didn’t even consider porting unless the title was a megahit. There just wasn’t any money in it.