sorry, should have been “a grand more per box”.
Because Steve Jobs is a fucking tool. Macs are overpriced slow pieces of shit. Unless you are doing high end mathematical work that can take advantage of the altivec engine, like SETI@Home or dnetc’s RC5, or such work in the scientific arena, Macs are useless. Jobs can’t even get OSX to run worth a shit. Friggen OS9 (or “Classic” as the whores at apple like to call it now) ran a thousand times better than this Panther, or Tiger, or whatever feline bullshit they are calling it now. Most new games run like shit on Macs. Its almost comical. Unless Valve writes some code into HL2 to make it use altivec, macs remain worthless pieces of shit. Can’t customize them worth a shit, can’t overclock worth a shit, can’t build your own (unless you buy the precise parts intended to comprise a particular model.
[Howard Dean]
YEEEEEEEAAAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHHH!!!
[/Howard Dead]
And BTW: I am a former Mac Evangelist. You could say I Saw The Light.
Geez. Who pissed in your Corn Flakes?
I agree with those who have said that there simply aren’t enough Mac users out there for developers to justify spending much time and money on a Mac version unless the game is a major hit. Also I don’t think I can go into my local Best Buy and pick up any Mac software, let alone games. Maybe it’s different in other locales, but if a Mac gamer around here wants to get the latest software he’s going to have to order it online or drive for a while to find a store that sells it.
Personal opinion. For me, Macs have always lived up to the “open box, plug in, use computer” advertising. And OSX works far better for me than OS9. Thumbs up to Jobs!
Yeah, 'cause the color-coding to set up PCs is really difficult to figure out…
If they wanted a larger market share, they’d have to drop their prices considerably to be competitive in the gaming market. You don’t see a lot of laptops set up for gaming either for the same reason; I looked at a Dell catolog recently, and in order to get a laptop with the same specs as the computer I bought this summer (less than $1000 for the pc, new mid-range graphics card and 512mb more ram) it would cost almost $3000, which is even worse when you think of how hard it is to update the graphics cards. The only way Mac is going to ever get a shot at attracting a lot of gamers is to find some way to make their components dirt cheap, since they’re not going to make it on volume sales.
OK, I’m not getting this at all. Panther runs splendidly. OS9.x crashed the system like clockwork. MacOS memory management prior to OSX.x was, in a word, pathetic. It’s actually nicer now to run Classic apps within OSX because if the shit hangs, I can at least kill the Classic layer and re-launch. I have literally left my tower on for months running both Jaguar and Panther without having to reboot. Very occasionally I have to force-quit an OSX-native app., but that almost never happens (usually it’s Safari when it encounters a script it doesn’t like).
I got Mac Halo, which admittedly easily strains my poor old G4 tower to its limits without turning off just about everything that makes it beautiful, but on G5 towers and the new iMacs I’ve read it runs pretty smoothly with all the bells-and-whistles. Macs certainly are not very customizable, and they cost more, but a lot of your rant seems not to fit my experience using MacOS X.2.x and X.3.x remotely.
CynicalGabe. Forget which forum we’re in, did we??
Take your rant to the Pit. This is General Questions.
Don’t do this again.
samclem GQ moderator
With PC’s you can get cheap generic parts so it is cheaper to build a high performance games machine. It’s also cheaper to upgrade your video card and probably your RAM, CPU, etc… at least in the past… and now it would be too hard for the Macs to catch up.
The number of PC owners and potential buyers of games has always been bigger than that of Macs which means that makers of PC games are more likely to get higher sales for their games which encourages more games to be made for PC’s compared to Macs which makes people looking to play lots and lots of games more likely to buy a PC than a Mac, etc.
When I started with home computers I was sure that the Amiga was going to become the standard home PC because it had sounds and graphics way beyond the capacity of anything else at about 10% of the price. Game play on Amigas was fun when PCs struggled to provide Leisure Suit Larry.
Geez, I think everyone is really over-analyzing this. The reason Macs lagged behind PCs in games is because by the time the computer game industry really took off (i.e. the 90s) Macs were still a niche product compared to PCs.
IOW its because of the same reason that Macs never overtook PCs in general. Because Jobs saw them as a tool for intelligent, semi-artsy, devoted professionals while Gates saw them as toasters, a ubiquious appliance. Had Apple licensed their hardware to allow inexpensive Mac clones today they would be as big as Microsoft and I would be typing this on an Apple instead of a PC.
This is not true. They are the exception not the rule. The vast majority of PC gamers were & are teenage boys who most definitely did NOT have $2500 to blow on a Mac (or on a Doedeckium, 1000x overclocked, liquid hydrogen-cooled PC).
Okay, my apologies to kanicbird. But still, it’s not MAC – that’s something entirely different. Without MAC, you wouldn’t be on the internet. More specifically, no ethernet style networks would run, which doesn’t preclude internet use, but somewhere along the line you’re likely dependant on it.
Yeah, but this is where they start.
I was a poor (relatively speaking) kid once. Made do with my SX25, then DX2-66 while my friend picked up his sweet Pentium 60 with a 3X CDROM drive that spun circles around my machine.
Because of the PC start I had, I never even looked at Macs. I knew from school they I could type stuff on them but that’s the extent of my Mac knowledge (oh yeah, and Oregon Trail and da bomb).
Mac would really have to focus on games and kids to seriously compete. As things stand right now my kids won’t know anything about Macs because I’m a PC guy.
Almost every games graphic engine programmer will have met OpenGL before.
Again, this is very false. A real gamer doesn’t buy his machine, he builds it from parts individually selected, something you can’t really do with an Apple machine.
And you can build a very nice gaming machine, for less than a Mac cost. For example, the entry level iMac, comes with 1.6ghz G5, 256mb of RAM, a GeforceFX 5200 Ultra video card, a 80gb hard drive, and a 17" LCD monitor, all wrapped up in a small, attrative package for $1299.
Now, for that price, I could easily build a PC with the 2ghz Athlon 64 3000+, a gigabyte of RAM, a Geforce 6800 video card (you can get them now for $230 at CompUSSR; to say the least this card is much faster than the 5200), a 160gb Hard drive, and a 17" LCD monitor, plus all other items, all for about the same total price of the basic iMac, though I admit it won’t look as pretty, though you could throw in some neon tubes and blinking LED lights to jazz it up a bit.
Another factor is overclocking. Gamers like to tweak and modify their machines to get extra power for free. Now, my PC motherboard made it very easy to overclock - just go into the bios and start pushing up the Front Side Bus. I managed to get my Athlon 64 2800+ up to 2.3ghz, from the 1.8ghz default. And when I pushed it too high, all I had to do was push the reset button, and my bios automatically reset to default settings.
With a Mac, your overclocking options are much more limited. IIRC, if you want to overclock at all, you have to screw around with jumper settings. And if you mess up. :eek: Please correct me on this if I am wrong, as Mac overclocking is not my strong point.
I think the business strategy decisions are more important than all the performance issues. Any statement about Job’s supposed obsession with the business market has to consider why he was obsessed with that market. Jobs understood that the business market was the largest portion, and would drive the market-share wars.
1: Apple didn’t license, so there were no Mac clones. The strategy was to get both the software and hardware bucks. This backfired because the IBM PC clones (starting with Compaq) drove down the price and drove up the market share.
2: The PC started out with a guaranteed acceptance that Apple lacked. True enough, Apple’s were the originator of the market, but they, and other early personal computers (e.g., Commodore) were ignored by corporations. IBM made the PC respectable. “No-one ever got fired for buying IBM” was a mantra in corporate data-processing departments (before they became IT or ITS).
3: The one market that Apple did achieve domination in was the educational market. In the 80’s Apples and then Macs lead the way in classrooms and computer labs across the country. This reinforced the “not a real computer” image, which retarded their acceptance.
Capturing he business market allowed the PC market to grow, reducing unit costs to acceptable prices to where you’d give one to your kid.
It’s terrifying. I don’t even know why I tried it. I have a dual 800MHz G4 tower. First, you have to spend hours combing the internet, trying to find the best info you can because Apple does NOT sanction monkeying with the CPUs in any way. First yoe need to know where and which jumpers among the scores found on the daughter card are the ones that control frequency. There’s a different bank of jumpers for eash processor, and, to make matters worse, they’re arranged differently in each bank. So, once you’ve figured out which jumpers need to be swapped where, you get out your soldering tools and do your best not to cause irreperable damage to the IC board the jumpers reside on. One badly aimed iron, or one errant glob of solder, and you can cook the whole card. In my case, assuming I got the jumper locations correct by extrapolating from tech documents I had to download from motorola, and from photos of a later-model G4 that had a very similar-looking daughter card, a worthwhile boost in speed (933MHz, was what I shot for…both processors have to be the same) was not attainable. I might have been able to squeeze more speed out, but that would involve resetting the core voltage, which requires monkeying with yet another bank of jumpers. I couldn’t take the stress! Putting the card back in after swapping the jumpers and getting no startup put the fear of gawd into me. So I put the jumpers back where they belonged, thanked my lucky stars my Mac worked again after taking a soldering iron to its innards, and vowed to be happy with what I’ve got thenceforth.
IMO, The modern desktop computer market began with “Myst”.
Myst was excellent, but it made one long for the ability to “look around”. That is, being a first-person game, it lacked first-person realism.
Now, there had been 3-D type games before, but Myst actually made people go out and buy computers with CD-ROM drives just to play the game.
So you had lots of people who’d cracked Myst looking for the next big thing when Doom came along not too long after that.
Doom was a PC game. Period. And it pretty much cemented the idea that 3-D games were PC games.
I have even seen editors for Mac magazines admit defeat. While the Mac retained superiority for professional quality static graphics, the 3-d Animation belonged, and still belongs to the PC. Ot was all over 12 years ago.
Now, the Mac has some well-conceived games. Ambrosia Software usually does a fine job, and I destroyed my wife work iBook by playing Escape Velocity on it, but for sheer thrills, the PC games have it all over the Mac.
Well, things have progressed a long way from where Escape Velocity taxes your GPU. The iMac G5, the slowest modern Mac desktop (don’t get me started on the eMac), uses the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, which, while not being the flashiest graphics hardware around, can handle any new game available on the Mac platform reasonably well. I think the current gold standard for Games That Can Bring Your Machine to Its Knees is Halo on the Mac platform, and I’ve seen it on a new 20" iMac with my own eyes. It’s beautiful. It’s even more beautiful on a dual 2.5GHz G5 tower with a 20" Cinema display, to be sure, but then you’re talking about $3.5k. The fully decked-out iMac G5 sets you back around two grand. Not cheap, but you get a fast CPU, with a 20 LCD display, DVD-R, reasonable, GPU with all the necessar 3D bells and whistles, and it looks rather gorgeous sitting on a desk. Yeah, you probably could spend a few hundred less on a comparable PC setup, so there’s no arguing price, once again. But to say Macs can’t do 3D gaming is simply inaccurate. The consumer Mac performs just as well as the consumer PC, at least. For a premium, true, but that premium has shrunk considerably.
I don’t think so. Both Marathon and Myth came out for the Mac first (Bungie was a pro-Mac developer before Microsoft bought them). Although it did come after Doom, Marathon broke a lot of new ground in the first-person shooter domain. (I seem to recall that it was one of the first games where you could look and shoot * up *.
I think it comes down to marketshare, and some really bad decisions on Apple’s part.