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Games Go to Boot Camp
by Chris Remo, Apr 11, 2006 11:30am PDTFor those of you wondering how that whole Windows-on-a-Mac thing is working out for games, 1UP has tried a few current PC games on an Intel Mac. They've dual booted a MacBook Pro with Windows XP, and installed Valve's Half-Life 2, Monolith's F.E.A.R., and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. From the hands on impressions, all three seem to have worked out pretty well.
The Intel transition is a big deal for Apple, so it's encouraging to see the company tackling it head-on. What matters to us is that the MacBook running Apple's official XP drivers is a robust, stable gaming platform capable of playing software from either side of the OS wars. While some are predicting this will be the beginning of the end for the Mac platform, the opposite seems to be true, at least anecdotally. At least a dozen platform fence-sitters have told me that the Mac's newfound ability to play PC games has broken down the last barrier to their buying a Mac as their next computer.Shacker empathe tried out Oblivion on his own Mac as well last week, and he even posted video of the experience. I'm pretty sure I've never actually owned an Apple product before, but I'll need a new laptop some day, and those Macs are looking mighty attractive...
Comments
Macs which run everything, look better then all the others and use higher quality components.
And their retarded brothers the PCs which can just run windows and linux.
Sort of like normal TV compared to HDTV, just with a smaller price difference.
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As far as why someone would want an Apple, there are a few possible reasons:
1. There are no viruses you can get on Mac OS X. Well, I think people have searched down an obscure one or two but for all purposes it is nil.
Because of the above, there's no need to buy or run a virus scanner for the Mac. I think there are a couple freeware ones available, but I don't know of a Mac user who uses one.
This is probably incidentally useful to a power user, since I keep my Windows clean anyway. But this is awesome for newer users, and the reason why I recently advocated a Mac to a family member that asked me. It's a reassuring peace of mind knowing that I will not foreseeably have to clean their computer every few months.
2. It's an attractive platform for developers. There's a BSD foundation, giving access to useful UNIX tools and regular expressions. The Cocoa API lets you get up graphical apps quickly. Every Apple system includes Xcode (Apple's coding IDE) and programming tools right out of the box.
3. A few creative industries have apps specific and favored on the Mac, like Logic for musicians. There's Final Cut for editors, though that has a bit more competition. I hear, though haven't seen it for myself, that Macs are still dominant in the graphic design and publishing industry.
4. Both the hardware and software exudes elegant design. The G5 tower for example, with its clean industrial look, carrying handles, and easy inside access. Or their Powerbooks, which have great feeling keyboards, thin and sleek cases, and little touches like the magnetic power cord attachment, built-in camera, and remote control.
Take Quicktime's play controls for example - they got rid of the redundant stop button so that it's simply rewind, play/pause, forward. Or take program menus of any app, which are always at the very top of the screen and thus allow you to snap scroll up there to click it. Or how bout Apple's awesome built-in font support with their Font Book program that lets you easily preview them. Their included PDF reader is a bazillion times faster and more responsive than Acrobat Reader, the latter of which is why I've grown to hate the PDF format on PCs.
You might discard these qualities as frivolous, but this attention to detail is found throughout their products.
5. Bootcamp gives the best of both worlds. Now developers can develop on and target three platforms (Mac, Unix, Windows) with one machine. Gamers can use Mac OS for their everyday stuff, being stable and virus free, and then hop into Windows for games.
And no, I don't work for Apple. I actually only recently got interested in them after the Intel switch. In the process, I found out why Apple is as lauded as they are, and a large reason is because of their excellent design.
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Apple mail intergrates into Exchange very very nicely, Id almost say better than Outlook...
I can't comment about the PDA needs as I don't have one nor desire one.
Connecting to a remote windows PC is easy, with MS remote desktop for OS X, works great.
The only thing that my PC does that my mac doesn't is run Visual Studio, and games, oh and I haven't found a nice SQL Server Client.. god knows I hate oracle...
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So the question is, would enough people keep using native OS X apps, thereby maintaining that profitability? I'd say yes, and I'd also say that Boot Camp really won't have much of an overall effect beyond increasing the Mac's market share slightly (and only slightly, because setting up dual-booting is an extra cost in terms of the XP license and the time involved to make it happen); Boot Camp is aimed at people for whom Windows is the exception, not the rule - i.e. people that always use native OS X apps if they're available. I honestly don't see this radically changing anything.
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I hate these "the world-is-flat and it's owned by Microsoft" bitches. Fucking ignorant fucks tow the fucking line for MS without ever venturing to the unknown. They believe whatever they're told, or happen to read, and are ostensibly incapable of thinking for themselves.
Fucking sheep.
Microsoft appropriates and acquires.... they don't innovate.... and truthfully,
I don't want the bloat of XP on my mac, just a port of DirectX 9. Kthnx.
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I need Outlook 2003 to sync with my exchange server which syncs with my tmobile MDA. I need to be in windows so that I know wtf is going on when I need to help a client. I need PC programs.
And I think most people that would buy a Mac and dual boot XP would find themselves saying the same thing. If not that, they would find themselves sick of dual booting like most people do.
On top of that, I still don't see the appeal of letting someone else pick your hardware for you. That hasn't ever really been a good idea ... so why is it now? Apple has a track record of picking shitty components (g4 cube and its cracks, the ipods and their hardware issues (battery), etc). On top of that, why force yourself down the Intel road when you know what AMD has to offer? Just so you can run OS X?
No thanks.
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I'm not making a stability argument about OS X mind you, just saying "well, I already proved to myself that I was willing to reboot in order to have both my preferred desktop OS and still play games"
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tiger comes with 1.4, but i have an app that requires 1.5.
So far, and I keep asking this every few months in various places, nobody has given a strong, specific reason for Macs or OS X being better than PCs and Windows. It's all nebulous stuff like "it's just nicer/better/easier/prettier" and then stuff like Expose (which I think is a horrible idea personally, no offense) etc. thrown in for good measure. But so many people seem to like them that there has to be something in it. Or is it just a sheep thing, and the fact that dropping a grand or two on something makes you want to like it and justify the purchase?
Amusing letter on The Register today from someone saying he runs his entire company on Macs and wants to know why anyone uses PCs. Then in the next breath he says, oh well, I do have a few PCs for accounting and some other stuff that you can't do on Macs... So there's a reason for having PCs right there and he's answered his own question, yet he still failed to point out anything specifically advantagous about his choice of the Mac, especially when he has to have PCs as well and having both can only complicate things. (Which may be worth it, sure, but he didn't say why.)
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Week later, I've uninstalled XP. I game on my desktop PC, but on the go I prefer OSX hands down. I didn't buy the laptop for gaming and I think the whole idea of "gaming" laptops are pretty silly.
I'll probably never buy a mac desktop, but I'll never buy a windows laptop. Simple as that.
Fun story of the whole experience. After taking the videos on my digital camera of me playing oblivion, I had to reboot back into OSX because Windows doesn't support digicams out of the box. That seemed pretty ridiculous to me. Apple's first party software (iTunes, Safari, iPhoto, iWhatever) is all great and I wouldn't trade it for any XP program that MS made or that is 3rd party.
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I'm pretty sure the sharing will be done using Samba, like Linux would, and so you should beware that Samba has some annoying limitations. Note that I'm not certain these affect the Mac like they affect other things -- I'm not even certain that OS X uses Samba but I remember being told it does -- but if they matter to you I would investigate them to see what the deal is.
The main one for me is that Samba doesn't properly support file change notification (it's implemented by polling the filesystem at a configurable interval which is both slow and wasteful of resources), so if another application is changing files on a network drive you won't see those changes very often without hitting F5 constantly. (This is annoying from a human user point of view and also if you're writing automated programs which are supposed to react to new/changed files. Sometimes you don't get the change through for MINUTES.) This is probably in part because most Unix/Linux filesytsems don't support change notification in the first place but, AFAIK, even on the few which do Samba still works by polling.
I've also had problems with non-ANSI characters in filenames being b0rked on the NSLU2 USB network storage thing I had, which ran Samba on an embedded Linux. I gather there are fixed versions of Samba that you can install and I expect Apple have used one which works properly and it isn't a problem but, then again, I expected Linksys to have done the same with the NSLU2 and they didn't, so it's worth double-checking.
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http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/asinine_and_or_risky_ideas
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I remember when Win95 first came out and games still required DOS or there just wasn't enough memory to run them under Windows and so everyone at the time had to reboot into DOS to play games.
That was seriously annoying.
It would be even more annoying now that we have multiple monitors and can watch IRC, Email (etc.) while playing a game (even if it's not possible to interact with said programs because Windows games still go utterly spastic if you alt-tab). I do that on my laptop (XPS Gen 2) all the time with IRC on the laptop screen and the game on the external monitor.
Dual-boot isn't a bad thing at all but it seems a horrible compromise for day-to-day use.
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apple makes fantastic hardware
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But, thats not to say that I'm glad Apple is doing this....it's a very good move to merge both worlds for us gamers. :)
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They wouldn't. I think it's great that you can buy an Apple laptop, use OS X and call upon Windows when needed/for gaming, but I don't see why everyone is bothering to bench the Apple laptops when running Windows. There's nothing "Apple" about those results. It's the Windows OS and generic Intel hardware.
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But like rosewood mentions, I'd need to be doing certain things in Windows. And because I'd be running Windows for work, I'd be spending more time in Windows, and probably have my email and stuff setup under Windows rather than OSX. Then again, if the virtualisation stuff plays out well enough..
SOMEONE GIVE ME $2599 ALREADY.
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