If Tycho loves Macs so much, I suggest that his next move should be to use one exclusively for a month. Pity about Galactic Civilizations II shipping…and Oblivion is coming out on the 20th…but surely the fantastic user experience of using a Mac will itself be sufficient to sustain him.
10 Responses to Oh, for crying out loud…
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I guess it depends completely on what you do with your pc.
I’ve been perfectly happy with my powerbook, for instance. True, I don’t play a lot of games on it..
I wouldn’t switch back either, the only thing I miss is Steam but more and more games get ported to mac so we’re starting to get some love 🙂
Apple hates gamers; it considers them “unwashed masses” that it doesn’t need. Every gamer-oriented initiated by Apple has been half-assed. This was proven when they allowed Microsoft to buy Bungie. Bungie’s premier of Halo on the Mac was the first thing that ever made me think Apple was getting serious about games. Apple should have paid ANY price necessary to keep Bungie an independent, and they should be paying bounties to companies to port games to the Mac (at least until their market share improves). This is a huge hole in their user experience, and they just don’t give a damn about fixing it.
Maybe it’s because they’ve been a bit behind on gaming hardware? =) Perhaps the intel move will bring them closer to PCs on what it comes to gaming performance..
..or maybe not, but we’ll see.
Anyway, it’s interesting to note that several indies have said that about half of their sales are for mac versions, even though mac users are a clear minority. There’s two easily spotted reasons for this; a) mac users are used to paying for stuff, and b) there are no games for macs =)
Anyway, I’ve ported some stuff to mac and like I said, I’m more than content with my powerbook. But I wouldn’t talk about “switching”, it’s just another computer I use.
When Microsoft bought Bungie, apple was far from being in a good position to make such a move. And I wouldn’t say apple doesnt care about gamers, there is a lot of spotlights and hands-on with games on their website and they mention “gaming” quite frequently. Steve Jobs said at a keynote that he was quite content with the amount of games on the mac and I agree with him. A lot of major titles are available … the only thing I miss would be Steam but I can live with it.
Mac’s main problem, as I see it, is that they have nothing like Direct X available for them. And when they try to do it, they get slammed for it. There’s nothing wrong with Macs except that Apple hates it’s user base. But the deal is Windows is made for the lowest common denominator. It has to support all kinds of software and hardware. Mac doesn’t need to because they make or license all their hardware. It makes their systems more stable.
Plus, those guys in the Mac UI department know their stuff when it comes to interface. Mac OS is smooth as butter and has been for years. But I relate the following laptop story. When I was shopping for laptops 2 years ago, I saw the fun touch pad get a scroll bar. Fine. Then I saw it also get forward and back buttons and soon the mouse-like touch pad was being inundated with buttons. It was too much by my estimation. Mac touch pads have no scroll bar area. Do you know how they handle it? If you put two fingers down (index and middle, typically) and move up and down, you get scrolling. Same touch pad, no special area, just a different way of interfacing with it. Move those same fingers left and right and you have internet navigation of forward and back. It’s quite good.
With the kind of design innovation like that from people, I’ll just bet that Mac users could make some pretty good games, if they had the tools.
Dave, we have Quartz which works pretty good for display but I agree there is no “game” package like DirectX. The problem with DirectX is it’s cross-portability, which is non-existant. In this spirit, I hope we never get something like directx, where you can’t port your applications to other platforms. But I don’t really see a need either since we have SDL and other sweet opensource, cross-platform packages.
Yes, now that Apple doesn’t have to keep up the polite fiction of “PowerPC runs just as fast as Intel” we will start getting Apples that are more capable of handling high-end games. But I’m serious about that port bounty – Apple really needs to prove themselves in my eyes that they are committed to the Mac as a gaming platform. The iPod has given them more money than God, so they are in a position to do it now.
DirectX and OpenGL are far more similar than dissimilar at this point. Converting a game from one to the other has been reduced to the level of annoyance, one you can mitigate by either usign OpenGL up front, or writing a wrapper API that can call either at the back end. Having said that, I still think Apple should go ahead and put together a gaming API just to show their support for game developers.
You know, that reminds me…I’m still waiting for someone to try compiling Inaria on another platform. I deliberately tried to use as few Windows-specific functions as possible to make that easier.
Speaking of Apple, the iPod and gaming, what I’ve been saying for ever is that they need to make an iPod gaming platform. They have iTunes as a ready digital distribution channel. The device is simple enough. Picture two video iPods attached end to end. Strecth the screens together to be one screen. Take the buttons out of the centers of the two scroll wheels so that it’s one giant analogue touch pad. Leave the clickies and maybe, maybe, add a fifth clicky in the center of each pad if you can. Put in some 3D hardware and blammo, Apple’s GamePod. I should start this with some photoshop and an internet rumor.
Of course, you can already play Pac-Man on your iPod…no specialized hardware necessary.