I’m a PC-user, and I will remain so until the day that I die, no matter how they try to subvert me. In my last post I cited Eric’s snark regarding running City of Villains on his Macbook Pro. Evidently the dual-core intel processor coupled with the innate powers of Mac video-processing made the game practically purr with a sparkly ebullience. A fair amount of people mention that the new Mac desktop may run two (2!) dual-core processors. And of course, EVERYONE in the Mac corner mentions how gosh-darn pretty they are. Despite all this, I don’t see Mac taking over the computer-gaming arena, and I even have a few decent reasons:

• Cost

Macs are expensive. With the iMac starting at $1299, the PowerBook G4 at $1499, and then MacBook Pro at $1999, you’re automatically spending a lot of money on that fine gaming machine. Oh right, and don’t forget that to run those games you’ll need to spend at least another $100 to buy Windows XP. For $1299 I can put together a nice PC with all the parts I would reasonably need to run any current game without a hitch. I mean, I should know because I just put one together for my friend Theo, and it’s gorgeous. For $1999, I could build a gaming god. And I wouldn’t have to dual-boot the damn thing. But the biggest cost issue is that Mac’s are difficult to upgrade. When your Mac gets old, you buy a new Mac. If your PC gets old, you can seperately buy the parts that are getting dated, and maintain your machine’s performance even on a meager budget.

• Hassle

No matter how easy Apple makes it to run Windows, dual-booting is a pain that won’t be worthwhile to a majority of people. Sure, you can run a Windows “window” in OS X, but if we’re talking about gamers (and I am, currently), they’re not going to get the performance the machine is capable of, and gamers are interested in nothing if not performance. In a way, the Apple Matters post I linked to previously has a point that if people are consistently running Windows on their Macs, simply because it allows them to play the games and run the apps that OS X doesn’t support, eventually they may get used to Windows, and wonder why they need OS X at all. Which is not at all to say that Windows is better than OS X, but it’s compatability is a juggernaut that may be hard to overcome, and a great many of us “PC users” not only use it, but enjoy it. There must be something to that, right?

• Customization

If you buy a Mac, you’re pretty much buying whatever specifications that Apple happens to be offering. In the case of the MacBook Pro, you have a mind-blowing two options. I can’t even begin to think of how many options there are for building a PC between $2000 and $2500, but my god there are a lot, and by PC I mean laptops as well. Do-it-yourself laptops are possible, for the hardware afficianado, and the process for building one was even outlined very clearly in a recent edition of Maximum PC. But even if you don’t want to build it yourself, there are a thousand websites out there, at least, that give you a ton of options on everything from screen size to memory to video cards to processors. Bear in mind that Macs don’t hold the patent for dual-core intel processors. Heck, they just switched to a processor-type that PC-users have been enjoying for years. And PC-users have something Mac doesn’t have, which is AMD. Right now AMD has dual-core 64-bit processors for the PC, and they’ve announced the release of the same for laptops in the near future. Also, and contrary to the Mac “we’re so pretty ideology”, you can customize the look of your PC. A pretty case? There are a ton of them out there.

So my question, then, is this: Why buy a Mac as a gaming rig running Windows when the PC offers so much more in the way of cost and customization, with less hassle? The answer is that you won’t; not unless you’re already a Mac enthusiast, and hey, there are plenty of you out there and that’s great. But for the rest of us, PCs make a whole lot more sense in a lot of ways. Apple’s “Boot Camp” may pull a few people to the dark side who were previously on the fence, but the people that have chosen their sides likely won’t be swayed.

As for me, the next computer I buy will likely be a laptop and a PC, and will probably come in pieces. They’ll be small, complicated, fragile pieces that will need to be carefully nurtured and placed into the appropriate places at the appropriate times with an extreme amount of care. I’ll nurture them, place them, build a machine out of hopes, dreams and expensive parts from very particular namebrand retailers, and I’ll be damned if I won’t enjoy it. I’m a PC-user, hear me roar.

Follow up to my previous Boot Camp post.

Eric over at Websnark dual-booted windows on his MacBook Pro and loaded up City of Villains. Evidently the result was even more impressive than he had anticipated.

I ran at full native resolution with all the bells and whistles. It was beautiful. Effects I’d never been able to see before showed up perfectly. In the middle of a gigantic fight with a giant monster (the Ghost of Scrapyard, for those playing along at home) I and two other Masterminds, along with a pile of corruptors and brutes, were all in a pack alongside about sixty minions, the giant monster, special effects of everyones’ attacks, at least twenty Henchmen and a giant blue glowing thing… oh, and explosions everywhere… at absolutely no choppiness nor loss of framerate.

This poses a quandary for PC-manufacturers, who have until now at the least dominated the gaming market through sheer windows-compatability brute force. And the gaming market makes up a very significant chunk of change in the computer hardware world. If Macs can, all of a sudden, do everything and play everything, and do it as well as Eric’s post describes, the PC is gonna be in a heap of trouble.

But of course, the real winner here is Microsoft. But then, that’s nothing new. In fact, according to Chris over at Apple Matters, this could be a bad move by Apple in general (though I agree with Eric that once the cat was out of the bag, Apple was beholden to make a move).

Why is Boot Camp the Apple equivalent of the New Coke fiasco? Well, because Apple is trading a little short-term gain for a long-term negative. At this moment in time, OS X does have a big lead over Windows XP but Vista is around the corner and it promises to address a lot of the problems found in Windows. So, for the next few months, people might buy a Mac with the idea of using it as a dual boot machine and get slowly but steadily sucked in by OS X’s superiority, but once Vista comes out that will likely change.

In fact, Apple has tried this before. In an effort to stave off dwindling sales Apple once offered Macs with PC cards in them. These were the equivalent of dual boot machines. The theory went that people would buy the machine for their Windows needs, but use the Mac OS more and more as time went by. Finally, unable to resist the allure of Mac OS you’d have a full blown Apple zealot on your hands. The reality was that Mac users bought the machines (they were brisk sellers) and got converted to Windows users. This was when the cutting edge Windows was 3.0, it is hard to imagine that Boot Camp won’t make at least as many Windows converts out of Mac users than the other way around.

Having Macs and PCs out there, appealing to different users with different needs, was much like having two distinct political parties. You were either a Mac user, or a PC user, and the line rarely blurred between the two. With Boot Camp, that line is officially blurred. Is it only a matter of time before we have essentially the same computers trying to sell themselves under completely different names?

Additional reading:

• Response to the Apple Matters post from Insert Title Here.
• The Times weighs in, and encourages discussion.

More additional reading (added 4/7/06):

• Daring Fireball writes an exhaustive if Mac-biased analysis.
• Tycho writes a non-exhaustive post with some good points.

With a tagline like “We have only the YOUNGEST ponies eating the hottest chocolate CAKE!”, CAKE PONY feels like it should be NSFW. But really, there isn’t anything objectionable there. You’re just going to feel dirty. Other than that, I’m really not sure what to make of CP; I just know somehow I’m strangely drawn to it. It’s got a bizarre, surreal charm, and at the least, it’s certainly unique. (link via Lore)

Fairly unrelated except that it posts once a week and is focused on its own brand of odd animal, the Secret Crocodile Adventure Club is one of my favorite secret adventure clubs. You’ll get the most out of it if you join the mailing list (you’ll get one email a week and no more, on Saturdays, which is a nice day to get email). Stig’s ravings, via the most honorable Archcroc V, are consistently chortle-worthy.