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.