The apple ads that have been running for months are fuel on the flame. It sparks a pointless debate among nerds and geeks about who beats what, who is better and other things that people don’t care about. Even though a spoof made me laugh and giggle, it’s woefully inaccurate and I think it’s because people forget what is actually wrong with Macs. People say games. And they are right in a sense. But the lazy person says games forgetting that Macs run Windows.

There are only a handful of PC games that are even worth bothering with. Everything else that is tasty is on consoles. I mean, what PC exclusive title is there? Oh sorry, what good PC exclusive title is there? Most of it is crap or can be found elsewhere.

Half Life 2. This is the only PC game that you should be worrying about when getting a Mac. It’s on the xbox but it’s not the same. And it’s not on OSX because it’s based on DirectX with no hope of OpenGL. But yeah, it runs fine on Windows, running on a Macbook. The Macbook Pro has an ATI X1600 video card in it and the X1600 is more than enough to power Half-Life2. Half-Life 2 runs nice on almost everything, so we’re not saying much here when we say HL2 runs fine on a Macbook.

But to up the ante, in terms of graphical complexity, something like F.E.A.R. would have a harder time running. But we’re talking about a laptop here, not exactly the best platform for these things. Laptops are built for portability. Even my old PC has a hard time with F.E.A.R. at many times and it’s much bigger, heavier and (at the time) more expensive than a Macbook Pro. Again, a bad comparison, desktop (PC or otherwise) versus laptop.

So then we hit the Mac’s desktop line looking for something more substantial. They have the iMac which is a poor solution for a gamer because it carries the same upgrade problems that the laptops have. They pack more of a punch but many would find the embedded screen a turn off. On the flipside, the iMac would be a great LAN-party machine but who does that but once a year? Moving up the product line, we reach the tip-top Mac Pro. Although a nice workstation, it includes mac video cards so you can’t just throw in a PC card and expect it to work.

No, Apples do suck for gaming but not completely. If you named a few titles, they either run on a cheaper console or they run fine using bootcamp. So this is not the way to mock Macs. What follows below is a guide similar to above.

How to Make Fun of Macs

The Mac Pro uses FB-DIMMs
Hey, want to piss off a mac zealot? Tell them to order a Mac Pro with 16gb of memory. The 16gb kit will cost you $5400 on the Apple store for the memory kit alone. It’s super fast server memory but it slays the Mac fan’s wallet trying to get to the magical 2-4gb configuration.

The Mac Pro is the only gaming rig
$2499 for a quad core box that only needs one core to game. Adding memory is crazy expensive. And, that’s not including a nice video card. Granted, Dell’s price for a workstation is about the same (or more) but I wouldn’t buy a workstation on Dell’s site for a gaming rig. Apple really has nothing to offer in the single-core, SDRAM category.

Mac video cards are not PC video cards
Macs have a special bios on them so you can’t just upgrade your machine with any card out of a retail store. Nope, you have to order a Mac video card even if it’s got a model name you recognize from the PC world.

OpenGL 2.0 support
Even the latest OS 10.4 has OpenGL footnotes. See, they bundled OpenGL 1.5 and provided all the extensions to essentially make it 2.0 worthy. But since they don’t include all the extensions, you can’t depend on it as a game developer. That means you are always checking for certain features not able to depend on the 2.0 spec. This is fixed in 10.5 when they fully implement OpenGL 2.1.

Updating video drivers on a whim
You can’t just go to nvidia.com and grab the latest nvidia drivers. Since OSX graphically accelerates the desktop, they have to be careful about breaking stuff. Apple releases their drivers after pinging them off Nvidia/ATI, which takes a while because they can’t pull the I’m Dell, do my bidding! crap.

AA and AF settings
You can’t control AA and AF without getting a 3rd party tool is OSX. Usually it’s ok because games started providing screens to configure this a few years ago. But if you have a copy of Madden 1949 around, you might have to download a tool to do what Windows does with the display properties.

Ruby on OSX is broken, Python is broken, more is …
OSX might be Unix but it’s a Unix with a broken leg. There are packages all around the net to replace crappy versions of Ruby and Python with real ones but what did I just spend a premium for?

Wrap Up

Hopefully these points will get the fanboy flames burning bright, annoying any decent and normal people around you as you flame the Interweb’s public message boards with inconsequential argumenative details. Certainly the lame arguments of “Macs don’t get viruses because virus writers make viruses for the biggest market” is the laziest technical analysis I’ve ever seen. The virus thing is a complex issue but I assure you it’s only partially related to market share. Sudo-model. Vista’s doing it.

The market share number is another metric that I find both laughable and tear-inducing. On the one hand, market share drives everything including the forementioned I’m Dell line. But on the flip-side is the thing Windows fanboys miss the most. Which is the simple fact that a large user base means more legacy support. Apple has been limping along forever at 5% (depending on your source) and although that’s depressing in one sense, it’s also bright in another sense. Apple is free to make major changes and innovate. Microsoft was supposed to make a major change in Vista but now that’s being pushed to Vienna. Never heard of Vienna? It’s just the smoking gun that Vista is XP SP3. From engadget:

James calls Fiji a sort of “Vista R2,” which should include most of those fancy features Microsoft had to cut out of Vista to get it released this century.
…
but Fiji has nothing on Vienna, which is purported to feature a complete overhaul of the OS, including a break in compatibility with “all applications,” though hopefully Microsoft will have some Apple-esque transition schemes in place before that time comes.

What engadget is referring to is the OS9 to OSX transition in which no old apps ran. The OS was rewritten and a legacy mode called “Classic” was introduced. You could launch your old apps but it would load a legacy layer first. Eventually people replaced their apps and now Classic hasn’t been used for many years. The same thing will have to happen with Windows in order to innovate. Anything less is DOS maintenance.

Speaking of Vista, here is Vista running in Parallels Coherence mode under OSX. Not a fake screenshot. The line is so gray, it’s just laughable when a ytmnd.com parody tries to make it black or white again. I mean, what do you call a Mac fanboy who runs Windows?