Valve is bringing its popular Steam platform to the Mac. If you’re not familiar with Steam, it’s the super popular digital store front for Valve and its big hits like the Half Life franchise and Portal (the game where we all learned a very valuable lesson about cake.)
This in itself is very cool if you’re a Mac owner. It’s even cooler if you’re a “switcher” who has missed playing games on the PC for years and even though it’s awesome and everything, that Xbox 360 sitting next to your TV just isn’t the same. I mean, the Mac hasn’t really ever had a universe of gaming options to choose from… I mean, there’s always been Photoshop.
So there are going to be more games on the Mac, I’m sure if you’re not jumping up and down excitedly then you’re saying, “ok, so what?” What this really symbolizes isn’t just more games on the Mac, but it’s the eventual realization of the direction Apple set in 2007 at their World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) when they paraded Electronic Arts, the largest game publishing company ever and John Carmack of iD, a legend in the world of game design, on stage talking about bringing gaming to the then-new Intel Macs.
The message wasn’t just about gaming though. The message was simple, “Apple products are the same as your PC technology-wise, we just design them for a better user experience. We’re going to take some market share now.” And they have…sort of. In 2006, before they released the first Intel Macs (the iMac and the Macbook Pro), Apple accounted for about 5.8% of desktop and notebook sales. Now they’re at 10.41%, no small feat in only 4 years.
Steam coming to OS X is the first sign that companies that only a few years ago were saying things like “we’d love to make our product for all those mac users out there, but there just aren’t enough of them to justify the cost” have changed their tune. And as the Mac becomes a more complete platform it will continue to grow it’s percentage of computers sold worldwide, because there are a few things that absolutely drive personal computer sales, and gaming is very close to the top.
I appreciate the vast universe of hardware options available to the Windows computer. The choice is almost overwhelming sometimes, but it lets you get a truly unique rig if you’re willing to spend the time and money to build one. But, for me, the days of a monster tower are gone. I’m a laptop user now. I have been for about 8 years, ever since I bought by 12″ G4 Powerbook in 2004 and I appreciate the constancy of the Apple product.
Frankly, Apple makes a superior notebook computer. Before the Powerbook G4 I had a Dell Inspiron, which was at the time Dell’s high end notebook line (I don’t remember which Inspiron it was, but it was a Pentium 3 of some kind.) The Powerbook (and my current Macbook Pro) are simple, not a lot of options but they’re powerful machines. And while Windows 7 is a step in the right directions, OS X had the best UI/UX that I’ve run into in an operating system (and I work as an interactive and UX designer, so I kinda pay attention to that stuff.)
All it was missing was the support from 3rd party software. Apple tried to fill the gap with things like iLife, iWork and they had a few big software companies on board: Adobe, Wolfram Research, Blizzard, even Microsoft (hey, we eventually got a version of office that wasn’t total crap) but at the end of the day people want to be able to download demos from the web. They want to play Tiger Woods 2014, and the new Star Trek MMO. They don’t want to wait 6-8 months for someone to port the “new” software over.
Sadly for most of us, this won’t just be a marketing war fought in advertisements, snarky remarks made by CEOs in keynotes at conferences and things like that. Prepare to hear the already obnoxious mac fan boys to get louder in their love of all things Apple and get ready for them to lecture you about how Steve Jobs can do no wrong.
At the same time get ready for a whole new breed of “I’m a PC” people to come out of the woodwork and decry everything Apple and all their users elitist, too expensive and “all form and no function.” In short, get ready for a flame-war, because for some reason that is beyond me these two sides can’t just let the other one buy the computer they want to buy.
The promise from WWDC 2007 of “Intel Macs are just as powerful as your Windows machine, because it’s all the same hardware” will finally come true, because we’ll finally get more software options. We’ll be a real user base that’s worth spending millions of dollars to develop for. Also we’ll probably get some more great “Mac and PC” ads with even more crazy funny because it’s true things for John Hodgman to say.
Of course this is just my opinion, and I’m sure some of you will laugh at the idea of this kind of change coming from something as simple as a game company releasing their stuff for OS X. But just keep this in mind, I don’t think even the guys at iBuyPower.com have a set up that has 2 quad-core CPUs, 32GB of RAM, 4TB of hard drive space, and four 3d accelerator cards in it, and Apple does. Sure it costs $11,000 but if you have even a little bit of PC gamer in you, then you just drooled a little thinking about playing something you downloaded from Steam on that machine. And that’s the power one major gaming platform has to shape the future of the personal computer market.
“But just keep this in mind, I don’t think even the guys at iBuyPower.com have a set up that has 2 quad-core CPUs, 32GB of RAM, 4TB of hard drive space, and four 3d accelerator cards in it, and Apple does. Sure it costs $11,000 but if you have even a little bit of PC gamer in you, then you just drooled a little thinking about playing something you downloaded from Steam on that machine.”
This is juts a dumb statement.
First; Yes you can build a windows machine that match and exceed those specs quite easily. It will also be cheaper than buying it from Apple.
Second; Computer gaming is heavily dependent on your video card. Just because you have four doesn’t mean it will run a game at the highest settings. It matters which video cards and scaling issues come into play when you add more than one. Having more than one processor will do you no good since most games can’t even take advantage of four cores. All that ram will do you no good in gaming, 4 gigs is plenty.
Gaming on a mac will be casual until Apple puts video cards powerful enough to run current and upcoming games.
Actually 3gigs is all you need for max FPS. And it’s true. Crossfire and SLI are never what you think it will be. The best thing you can do right now is stick an ATI 5970 in your rig which in its own right is cross-fired but still on one bus.
If Apple actually achieves 20% market share and they get all the ‘developers’ to start making their software for both sides, i think you will begin to see an increase in the number of hackers and malware that will be produced to affect Macs. Nobody codes viruses for Mac really because practically nobody owns one. (In comparison to the amount of PC users out there) And as the amount of people who own Macs increase, the amount of influence Steve Jobs and Apple will have on the computer world will increase. And where there are people who try to control the system, there are people who will rise up to disrupt that control. Just because there isn’t an issue with viruses on Macs now, doesn’t mean there never will be. Unix Kernel or not, I have a feeling that Mac users are in for a rude awakening.
“But just keep this in mind, I don’t think even the guys at iBuyPower.com have a set up that has 2 quad-core CPUs, 32GB of RAM, 4TB of hard drive space, and four 3d accelerator cards in it, and Apple does. Sure it costs $11,000 but if you have even a little bit of PC gamer in you, then you just drooled a little thinking about playing something you downloaded from Steam on that machine.”
For 11 grand those specs do not impress. Try two 6-core cpus running 4ghz, 64 gigs active memory however much hard drive space you want, and 4 gpus in a crossfire x configuration of 5970s with a nividia card hacked in for physisX support. Sure you will be able to buy 2 or 3 of those for the price you bought that lousy apple. But whatever.
PS, your article lacked any substance what so ever.
Your statement in the last paragraph: “But just keep this in mind, I don’t think even the guys at iBuyPower.com have a set up that has 2 quad-core CPUs, 32GB of RAM, 4TB of hard drive space, and four 3d accelerator cards in it, and Apple does.” is totally without basis.
This is just another example of an overpriced Apple machine. Using the absolute top of the line commodity hardware currently available you could put together such a machine for around $4000 and it would be substantially more powerful than Apple’s offering.
“But just keep this in mind, I don’t think even the guys at iBuyPower.com have a set up that has 2 quad-core CPUs, 32GB of RAM, 4TB of hard drive space, and four 3d accelerator cards in it, and Apple does. Sure it costs $11,000 but if you have even a little bit of PC gamer in you, then you just drooled a little thinking about playing something you downloaded from Steam on that machine.”
Only a retard gamer would drool. The parts in my 3-year old machine aren’t worth $400 collectively, yet they will play every game made on highest settings. Yes, even Crysis.
Steam SUCKS! Always has and always will. I refuse to buy anything that is hosted on this bloat ware crap software!