Dafydd Merc
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Posted - 2006.04.18 21:56:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Sevarus James
Because MOST users buy their stuff at the store, and they dont' KNOW or have a clue that there are alternatives is why. MACs have been pricey as hell, and that has limited their exposure......but if you ask ANYONE in a compusa to pick (for free) between a current XP box and a mac...............
CompUSA is where all the computer geniuses and those who know all are working now?  That's a laugh.
Let me tell you a little story about myself. I consider myself a pretty hardcore computer geek. Yes, there are lots of people who know more than I do, but I know my stuff, enough to make a good living working with computers. I've had at least one Linux box running at home for probably 12 years now, and when Mac OS X came out I thought my saviour for a pretty desktop system had arrived. So, winter 2004/2005 arrives, and I toss my beginning-to-become-outdated pc hardware and get myself a shiney new Mac as my sole desktop for home. It's beautiful, I love *nix underneath, and I can do my day to day tasks on it. But what about games? Well at the time, I wasn't playing many, but World of Warcraft was the new big thing and I wanted to play it. Lucky me, I can play it on my Mac! That's great... but around the same time, a new game comes out from one of my favorite companies ever, a company from whom I've purchased practically every one of their games: id Software. Doom 3 arrives, and I want to play it. Can I? No. It won't run on my Mac, and no emulation will run it with reasonable playability on my Linux systems (in my personal experience).
Thus, I have stepped on the slippery slope back into Windows land. All of a sudden I need a PC with Windows to play Doom 3. This PC I use to start playing Half Life 2 and Counter Strike: Source. Hey guess what, I'm playing all these other games on my PC, so forget playing WoW at low graphics settings on my Mac lagging to all hell in Ironforge, I might as well crank it up and play on my PC with not a stutter. When I got bored of WoW, I went looking to find a new MMO to play, enter Eve. Eve is good times, and all of a sudden I want to run multiple accounts without breaking the alt and tab keys on my keyboard, so I get myself a second PC, running Windows. This last winter comes along, and I find myself needing to purchase a laptop for myself for work. Well PowerBooks sure are sexy, but I spend all day either at an SSH terminal or using RDP to admin windows servers, so what's really an appropriate choice? A laptop running Windows, which *gasp* I can now use as a 3rd Eve client. Thus, my Mac now sits in the corner grinding Seti@home workunits, doing downloads, and once in awhile getting use as a web browser or something of the sort.
Now, people are going over DRM, and DX10, use this, use that, why won't CCP do something the way I think it should be done instead of the way they think it should be done? In my eyes, there is a very plain and simple truth here: no matter how much we love Linux, no matter how much we think it's a better operating system, and no matter how well Apple does remaking themselves as a company and giving us the beautiful OS X, well over 95% of the GAMING community lives on Windows. I suspect CCP knows this - they're not dumb folks. So when they look at what they have right now, the technologies they're using, and what their best option is moving forward, I suspect Windows, Vista, DX10, and the lot, all seem to make a whole lot of sense.
Mostly I think everyone needs to pull their heads out of their asses, stop speculating on how they think things are going to work, and wait to see what we get with Vista and the new Eve client. Barring some disaster, they'll all arrive eventually, and when everything works fine, we can all meet in Jita for a traditional testing of the new graphics engine by brute force. See you there in early '07. Until then, fly safe.
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