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Topic: APPL stock spiking (Read 142 times)
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Terraji
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APPL stock spiking
« on: April 05, 2006, 03:42:54 PM »
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In case anyone hasn't heard, buying a Mac will let you officially boot windows XP if you desire.
This is huge since it kills the biggest two arguments one could make for not getting a Mac.
1) "You can't play games on a Mac"
2) "I still need to run windows only-application X sometimes"
Brilliant move on behalf of Apple. I was getting ready to buy myself a 360 in the next week or two, but I think I'll throw that money into getting the better video card option on the iMac I plan on ordering this summer and a whack of ram.
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Grounded
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #1 on: April 05, 2006, 04:56:24 PM »
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Isn't the whole point of a Mac that it doesn't run Windows? Am I missing something?
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Terraji
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #2 on: April 05, 2006, 07:00:08 PM »
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Close,
The point of a Mac is that it runs a better operating system than Windows. That has not changed.
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #3 on: April 05, 2006, 07:10:24 PM »
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Yeah except now you can run a horrible OS if you want to too. 
Actually, I was discussing this with yurei earlier today. This is a great thing, and should really open the Mac up to a wider field of people.
The one thing that will be absolutely key for this development to succeed will be support from hardware vendors with OS X device drivers.
Think about it this way: now that Macs can boot Windows, as a gamer you have to think of them as a custom PC that happens to also run OS X. What's key for the gamer though, is being able to upgrade core components such as the graphics card. That's not at all a problem since all graphics cards come with Windows drivers, but once you boot back into OS X, will your latest and greatest Radeon X320000 still work? THAT is where the catch will be. Using a Mac as a gaming PC is totally feasible, but making sure upgraded components still work on the "Mac" side still work will be the tough part.
Of course as a stockholder, I'm happy to see Apple recovering after being down nearly twenty dollars the past month or so. 
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #4 on: April 05, 2006, 07:11:41 PM »
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Terraji also neglected to post the link:
Apple Boot Camp
Also, he forgot to mention this capability will be completely integrated into the next version of OS X (10.5) code-named "Leopard."
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| « Last Edit: April 05, 2006, 07:12:39 PM by Porter » |
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Terraji
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #5 on: April 05, 2006, 07:53:22 PM »
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I think it is safe to say that an iMac is not the best gaming rig, and it never will be, but it's a pretty awesome all-around package.
I don't think that upgrading the graphics card will be a possibility. In fact, I think you are unable to in the current iMac.
You are not exactly taking a big hit on performance compared to a new PC + monitor gaming rig at the same cost, so this isn't a huge deal.
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Surgeon General
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #6 on: April 05, 2006, 09:11:05 PM »
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Took them long enough.
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Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love!
Source blows.
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #7 on: April 06, 2006, 09:49:06 AM »
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Two things.
One, Terraji's got the wrong stock symbol. It's AAPL and not APPL. Not a big deal unless you're looking to buy, in which case you'd be awfully surprised when a certificate for Appell Pete Corp. showed up.
Second, as far as the graphics card, I was thinking towards the future when Apple finally releases an Intel-based tower along the same lines as the current Dual and Quad G5's. In that case, you'd have a completely standard PC with an Apple logo on the case: PCIe, SATA, DDR2, FireWire 800, USB 2-- the works. Upgrading THAT video card would be a piece of cake, and I would expect the towers to end up being the gamer's choice, just as they are in the traditional peecee world today.
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Terraji
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Re:AAPL stock spiking
« Reply #8 on: April 06, 2006, 10:17:07 AM »
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I disagree on that last one.
The base G5 tower is $2000, comes with a 160GB hard drive, 512 ram, and has an anemic (by gaming stadards) Geforce 6600 w/128 ram.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt on the upgrade, the new intel 'Mac Pro' will probably have a 250gb hard drive, a conroe dual-core and a geforce 7800 GT or equivalent card, along with the standard 512 of ram. That is still not a competitive gaming rig for $2000 (even today), and nobody would be in their right mind to buy that for gaming in windows. That is targeteted market for these machines is the professional user, and that is what it will optimized for.
Perhaps they will introduce a third desktop line which will make them more like a PC, or else a barebones 'Mac Pro' which has a variety of upgrade paths to cater to the hardcore gamer.
I am still skeptical of this possibility to since it does break the apple ethic of limited hardware support, one of its competitive edges. By that, I am referring to the tight integration between the hardware and the software.
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #9 on: April 06, 2006, 12:06:42 PM »
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That's the real beauty of this development though. Out of the box, even a bare-bones Mac tower would be fully supported on the OS X side, and for users who will never touch Windows, their experience will be the same, beautiful, consistence, easy one they have always expected (and gotten). But for the gamers, a more competitively priced (I agree with you on this point) tower would give you all of that compatibility, plus some wicked upgrade paths-- which, if you chose to take them-- might reduce the stability of the OS X side since you'd quickly become dependent on third party OS X drivers for the upgraded hardware components.
My point remains though: out of the box you'd have the same Mac experience, but if you wanted to, you could upgrade the hell out of it and be no worse off than all the Windows users currently are with flakey hardware support. I doubt anyone would ever buy a Mac to use solely as a Windows gaming platform, but for a lot of casual gamers who aren't looking for the bleeding edge best performance, a Mac might make their day-to-day operations a ton more pleasant.
It will be interesting to see how Apple will/would support Macs that had been upgraded by the user. Apple is known for it's outstanding customer support, and like Terr said, letting users hack the heck out of the hardware is going to make supporting them a lot like being Dell or Gateway.
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Guardian_Tenshi
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #10 on: April 18, 2006, 10:42:01 AM »
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If I have a windows partition on my brand spanking new MacBook Pro, and haven to boot into windows, get some virus that effects my boot partition, didn't I just loose alot of the security I moved to a mac to get?  I find it strange that NO ONE that i've seen has even speculated on the security issues that COULD come of this...
And it's true, one of the biggest down sides of apples as gaming computers probably is their graphics cards. I thought that macs were pretty much supporting any radeon on the market though, maybe not
I suppose it just opens another door that apple could walk down whenever they wanted to though I guess...maybe they'll make something special for the gaming world like they did for the music world with the iPod.
Tenshi
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #11 on: April 20, 2006, 02:40:40 PM »
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| If I have a windows partition on my brand spanking new MacBook Pro, and haven to boot into windows, get some virus that effects my boot partition, didn't I just loose alot of the security I moved to a mac to get? I find it strange that NO ONE that i've seen has even speculated on the security issues that COULD come of this... |
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That was one of the first things that occurred to me when I heard the news, but there are a couple things to keep in mind. The first is that when you're running Windows on your Mac, the Mac partition is invisible because Windows can't understand HFS (the filesystem Macs use by default). There are software programs that add support for this to Windows, but under normal circumstances, the "Mac side" of your machine is relatively secure. Windows itself might get infected with virii and torn to sh-- with spyware, but the Mac side should stay pretty pristine.
Of course, the next step Apple is leading up to is the ability to run Windows applications WITHIN Mac OS X. Even in this scenario, it's important to remember that Apple will likely follow the Classic route, and encase the Windows environment in some heavy virtualization. OS 9 applications current run in a 'jailed' emulation environment to prevent them from crashing an OS X machine. I can't see how Apple could NOT do this with Windows. I'm not saying that this approach will be completely secure and completely without holes, but it's a darned good bet that it's gonna continue to be a lot tougher to infect a Mac.
In both of these cases, the most important thing to remember is that while Apple does do a pretty remarkable job with security, in terms of market share the numbers are still on our side. Although I have no doubt that someone will try it just for the sake of saying they did, I don't think there is going to be a huge rash of new outbreaks that following the "infect Mac OS X by going through Windows on the 5% of machines running Boot Camp of the 5% of machines that are Macs" thinking. It just doesn't make sense to follow this attack vector.
| And it's true, one of the biggest down sides of apples as gaming computers probably is their graphics cards. I thought that macs were pretty much supporting any radeon on the market though, maybe not |
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Tenshi needs to check Apple's specs. The current edition iMacs are boasting Radeon X1600s (those are PCIe, by the way) with 256MB of RAM. That's a darned decent graphics card by any account. It might not run Quake 4 at 200 FPS, but it's gonna handle HL2 level stuff plenty well. And that's just the iMac-- the consumer-level machine! Once they release Intel-based towers, all bets are off!
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[Wumpa] Porter
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yurei
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #12 on: April 20, 2006, 05:27:20 PM »
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I love the post by Gabe over at PA about his MacBook. I find it odd that the graphics performance is better in Windows than on the OS X side.
Post:
So I installed Boot Camp on my MacBook yesterday. I had read a few articles saying that people playing games under Windows on the new Intel Macs saw a •20% performance increase•. That number doesn•t mean anything to me so I figured I should test it out myself.
Boot Camp is a pretty slick program. Once it is installed it lets you partition your drive a then it burns a disk for you with all the drivers you will need to make XP run on your Mac. You go through a standard Windows install and then you throw your driver disk in and boom it just works. Once I had XP on it was time to test it out and that meant installing WOW.
So for reference here are the stats on my MacBook:
MacBook Pro
2 GHZ Intel Core Duo
2 GB Memory
Radeon X1600
I•m running WOW at 1440 x 900 with all my graphic settings jacked all the way up. I•ve got spell effects and textures and all that good stuff up as high as it can go. With these settings under OS X I hovered between 15 and 20 FPS. It was just barley playable but for raids and stuff I•d drop down to a lower resolution and take off a few of the fancy effects. Now on the same laptop, but running under Windows with the same crazy settings I averaged between 35 and 40 FPS. That•s a pretty f---ing big difference in my book. It was even able to maintain that frame rate in major cities and in a raid out in SS.
So if you•re thinking about giving Bootcamp a try now you have some hard numbers to consider. I may try and get steam on there today and check out Half Life 2 just to see how it runs. On one hand I•m pretty impressed with the machine. It•s a hell of a laptop. On the other hand I•m disappointed that I can•t get that kind of performance under OS X. I honestly prefer using OS X at this point and it was sort of nice to have a game I could play that didn•t require me to go upstairs and start up my Windows box. But it runs twice as fast under Windows for f--s sake. I can•t ignore that.
-Gabe out
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| « Last Edit: April 20, 2006, 05:29:21 PM by yurei » |
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Terraji
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #13 on: April 20, 2006, 05:41:13 PM »
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I read about this WOW thing on digg earlier today. I can't seem to find the link (the story was buried as 'innaccurate').
In the comments it was pointed out that WOW under XP is DirectX, and in OS X it is ported to OpenGL So this comparison is basically meaningless.
This is not to say that DirectX is better, it just means that Blizzard probably spent a bit more time optimizing it.
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Re:APPL stock spiking
« Reply #14 on: April 21, 2006, 09:39:45 PM »
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Also, I wonder how much Mac OS X is actually getting in the way. Under Windows, DirectX applications get full control of the graphics card. On the Mac, the Desktop is itself an OpenGL layer, and I'm not sure if it continues to "run" behind a game. I know theoretically there's nothing stopping someone from running any OpenGL game in a window-- it would just be another "polygon" being rendered on-screen. That's gotta effect game performance.
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[Wumpa] Porter
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