Mac. Windows. Mac! Windows! MAC! WINDOWS! etc.

Quoth the Naughty Alien:


I can't make an authoratative statement here, having never actually used a Mac in my life. However, from the numerous magazine articles, consumer reviews, and friends' opinions, what I've gathered about Macs versus Windows is this (please read all the way through before passing judgement):

Windows: Everyone knows that a Windows PC is gonna hit a major problem at least once in its used life, and while the "blue screen of death" has pretty much evaporated with XP, full-blown computer freezes have not. On the flip side of the coin, modern versions of Windows are compatible with enormous libraries of software, and as such are probably the most widely used by the general public. This, of course, means that us game programmers would be foolish to make our games Mac compatible only, as we would miss out on the largest chunk of the computer game market.

Macintosh: The more I hear, the more I like. Macs are user-friendly and powerful not to mention having been innovative from the start; I've yet to hear of anyone whose Mac's frozen up on them even once. Some of the best software is for Macs; even Microsoft has proved this point, by making a Mac-compatible version of MS Office. On the other hand, the list of compatible software for Macs is somewhat (not a lot, though) smaller.

My overall opinion: Macs are "elitist" computers, and I mean that in a good way; they're not used by everyone, they won't work with everything, but when they do, they're unsurpassed. Windows PCs, on the other hand, are widely sold, widely used, and widely compatible "general-purpose" computers. It's kind of like comparing a Prius to a hybrid SUV (like that'll ever happen). The SUV'd be solid, popular, and off-road ready, whereas the Prius would outstrip it in efficiency & style. (For those of you SUV lovers out there, it's just an example; don't get annoyed by it.)

So that's what I feel about Macs versus PCs. Game programmers would, as I said, be fools to ignore the fact that Windows has the lion's share of the gaming market; but we would also be fools to ignore the merits of a Mac.

For all you Windows diehards out there: even if you still think XP is the best, take my word for it: upgrade to Vista. It will improve with time, but moreover, now that it's out there, it won't be long before XP upgrades & patches halt altogether, and Vista is the only expandable future. Until the next Windows OS.

Now, anyone know a good website where I can buy cheap but powerful Mac laptops?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHO8l-Bd1O4

> but moreover, now that it's out there, it won't be long before XP upgrades & patches halt altogether,

A few years anyway.

There are two downsides to Macs - the price, and the lack of easy to use 3D programming software (ala DBPro/GSDK). C4 and Torque is a real pain to use and Unity is just a RAD system. C4 has a few nasty bugs in the Mac version too.

2D is fine, because of BlitzMax...

Aside from that, the lack of need to buy AV and defag software saves bit of money.

You also dont really need to buy a web authoring program as it comes with an iMac.

Installing programs is easy - just drag a package to where you want, as opposed o having to click to mass of options.

One thing PC users can do that Mac users can't.

MacOS X (or even to some degree Linux) does not inherently have fewer problems than Windows. It just has different problems. The real question is which problems annoy you the most. Figure that out, then pick the OS that has fewest of them.

That's an absurd (and quite dangerous) assumption. For starters the Windows "market" is a lot more heterogeneous than the Mac market. Second of all, for a new company starting out, you need to focus on a narrow market, if you hope to get any market penetration at all.

You will not have instant mainstream success, so initially focusing on a certain market segment (including hardware and software platforms, along with other aspects and demographics) should definitely be the driving force behind your marketing strategy. People who use MacOS X and people who use Windows, are not part of the same market.

I personally think you would be making a HUGE mistake if you went to MAC.

Personally I think the best thing I ever did was to switch to a Mac.

I'd had 15+ years as a PC user until I switched nearly 2 years ago. I've never even turned on my PC since.

Adam, check out the Apple refurbished store for "cheap but powerful Mac laptops". Usually they sell the second-last generation of notebooks there.

Regarding the market share, simply read what Wil Shipley ("Delicious Monsters") has to say about all that. I think it perfectly summarizes everything that there is to say about why especially a small company or even a one-man-shop should rather develop for the Mac than for Windows:
http://wilshipley.com/blog/2005/06/student-talk-from-wwdc-2005.html

Here´s a simple one that I think is absolutely true: Mac users usually pay for good software. Now take a look at the Windows machines of everybody that you know and tell me if the same is true there. I think we all know the answer. There must be a reason why the big players in the Windows world "invented" product activation and dongles. Or why there are so many cracks available. Just do the math.

However, I don´t know if games are the ideal type of software to produce for the Mac. Most Mac users that I know just are no gamers. They actually USE their computers. As a tool to boost up their creativity. But games? Well, there must be a market for it, otherwise nobody would make the effort to port the blockbuster games to the Mac. There sure is a good market for casual games, and I also know of a few great indie titles that are exclusively available for the Mac (for example Deep Trouble, Midnight Mansion, Dark Castle).

I personally do not regret that I switched to the Mac almost two years ago. My Intel Mac also is a great PC for Windows XP AND Vista, if I need that, and it also runs Linux. But once you made the transition to OS X, you just don´t want to put up with either of them anymore.

Working with OS X is so much more comfortable, straight forward and productive than with any other system out there that you just don't want to go back. OS X applications use drag & drop everywhere, for example, where a typical Windows app still forces you to copy & paste or to save something to file somewhere and load it in the second application. Even though it does not sound like much, this already makes a HUGE difference for your productivity.

Programming on OS X, however, is a completely different story and when you want to write native GUI apps, there is only one reasonable way to go: Use Xcode, Objective-C and Cocoa. Anything else is a dead-end street. For server apps, of course you can have it all: Java, Pyhton, Ruby, PHP, C#/Mono, you name it. But for GUI apps, Cocoa is the only thing that makes sense. Depending on what kind of developer you are, that can be a very bitter pill to swallow. Especially when you are one of the people who hate C-type languages.

I personally believe that Microsoft´s star is slowly sinking. For too long they were too successful and they grew too big, too arrogant, too slow and in summary they became just another IBM that does not adjust itself to the changed demands of the market. Most customers are just fed up with they way Microsoft does business and they are looking for alternatives. And there is more than just one available, so it is only a question of time now.

I personally think you would be making a HUGE mistake if you stayed with Windows. ;-)

Are you mocking me? -_-

EDIT: just joking

I've seen mac's freeze up quite a few time. OSX is MUCH better than previous OS's which were abysmal, made windows look good.

Ever since I started playing with GTK, I've been of the opinion that everything else is garbage. Developing GUIs with GTK is a joy!

Those automagic features like resizing window contents and menu accelerators are actually features in the depths of the GUI library instead of being left to the individual applications. With lots of (most) GUI libraries, the menu accelerators (shortcut keys for menu items) are just painted on; it is up to the developer of the app to both print a menu accelerator to the menu item and to actually set up that shortcut within their application to do the same thing as clicking the menu button.
With GTK, I can just say "The Open File item has an accelerator of Ctrl+O", and the rest is taken care of for me. If the user hits Ctrl+O, the menu item is triggered as though clicked. This isn't just an easy development feature, either: It also means that menu accelerators can be changed on the fly, transparently to the program with the menu! Gnome lets me put the mouse over any menu item and hit any key combination I want, then it saves that key combination as the accelerator for that menu item.
Then there are Notebooks. With Windows, the developer has to go through a lot of pain getting the window contents to change when tabs are pressed. With GTK, it is the exact opposite: The developer has to jump hoops to have a tab bar that doesn't change the window contents. This is a good thing, though. A Notebook in GTK has a bunch of pages, and each page has different contents added as children. GTK automatically shows the contents for the currently selected page instead of the application developer having to do so himself.
That isn't just with notebooks: It's everywhere! Expander boxes work the same way, where the contents are exposed / hidden automatically when the box is expanded or collapsed.
Expander boxes also expose another great thing: Automatic window resizing. Windows in GTK can be done with static positions in a Windows sort of way, but who would want to? Instead, you can have relative positions with a sort of table layout, which lets GTK handle all the resizing code for you.

Oh, and it's just more sensible: I've noticed Windows having, at what looks like its deeper depths, text is always attached to buttons when it is really just a label. This text is pretty much a necessity when you create the things; there is no encouragement to do it yourself. With GTK, it is up to you to attach a label to a button or whatever. (Or, you can attach an image or a check box or whatever else you want). This makes the whole labelling thing a lot more sensible looking.

I could go on and on, but I just remembered that this is not about GTK, it's about Mac OS and Windows.
Nobody can say Macs don't crash. I know it's many years ago now, but I am sure we all remember those ridiculous iMacs. Have none of you felt the tops of those things? (Particularly display models that are turned on all day). They have terrible cooling, so they are hot. I have seen a huge number of them frozen from overheating.
Besides that, it isn't like Windows has many crashes caused by itself. It is almost always another app within Windows that some imbecile user has run that crashes / slaughters the system. This is not Windows' fault: This is the program's fault. Windows crashes more because there are more programs likely to do this (high-end games) and because there is a lot more hardware that those programs must be tested on.

As for one being better: They're both awful, get over it.
Now, back to Glade.

Confirmed. I worked in the graphics department of a print & copy shop. OS9 would lock up about half as often as Win 98 when running Quark Xpress or Photoshop or some other real-world app. But it took twice as long to reboot. OSX and XP were both better, and similar in reduced reboots.

Thus:

In a production environment, with similarly-advanced machines and similarly-advanced software and personnel, there was functionally little difference between PC and Mac. That's the result of four designers working over 16 man-years with Win 98, OS9, Win XP, and OS X. It's really, essentially, all the same stuff. Elitists from both sides can sit on it <g>.

Now, you look into some specialized production areas (like indie game creation) and Windows wins hands-down due to market size. That's something to learn and live by, and I did (a long time ago, with something pre-dating Windows, before Windows or Mac). But I also own a Mac, and for general things (though not so much for games and programming), Macs are just fine. No problem... but as for market share, Windows rules.

Oh. You mean something besides "right click"? :)

.

Heres what i currently think and understand from using all the different osses on certain systems. (OSX i havent used quite so much as the others and would consider myself a intermediate noob =) Also, i have never tried running LinuX on a mac or vista on an intel based mac (who would?).


LINUX / ix86 PC
The goods:
-Unix based bottom up rewrite (same same but... different :/ )
-Very Powerful with low resource use
-Customisable (you can make your own customised version out of it or use someone elses (distro))
-masses of GUI choices including the best looking to date (beryl although its stil beta and buggy)
-Fantastic when up and running 100%
-its free / opensource
-security
-versions for nearly every machine x86(PC), 64bit PC, AMD64, PowerPC(mac), Sparc, some PDAs etc. etc. etc.
-solid (with the exception of crashing the Xserver by tinkering, ive never crashed the linux kernel, ever!)
-Only 6-10% of the market (from a developers perspective) truthb is no one knows how many are using it as theres no sales figures and so many dual boot it.
-a weird sense of self satisfaction and freedom
-Can run emulators for lots of windows programs

The Bads:
-Getting some hardware going, esp. cheap stuff due to 'closed' drivers from manufacturers. Altho' some distros are getting better with each ver.
-Games (although there are more and more indie games comming out and the emulators run some AAA games)
-Limited software choices compared to windows, but theres a huge collection of repositories with 1000s of useful apps.(theres also the emulators :)
-No directX but can be emulated somehow by above
-Only 6-10% of the market (from a users perspective)
-Not ready for the computer illiterate / semi-literate
-Still has a heavy reliance on command line environment for maintenence, will be alien to windosey only people (although, i actually like / prefer it for some things)



OSX /MAC (AFAIK and used them, don't yet own one tho :/)
-The goods:
-BSD/Unix based kernel (or so im told)
-Looks great
-simple to use
-Security
-Closed hardware set (you know it just works and works well)
-Good software base
-Not had a hard kernel crash yet... (Ive crashed OS9 a few times though)
-6-8% of the market (from an indie developers perspective)

the bads:
-Closed hardware set (less choice)
-6-8% of the market (from a user perspective)
-Limited software options but most major software has a mac version (esp. 2d art & design).
-Expensive!
-Not really for 3D (at least the one i use isnt) can anyone put me right on this?



Windows XP /PC:
The Goods:
-Great hardware support (cant fault it there!)
-Fairly stable now (at the end of its life).
-Fairly secure now - for a windows product (provided you keep updated, and scan it every few days)
-everyone knows it / everyone uses it and is industry standard.. for now ;)
-DirectX = More games
-More software choices
-Looks good but dated (the 2k classic mode, the blue green default looks 'orrible :)
-is nice to use / easy to use
-Blitz3D

The bads:
-Still has security issues (big ones!)
-Spyware
-adware
-malware / viruses etc.
-Hard Crashes (unrecoverable) a fair bit, although not as much as earlier.
-Took 5-6 years to get it right.
-Expensive (if its still even for sale!)
-still based on a fundementally flawed system of filesystem permissions (there are none really to speak of!)
-Bloated and very inefficient with system resources




Windows Vista /PC (A.K.A. Windows ME2):
(Hard to judge, 'cos as far as im concerned its still BETA for at least another year!! Im sure it will improve but havent been using it long enough yet to comment more, however first impressions are bad.)
However, initial opinion:
The goods:
-Looks good, clean, fresh, but is already looking old compared to linux+Beryl+Emerald & OSX
-Better 'security' (Apparently, time will tell)

The Bads (will probably improve in a few years)
-Unstable as hell (bluescreens, hard lockups, 'COM surrogate errors' (thatever they are!)
-Ridiculous amount of power needed to run it, what is it DOING with all the extra power!?! (for what it does compared to say beryl on linux or OSX)
-Still too expensive. (Im happy to pay up to mabe £100 for an OS. If its good then the maker should profit somehow, however i do object to paying for Bill's island, the anti trust case legal fees and all their fines.)


I know not everyone will agree with what i wrote but thats how it is for me.

Unfortunately no - there are 3 commerical systems (Torque, C4 and Unity) and a few free ones (Irrlicht - always behind the Windows version, usually by a couple of version, unless you try and compile everything yourself).

C4 has nice graphics, but its overly complicated (and the help files dont help much). The Intel Mac version treats the cursor up key differently to all other keys, and you have to start and edit the CLI before it will detect any type of keypress.

Torque - enough said about that.

Unity is a RAD system (the cheapest version only supports Boo and Javascript). If you want the full version, you'll need to pay £600. The layout of the screen is awful, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way of doing title screens etc etc (not that its any easier in C4).

There is supposed to be a new commerical 3D engine coming out this year, so that'll be interesting to look at.

So, unfortunately, at the moment, Mac's are really suitable for easy 3D game creation.

In the 6 months of having iMacs, my mother's had one kernal panic (most probably caused by Open Office).

"Personally I think the best thing I ever did was to switch to a Mac."

Yep. I switched to Mac at home and I am -never- going back. I'll use Windows at work because I have to but once I leave the office at night, I'm done with it.

Macs work like computers are supposed to.

"-6-8% of the market"

This may be true but so what? Selling to .5% of that 6% market will still make you very wealthy. The Mac is crying out for quality games. The PC is saturated. Where do you think you stand the best chance of selling your creations?

The reason i stated that as a disadvantage was from a consumer perspective. mainly about 3rd party software/drivers/support etc. (ie: the driver problems in linux or the lack of games for a mac) because theres a small market, many major players cant be bothered. Also you have compatability issues with some file formats etc. Exampe you want to simply send a default wordprocessed doc with complex formatting to someone, export it as .doc but it loads all wrong in msoffice.
The more a market grows the faster these kind of things go away.

As you say though, ironically, if you have something useful that hasnt been tapped then the small market becomes a big one (for you) 6-8% of the worlds PCs is a s**t load of computers :)

So isn't Vista like what XP was at one time? -cough-CRAP-cough-. XP is good now, I think. I never have any crashes or lose any needed data.

No, XP was never the train wreck that Vista is at the moment. ME was, and that never got much better.

Yeah i may look at vista again in say... 3 years (for my secondary, obligatory windows pc) till then ill stick with XP.

WOAH, VISTA HAS BLUESCREENS?!?!

Its also got red screens - but your never supposed to see those...

oooh, never had a red screen b4, sounds BAD <:O

Macs are perfectly good for 3D. OpenGL is standard. They stock either pretty recent ATI or NVidia chips.

If you bought the cheaper Macbook or Mini though, not so much.

No. XP was the Fisher Price Edition of Windows 2000. Vista is sort of the opposite. While it may look like it's Fisher Price, it's actually Linux's evil stepsister (many of the same restrictions, none of the same freedoms).

Imagine how hard it is to retrofit multiplayer capabilities into a game designed exclusively for singleplayer situations. Now imagine that instead of a game you have a beast 8 times more complex. Then imagine you have to make it backwards compatible with a system designed in 1988. Microsofts idea about writing Longhorn (now Vista) from scratch was a good idea - a shame they didn't have the guts to follow through on it.

It wasn't a guts issue, it was more the fact they had no idea what they were doing. They only scrapped it because of its stability issues.

Absolutely.. I've registered more indie apps on the Mac that I ever did on the PC, and to be honest my overall impression has been that the average quality of the stuff out there for the Mac has been far better too.

Macs don't crash eh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCOlf_7BT-I

this clip is older than the latest MacOS, but still funny. :)

I got a mac book about 2 months ago. My first mac, and wont be my last.

I also have a BEEFY desktop pc and decent BEAST of a laptop pc.

Mac is so much nicer for doing day to day stuff like browsing and what not. Which is why i got one as a laptop. Pc's however are far nicer to develop on. They are kind of designed with that in mind. A mac you will need to know nothing to use it. A pc (running windows) you will need to know at least something!

One thing I can say about macs that you cant say about windows. The startup time!

My mac book starts up in like 10 - 15 seconds? Wow. Also the dual core utilization is great! Not once have I had to wait for a folder to chrun the cpu while reading the contents.

So I say mac and pc rather then none at all! If you cant afford that, then get an intel mac desktop and install windows on a partition! Best of both worlds!

"Macs don't crash eh?"

Did someone say that? Windows users are so defensive.

Definitely. I've registered many indie apps on my Mac and they are all top notch in quality. Not that Windows doesn't have good apps but stuff on the Mac seems to ... I dunno, try harder? Something. Definitely better quality stuff and better designed. Maybe it's a side effect of the OS itself.

Hey, I was just joking... it seemed a good tagline for the clip. Looks like I'm not the one on the defensive. :)

So far I have been able to freeze ANY machine I've ever used.

This includes Windows, Linux, OSX 10.2 10.3 10.4 as well as OS 9. Above that I even froze XBox, Nintendo DS, DS Lite, Wii, Game Cube, PS and PS2 as well as the Super Nintendo. (perhaps even the regular NES but that would have been over a decade ago ^^)
I even freezed Wiis virtual machine ;-)

Show me a single platform that can not be frozen as long as humans write code and I will become an apple fan :-)

*OS freeze not because the OS is bad but because morrons are allowed to write code as well. Sure if the OS does not block them, it will fail badly, thats what happened to Win98. Even XP suffers from morronic DRM, Rootkit and similar crap as it has no "no access kernel" and EU and similar idiots force MS to allow others to inject code into kernel mode!! Best known on that end is Starforce!*

Lol, you need to change your handle to Freezemora :P

Youre right though, i even crashed my palmOS a few times too. I think the rule is, if theres microchips running 1,000,000s of lines of code then its crash-able. (some more than others)

(although ive written a few bads that can do it in under 10 lines of code lol :)


All computers crash occasionally. Its a question of how often, and to put it mildly, ones running windows tend to do it more often than others.

My computer froze, then it wouldn't restart saying something from the kernel was still running even though I'd turned it off. Scary :/

And there's more impressive freezing yet: I can freeze water, brocolli, beans and bananas!