composer Posted January 21, 2008 Share Posted January 21, 2008 Look, I have apple products, and have used PC's for a while. Some apps (samplers) were PC only and are soon to be MAC I think but many drivers never came out for Vista. Now, I understand the core base for the "air" but there are others (Asus) that are 1/4 the price and what I don't understand (besides apple deleting threads) is how many can defend the price to performance issue and more importantly, which I have never, ever, ever seen addressed, is what is Apple afraid of? Meaning a sub $1000 Apple or Mini or Macbook with good graphics for games? PLLLLLLLLLLLEASE do not believe that the argument is APPLE is afraid of losing PROS to buying cheap computers for motion. So what if they do. The user base for motion and so on would increase and I am tired of these computers NOT being able to play games. Why can't we? Sure I can on my macbook pro but why, why, why not have a machine that you won't cringe if you lost that was $500+ or so? The user base is NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT, made up of us anymore. Its all mom and dads iPhones and iMacs.....NOT NOT NOT Pros....this would NOT affect APPLE's market share. Thoughts? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dark4181 Posted January 22, 2008 Share Posted January 22, 2008 gotta agree with you. but since the 'reality distortion field' generator is double blind, steven p. jobs will never acknowledge this Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mifki Posted January 22, 2008 Share Posted January 22, 2008 Macs were never designed to play games, the gaming market for macs is insignificantly small and all the ported games usually end up sucking worse than the windows counterparts, sure you can run windows on macs now, but i wouldnt buy a mac if i was just going to play games in windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colonel Posted January 22, 2008 Share Posted January 22, 2008 Intel's own integrated graphics are cheaper for Apple to manufacturer than throwing a dedicated GPU in there. For Apple, as long as it can handle QE/CI and was made in the last 6 months, it'll work.. If you want a better GPU, upgrade to a Pro product. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A Nonny Moose Posted January 23, 2008 Share Posted January 23, 2008 Apple tried this with the G4 cube. It failed miserably. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~pcwiz Posted January 23, 2008 Share Posted January 23, 2008 Macs were made to be overkill for the average user anyway (minus Mac Mini plz ). That's how Apple earns its money. You want a mac, you pay $1000+ for something that isn't even near your league. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mifki Posted January 23, 2008 Share Posted January 23, 2008 total {censored} pcwiz, macs are not overkill (an imac isnt overkill, its a rather basic pc). When you buy a mac, you buy a commitment from apple to support your hardware for years with new os'es. Maybe overkill for you considering all you seem to do is web browsing and some web "design" (which might i add made me want to burn my eyes out), but for the "average" user (check emails, watch videos, convert dvds to ipod format etc etc) apples products certainly arent overkill, they are functional. The market has changed and apple responds to this very well. the average pc user isnt somefool who just uses a pc to play solitaire and check email, people have become more proficient with computers and apple has scaled to that in my opinion Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
U.C. Posted January 23, 2008 Share Posted January 23, 2008 Frankly the 20inch iMac (Base Model) is cheap and can game pretty well too. Wats wrong with that one?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glassJAw Posted January 23, 2008 Share Posted January 23, 2008 It's call product differentiation and product cannibalism. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arv3n Posted January 23, 2008 Share Posted January 23, 2008 total {censored} pcwiz, macs are not overkill (an imac isnt overkill, its a rather basic pc). When you buy a mac, you buy a commitment from apple to support your hardware for years with new os'es. Maybe overkill for you considering all you seem to do is web browsing and some web "design" (which might i add made me want to burn my eyes out), but for the "average" user (check emails, watch videos, convert dvds to ipod format etc etc) apples products certainly arent overkill, they are functional. The market has changed and apple responds to this very well. the average pc user isnt somefool who just uses a pc to play solitaire and check email, people have become more proficient with computers and apple has scaled to that in my opinion I can do all that {censored} with my $50 DVD player and my $100 eMac. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scj312 Posted January 23, 2008 Share Posted January 23, 2008 My iMac G4 has a GeForce 2 MX card that was fairly good for its day (it CAN play Battlefield 1942) which supports QE. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JSn1™ Posted January 27, 2008 Share Posted January 27, 2008 Yup. Some games cannot be played on the MacBook. But I wouldn't like to carry a 15" or 17" laptop all the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
composer Posted February 3, 2008 Author Share Posted February 3, 2008 Yup. Some games cannot be played on the MacBook. But I wouldn't like to carry a 15" or 17" laptop all the time. First off, games have come a long way, in fact Unreal 3 is scheduled for Mac release this month. I agree the iMac will do the job, but think about the laptop lines (and minis), I mean really, would it kill them to place a $50 GPU in some of these units? (portable or mini). None of these can play a game that uses 3D. The reason it kills me (I own a Macbook Pro LED) is that they (Apple) fear that the PRO user would buy the low end machine for Motion or 3D applications which is simply NO LONGER warranted. The PRO user makes up less than 1/5 of apples market share and if it wasn't for the iPod and iPhone, Apple would still be at 3%. Its frustrating that you can't buy a machine unless you spend $2000.00, that can either, play a game, or use motion. Really. I mean, if the market (Pro's) really made up the user base, I could see this being the case, but they/we/some of you don't make up the large portion of the user base and not many of the so called low end PC's use INTEL ON BOARD, you can get a decent laptop (albeit plastic) with a card strong enough to do graphics or games for much less than $1000.00. If anything, the market would increase as gamers, college students would buy these machines in droves - and don't get me started (LOL) about the Macbook Air, its price point and under powered/lack of features. I believe this product will not do very well in the long run and if they offer another price cut, expect some snafu. New macbook pro theorized to be out in a few days, or week. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted February 3, 2008 Share Posted February 3, 2008 Apple tried this with the G4 cube. It failed miserably. But that was then. This is now. The difference is when the Cube came out at $1800 for the low end 450MHz, you could get a full-blown PowerMac G4 (400MHz) for $1600. Or you could get a Dual Processor 450MHz PowerMac for a tad more than the single processor 500MHz cube. The PowerMacs had gigabit ethernet rather than 10/100, and room for more hard drives and RAM, and more ability to upgrade the video card (while the cube's card could be upgraded, many cards were too big, or too hot for it). The story is quite different now. You can't get a Mac Pro for $1600. You can't even get one for $2600 unless you remove a CPU, or are a student or developer. There is a large gap in Apple's headless computer selection, between the very limited Mac mini and the over-kill for most people Mac Pro. Before the Mac Pro, Apple always had an option around $1500-1600, which was normally the same form factor as their top machine, but with lesser abilities (single CPU, less RAM, lower end video, etc). That meant that people could still get an affordable expandable computer. That has not been the case for the last 18 months or so. Even as a student developer, the lowest I can get a Mac Pro for is $1839 for the single Xeon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vbetts Posted February 4, 2008 Share Posted February 4, 2008 7300 GT was a pretty decent low end card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
doggyworld Posted February 6, 2008 Share Posted February 6, 2008 I think the reason is that the average Mac consumer doesn't upgrade or game on their Mac. By selling Mac Mini's, iMac's, and Mac Books with less upgradeable options, it makes it pretty easy on their testing teams to not have to deal with many different configurations for most of the consumers which buy Apple products. Most of the people that I know buy Macs not for gaming or care to upgrade anything more than memory in their computers. For Apple to offer a middle solution for the few that do want more upgradeability won't really help Apple very much in sales. Also, this kind of forces lower and middle end Mac users to upgrade faster than they would normally have to if they could upgrade more parts of their computers, which is what Apple wants I think. Although I would also like to be able to buy a cheap Mac tower, but I don't think most people care. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ferret-Simpson Posted February 6, 2008 Share Posted February 6, 2008 They tried. It was called the Cube. They gave up and moved to the Mini. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted February 6, 2008 Share Posted February 6, 2008 They tried. It was called the Cube. They gave up and moved to the Mini. /me points to her post just above that explains how now is completely different than when they tried the cube. Also, they had a mid-range option for 5 years before the mini came out. It wasn't until the Mac Pro that they dropped the affordable tower option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
capt_cope Posted February 12, 2008 Share Posted February 12, 2008 Wait a minute... low end GPU... that's all any mac I've seen comes with. Heck the $3500 Mac "pro" we have at work has got... a $50 7300 in it, yet Mac bills that as some extreme PRO hardware. It's all BS, and the reason there isn't a 1500 option is because the mini is limited by size, if they could toss in a couple 7300s, or actually, since it's low end, probably some 5200s, and charge you a grand, they would. Any time a company tries to tell you it'll cost an extra $500 to add 2gb of ram that you can get for $80-140 on newegg, you should kinda figure out they're into price gouging. I have yet to see anything on a mac pro that is really "high end" other than their mobos, which are pretty nice. Ever wonder how people can build a similarly equiped "hacintosh pro" for something like $800? And Apple's "high end" gpu system is to toss a lot of cheap cards in and call it expensive. I'm sorry, but the 2600xt just isn't that great. Maybe if they had triple sli with say... an 8800GTX, Ok that'd be pretty high end. Back when we got our mac pro the 2600 would have been a PRIMO upgrade compared to the 7300 we've got. Apple realizes that there really isn't much of a gamer market for their hardware, and they cater to the professionals. Only catch is: most of the programs we use don't rely on graphic cards, it's just clock speed that counts for photo work. Perhaps the hardcore movie editing stuff needs more graphics horsepower, I honestly have no clue on that. But regardless, there are far more powerful cards than apple offers. And clock speed is, IMHO, far more important than having 8 damn cores. Nothing I've seen to date uses 8 cores. I've seen one program that uses 4 cores, and a handful that are really setup to use two. That's why my e6750 @ 3.6ghz with 2gb of ram smoked our quad core mac pro with 5gb of ram in every file processing/photoshop filter test. (near as I can figure, unless vista really is a superior operating system ) Sorry for rambling, I'm tired. Suffice to say, there are few games for mac, that isn't likely to change drastically. That and Macs epitomize low-end GPU. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
martiniman Posted February 13, 2008 Share Posted February 13, 2008 Frankly the 20inch iMac (Base Model) is cheap and can game pretty well too. Wats wrong with that one?? It has a screen, which I already have, and the used screen is a mediocre one. Apple tried this with the G4 cube. It failed miserably. It failed on earnings only. The cube is the biggest succes! It has the best second-market value and it is the most upgraded and most beloved Apple Computer ever. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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