Apple *IS* switching to Intel

[PudriK Profile]

End of WHAT game development? Or did you mean game ports? (I know, I know, there are a few mac game developers, like Ambrosia.) Actually, I'm hoping this means that PC games will be able to run native on the mac with only a little tweaking, but I'm not sure if that's has anything to do with it. That would be huge... speaking for myself, the one thing that keeps me from buying a mac is that I can't play, say, BF2 on it. I'm sure there are others like me.

I have a feeling the notebooks are what drove this decision. I don't care what people say, I've seen the Powerbooks, they are dogs compared to mac desktops and PC laptops... too limited by their slow bus and processor. The Pentium-M should make a big difference for mac.

But other than helping out their performance, I don't see what all the hubub's about... a mac's benefits have nothing to do with the processor.

[cavalierlwt Profile]

I've read some good articles about intel based gaming on the Mac, the future looks good. Some of the developers said that porting to the Mac will be a breeze and that this will reduce the long lag time between the debut of PC games and Mac games. You hit the nail on the head with notebooks being one the biggest driving forces. Intel makes great notebook processors. Yeah, nothing else is going to change regarding the overall 'experience' of the Mac. It's still OS X, running on Apple spec hardware. The only difference Mac users are going to notice is more frequent upgrades in speed, high end Macs will probably cost about $500-$800 less, and dual booting into Windows will probably be a pretty solid thing eventually.
In case anyone is skeptical about gaming, and is wondering why companies will support Mac and not linux, it's easier to support the Intel based Mac with it's relatively small subset of supported video hardware, and it's tightly controlled operating system. On the upside for linux gamers. I supposed any game ported to the intel Mac should be a least within spitting distance of being ready for Linux (a lot less work will need to be done)