imported post
malignity wrote:
I imagine things have changed a lot since I dealt with Mac on a more wide scale basis. Even today though, software and gaming compatibility issues are still a very real problem, and though not as bad as it once was, until I can install absolutely anything on a Mac that I can on a PC and vice versa, I'm gonna be sticking to my guns (har har, ya like that pun?!).
I understand the sentiment, but I don't understand the logic. Blaming Apple for the software/hardware developer's inadequacies does not make sense to me.
A generic USB printer should easily work on a Mac (and in general, most every single one does work just fine, without inserting any software at all). However, on the off chance that a driver does not exist for a specific model, Who is to blame for that? Apple? No, the company that made the printer also makes the drivers.
The same holds true for games. It's not that Macs can't do gaming (Valve has proven so with the release of the Orange Box for Mac, including Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, and Portal for Mac), it's just that developers have locked themselves into DirectX programming, with no way out other than some recoding and recompilation.
Does this suck? Yes. Does this cost a lot of money? yes. But it would take the initiative of Microsoft to code the DirectX API for Mac before we'd see an "easy" out for this.
Apple computers and Microsoft-OS computers are similar appliances, but they are bred differently, behave differently, and require different APIs and programming languages. This difference is what drives innovation and competition, and I welcome it as much as I welcome the Android OS, WebOS from Palm, and Apple's iOS. We need these different platforms to drive innovation to make the experience better for everyone.
And as an aside: Choosing a phone platform due to inadequacies of a PC platform from 20 years ago doesn't make sense at all. Just saying.