There are people whose sole purpose ISNT gaming!? Man, they must be really addicted to that new RL mod.
Yes, everyone who isn't a teenage boy.
Gaming is one of the least important uses of my computer. Even so, I do occasionally play UT2004, Heroes of Might and Magic, Halo, Starcraft, Warcraft, C&C Generals, Civilisation, Escape Velocity, Geneforge, Half-Life and am considering buying Fable.
By far and away, though, I use my computer for web browsing (Firefox), IM chat (Adium), producing scientific documents (LaTeX), producing scientific diagrams (Intaglio) and graphing (Grapher).
Modern macs are more or less the same hardware you'd get if you bought a windows machine but in a shiny aluminum cover. The main difference, as you've noted, is the boot process. All bootcamp does is get the system into a state where windows can take over. After that, it's identical to any other machine as far as windows is concerned. Windows is not being run under any sort of emulation when you boot it up via Boot Camp. If you're interested in virtualization, Ars Technica has a running series on the ins and outs from a geeky technical perspective. There are a large number of variations ranging from a 10%ish slowdown to the 10-100x slowdown you'll see in your mentioned C64 emulator.
What I was saying was basically that, but that there is a layer of emulation required even in Boot Camp to emulate BIOS. Like I said, this might be an out-of-date problem and there might have been a fix to it in the last few years, but it certainly used to be true.
OnionSoilder said:
Umm... no. There are quite a few viruses for mac, and while Windows does have more, nothing can save users from themselves. People who think their macs are virus-immune are more likely to get infected than windows users, because they don't take any antivirus precautions.
Statistically speaking, Mac users who treat their computers as virus immune are still far less likely to have their computers infected than the average Windows user.
"Quite a few"? The number's about 26. It goes up to a couple of hundred if you add in exploits when you use Microsoft software on a Mac (namely Word). ~71,000 are about if you're on a PC.
Still, while it's absolutely true that you're very safe on a Mac even without any antivirus software, it's not actually by merit of Apple's security. It's just a fact of the market. Mac OS computers are actually marginally less secure than Windows computers just a little bit. Really, 'merit' isn't involved either way though. Apple hasn't had to bother much about security because the fact is, you
can use a Mac on the Internet for years with no antivirus software and never have a single problem.
I personally cannot stand not having a right mouse button. I'm not a fan of the Mac layout. I rarely deal with pictures or music. I need to use engineering programs sometimes. I like my games modable. Macs are not an option for me.
One thing I will say: even if you're buying a new Mac with a Mighty Mouse, screw it and get a
Microsoft mouse. I don't like much that Microsoft makes, but mice are a different matter.
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