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PC Games Go To Boot Camp
1up has taken several of the more popular recent PC titles to Apple Boot Camp, and report back on how they handle the MacBook Pro hardware. From the article: "With all settings on medium, F.E.A.R. is absolutely playable. Again, none of the silky-smooth 60 fps that hardware freaks clamor for, but it looks good and plays well even with tons of characters onscreen. Annoyingly, F.E.A.R. offers a really pitiful selection of resolutions, all of which are constrained to the old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio -- meaning that play on the MacBook's widescreen is stretched, and kind of ugly. That's not a hardware issue so much as limited programming, and presumably anyone with a widescreen PC is in the same pickle."
Shouldn't that be handle? Just curious . . .
And I was hoping for Video Game Characters going to bootcamp with hilarious and sexual results.
Alas.
Nice article but I dont know why any one would want to game on a laptop. With the screen and keyboard so close together thats a back problem waitign together. I would like to see how the mac desktops size up adainst say a dell or HP desktop.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
I find it sickening that modern games do not support what should be standard screen resolutions.
All console games these days have widescreen support. It is not hard to do.
In this HDTV age, why don't games support the standard HDTV resolutions, too? 720x480, 720x576, 1280x720, 1920x1080 - it's not hard is it? How hard is it to populate an array with some other options?
... But why should the widescreen folk have a better view than the 4:3 folk? Imagine playing a game online, and you have a 4:3 screen. It's great, it looks good. But then someone else you are playing against has a 16:9 widescreen and he sees not only what you are able to see, but more (on the sides). So his 'character' has a better peripheral vision because he has a widescreen monitor?
Having the widescreen stretch the view out seems like less of a programming issue and more of a gamer-fairness issue.
is a new idea, but I don't get the hubbub. Once Apple switched to Intel, they began churning out typical x86 PC's. Yeah, they look cooler, but why would anyone expect that they would bench/perform differently from a generic white box with the same specs? This seems to be much ado about nothing. It's great that the Apple computers have the secret DRM chip that allows for OS X x8 to be installed, the dual boot option may make this a great option for for some folks. But to bench them and remark with wonder about the results compared to any of a bijillion other Intel hardware based Windows PC's seems odd.
I installed Boot Camp last week, and other than some issues with some older games running too fast or not correctly measuring the speed of the processor, it worked great. I ran out and bought Oblivion, and it installed and runs great. I found the same issues as those in the article, but they are easaily resolved with some very minor tweaking. I don't really consider myself a gamer, but I was inpressed with the distance cueing limits, etc. and the frame rate was good. I was able to play four several hours and the only problem I found was that if you have anti-aliasing on the Oblivion Gates slow the framerate right down when they are on screen. Keep it on the default HDR setting and everything is fine.
A friend of mine tried City of Heroes/Villains on his MacBook and was highly impressed by its performance.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Handy link to the Widescreen Gaming Forum website. It includes a listing of games that work with widescreen monitors, including hacks, patches, and workarounds to get games that don't natively support them to work.
This guy's the limit!
If you pump up the clock with ATITool, frame rates jump 30-50% (at the cost of your Mac being unseemly noisy and warm).
Now you just need some blue neon - and maybe a carbon fiber spoiler on top - to give your iMac that Real Ultimate (gaming) Power! (tm)
Problem with extended peripheral vision ? How about surround sound? The gap is already there. Someone wearing headphones or using standard 2(.1) channel sound is at a disadvantage against someone using 5.1+ who can literally hear their opponents' footsteps behind them.
Of course its a older game, but its much more prossesor heavy than you would think based on how SE botched up the coding for PC.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Cabel (of the Mac software shop Panic) has put up a quicktime video of Half-Life 2 running on his Intel iMac. In two words, it looks friggin sweet:
http://cabel.name/
(With apologies to his hosting provider.)
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
And one time, at boot camp...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
After all, you have a triumverate of "evil" going on here. After all, it is an Apple machine with Intel chips running Microsoft software.
All the people crying that Boot Camp means the end of OS X gaming need to remember a certain reality: no software company with any sense will shut down a business unit that remains consistently profitable. So long as native OS X versions of software continue to bring in money for the companies that create them (Aspyr, Adobe, Microsoft, etc.), they'll stick around.
So the question is, would enough people keep using native OS X apps, thereby maintaining that profitability? I'd say yes, and I'd also say that Boot Camp really won't have much of an overall effect beyond increasing the Mac's market share slightly (and only slightly, because setting up dual-booting is an extra cost in terms of the XP license and the time involved to make it happen); Boot Camp is aimed at people for whom Windows is the exception, not the rule - i.e. people that always use native OS X apps if they're available. I honestly don't see this radically changing anything.
The coolest voice ever.
Yeah I have HL2. It's great apart from the chat font in the Steam UI being way way way too tiny to read from 6 feet away on a CRT HDTV. And having no way to change it except for hacking resource files..
Weird, I never had trouble with 4:3 resolutions on my 8:5 HP f2105 monitor, I find it odd that Apple failed to include options such as the following on their wonderful hardware:
Notebooks don't have on screen displays for LCD settings.
But ignoring that, Apple's hardware and OS properly support their displays, making the OSD controls you mention unnecessary.
In other words, you're asking why Apple doesn't have kludgey workarounds for a problem that doesn't exist on the Mac. It's not Apple's fault for not including unnecessary hacks, it's Windows'/F.E.A.R.'s fault that they need them.
In case you're wondering, this is what Mac users mean by "it just works". Why should a person have to worry about something the computer is fully capable of correctly doing itself?
They are there. Those are options in the drivers for ATI cards at least. The difference betwen Windows and OS X is that that latter offers control for such features outside of the driver.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
"It's not Apple's fault for not including unnecessary hacks, it's Windows'/F.E.A.R.'s fault that they need them."
You may not be familiar with how Window's works. You see third party companies make the hardware - not Microsoft. ATI in this case makes the video chip in the MacBook Pro. So first stop for blame should be ATI for not implementing this. Although as the other poster noted, it is in fact implemented in the ATI video driver. Now if the game manufacturer for whatever reason decides not to support widescreen gaming you can blame them too.
All modern widescreen capable video cards on Windows have these options by the way.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I don't have a MacBook Pro (so I haven't given this a shot) but people wanting to wide-screen F.E.A.R. should look here. It's a pretty easy hack to get the game running properly on wide-screen displays.
The Wide-screen gaming forum has tons of simple fixes for quite a few games.
You see third party companies make the hardware - not Microsoft. ATI in this case makes the video chip in the MacBook Pro.
How is that different with Mac OS? ATI still makes the card, either way.
So first stop for blame should be ATI for not implementing this.
No, first stop for blame is Windows for not taking care of this sort of thing. This is exactly what OS's are supposed to do.
So you've clearly missed my point. It's this sort of thing that make Macs "just work". If MS doesn't take the initiative to make Windows "just work", and instead rely on third parties, they will always lag behind a company which takes these things seriously, like Apple does.
Having a Cable modem when everyone else was on dialup was unfair.
Having a laser mouse vs the old style mouses is unfair.
Having a computer that can run the game at 60fps vs a pos machine that runs it at 12fps is unfair.
Having a 21" monitor playing against a kid with a 15" is unfair. (Mostly because the 21" guy can see better with his eyes whil ethe 15" is having to look at less detail and may not see the other person move).
So computer gaming is all unfair like this... Otherwise I suggest a console. Or maybe a DS.... Mmmm... Tetris DS.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Sure. Like Apple doesn't work with ATI or Nvidia on any of it's drivers.
Apple supports a small subsection of hardware. Windows runs on a vast selection of hardware. I don't see this as being particularly comparable.
And I really wish you would tell the Mac users at my office that I support that it "just works" because they call me for support when it "just isn't working".
I use and work with OS X. It's a decent OS but it has it's problems and this bullshit "it just works" crap is getting seriously tired. It's like that "insanely great" crap all over again.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Apple supports a small subsection of hardware. Windows runs on a vast selection of hardware. I don't see this as being particularly comparable.
Because you aren't paying attention. It has nothing to do with the video driver, and everything to do with what services the OS provides.
It's not the driver's job to decide whether or not to scale the video. It's the OS's job to tell the driver what to do (and, optionally, the application's job to ask the OS to scale or not). Windows, apparently, doesn't do that. But this has absolutely nothing to do with "Windows has to support a vast amount of hardware".
I use and work with OS X. It's a decent OS but it has it's problems and this bullshit "it just works" crap is getting seriously tired.
You simply just don't understand what that phrase means. It doesn't mean things can't or don't go wrong. It means that you don't have to go through so many hoops to get things working. For most hardware, you just plug it in and "it just works". This scaling issue is just another example of that. For most things, you don't have to tinker around, you just use it.
Do you realize how abysmally ignorant you sound when you say something doesn't exist, when this entire thread is about an example of that very thing? If "it just works" isn't true, why does the Mac have no problems with varied aspect ratios and video scaling (in other words, "it just works"), yet on Windows it's a grab-bag where sometimes it works, sometimes you have to mess with the OSD on your display, sometimes you have to tinker with the video driver settings, sometimes you can choose the right setting in the game, and sometimes no matter what you do you can't get it to work right?
"It's not the driver's job to decide whether or not to scale the video. It's the OS's job to tell the driver what to do (and, optionally, the application's job to ask the OS to scale or not)."
."For most hardware, you just plug it in and "it just works"."
So let me get this straight - it's the OS's responsibility to tell the underlying hardware what features it has? Even though the hardware may or may not support the feature? I be to differ. The driver on Windows exposes the hardware capabilities of the device to the operating system. So you don't have a situation where you have Windows attempting to force a 10 year old VGA card to do widescreen. You'd never have this problem on a Mac because you don't have to worry about old hardware. It's very easy for Apple to have the OS contain all of the information about any hardware it might need to run - after all Apple controls exactly that.
I would change that to "for some hardware you just plug in and it just works most of the time except for when it doesn't".
Let me tell you a story about the Editorial department at a magazine a work for. We recently moved them up to OS X and guess what? All their digital voice recorders (USB devices) stopped working. Apparently there is no OS X support for them. And they are only about a year old. Wheee. It just didn't work and just hasn't worked and the staff has to just go out and buy new ones that do.
Or the staff member that was taking pictures on their digital camera and tried to move it to the Production Macintosh. Oops, no Mac support for that camera. It just didn't work. Had to plug it into a PC to extract the photos. Now by my analysis the camera manufacturer would be to blame, but by your's it's obviously the fault of Apple since the OS should handle this automagically! After all it "just works" with other cameras why doesn't it "just work" with this one? Of course the Production camera's work because we bought them specifically to be Mac compatible, but really shouldn't the OS support any camera by your logic?
Or maybe you can explain to my friend who ran a recent Apple update after which his wireless card no longer works? Would that be "just used to work"?
Do you realize how abysmally ignorant you sound spouting a marketing catch phrase over and over again? Do you work with Macs? I have 40 of them onsite here and have seen them screw the pooch often enough to realize that although the OS is good it has it's problems. It does not always "just work" and sometimes fixing the problem is far from trivial. Try dealing with font management on OS X in a print production environment. Holy shit I have I seen some weirdness.
It's impossible to have a reasonable conversation about OS X or Macs in general because of this whole starry eyed "it just works" oh thanks my savior Jobs viewpoint.
I've used Macs professionally for 16 years and am well versed in the good and bad points. Stop drooling on your MacBook and acting like an Apple marketing programmed robot.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
These benchmarks of Windows games running on XP on an Intel Mac are all very interesting - I mean who would have thought that a standard Intel laptop with an Apple logo on it would have performance roughly equivalent to a standard Intel laptop without an Apple logo on it?
But so far no-one seems to have gotten around to benchmarking the Intel Mac running a cross platform game under both Windows and OSX.
I just don't understand that. Is it possible that OSX would score too highly and the Apple crowd don't want to embarass the Windows users? That's got to be it.
"It's the OS's job to tell the driver what to do (and, optionally, the application's job to ask the OS to scale or not)."
So let me get this straight - it's the OS's responsibility to tell the underlying hardware what features it has?
No. You even quoted me and got it wrong. I didn't say the OS should tell the hardware what it can do, but what to do.
You keep ignoring this video card issue as a perfect example. The card supports scaling. Mac OS can tell it to scale. Whether or not Windows can tell it to, it clearly did not.
An intelligent OS should be able to query the driver to find out if it supports a feature. If it does, it uses it, if it doesn't, and the feature is reasonable to implement in software, it should do that, entirely transparently to the user and the application. Windows clearly did not do this at all.
I would change that to "for some hardware you just plug in and it just works most of the time except for when it doesn't".
Then you would change to it mean absolutely nothing. That statement would be true for even the most obscure, least usable, poorly supported OS in the universe. But clearly, some OS's "just work" more than others. For example, MS DOS could hardly be said to "just work", Linux can, but usually doesn't, "just work", Windows rarely "just works", but doesn't take a lot of effort to get most things working. OS X is the only OS where the phrase "it just works" is a reasonable claim.
XP has come a long way, but it's still a far cry from OS X with regards to "it just works".
Of course the Production camera's work because we bought them specifically to be Mac compatible, but really shouldn't the OS support any camera by your logic?
Of course not. It should support any camera with drivers. If there was no Windows driver for the X1600, I wouldn't blame Windows for that. But if there is a driver (and there is), Windows should be intelligent enough to handle things that the user should not have to concern themselves with.
It does not always "just work" and sometimes fixing the problem is far from trivial.
I never said it always "just works".
It's impossible to have a reasonable conversation about OS X or Macs in general because of this whole starry eyed "it just works" oh thanks my savior Jobs viewpoint.
No, it's not impossible at all. It might be impossible for you, but that's because you don't understand the terms being used. "It just works" does not mean "it always just works" or "nothing can ever go wrong" or "all hardware works flawlessly". It means that the OS takes care of things so you don't have to. There are absolutely situations where this fails to be true, but it happens far, far more often on Mac OS X than it does under Windows or Linux.
If you re-read my posts, you'll realize I've tend to use qualifications ("it usually", "most of the time", "tends to", "it should", things like that), but you are ignoring them and pretending like I said, "it always". Obviously, if you hold me to that standard, I can't be right, but that's not what I'm claiming. You're wasting time disproving a claim no one is making.
Or let's put it a different way. Which OS, Windows or Mac OS X, tends to "just work" more often? Which does the right thing without requiring user intervention? Without popping up dialog boxes asking what you want to do? Without flashing icons everywhere letting you know it did exactly what you should expect it to do? Without running a wizard every time you first do something--a wizard which over 99% of the time is just an exercise in clicking "Next" a half dozen times?
*That's* what "it just works" means. In the "it just works" department, OS X is vastly superior to Windows--it's virtually impossible to have used both OS's for any significant period of time and not realize this. That doesn't mean a person is stupid for using Windows, that there's no reason to use Windows, or that Windows is not good at
Yeah, and some people have faster internet connections than me, but they should lag the same way I do. It's only fair, after all. Hell, some people have specialized peripherals (e.g. gaming mouse, extra keypatds, joystick, etc.); they should just be ignored by the computer, because it's unfair to those who don't have them!
Setting aside the hardware envy, game creators do need to take into account that not all screens are created equal anymore. Even without extending field of view to give an "unfair" advantage to widescreen players, they could use letterboxing (filling the extra width with black space) so as not to put the widescreen users at a disadvantage.
Shimatta1, (sole?) student of the joystick/mouse style of FPS.
Your RIGHT!!
AFTER Windows has checked the drivers to see what its supposed to be able to support.
If the driver says it can support YxZ rez then windows allows you to select YxZ rez (for games blame the makers), if not then how the hell is windows supposed to know .. magic! .. little pixies!
With a Mac it will do the same thing but as the hardware is so tight with the OS they will write to that standard of the screen.
What im thinking is that the ATI card is specific to the Mac and they dont have the windows drivers ready for it - mabe im wrong i dont know what the ATI card is.
The reason why it 'just works' is because the HW is made to Mac standards not the million and 1 different HW setups for windows - this is why windows drivers are important.
What im thinking is that the ATI card is specific to the Mac and they dont have the windows drivers ready for it - mabe im wrong i dont know what the ATI card is.
No, there are Windows drivers for all the video cards in all the Intel Macs.
The reason why it 'just works' is because the HW is made to Mac standards not the million and 1 different HW setups for windows - this is why windows drivers are important.
Drivers are important for the Mac, as well. Mac OS X currently supports a large number of ATI and Nvidia cards.
Your argument doesn't hold up. This isn't some oddball, no-name, Taiwanese video card which doesn't work well with the chipmaker's drivers. This is a high quality ATI card with ATI-supplied drivers for both OS X and Windows. In other words, this isn't some strange situation that MS couldn't possibly foresee, and which is the exact opposite of what on would normally want to happen.
This is exactly the point I've been making. On the Mac, things just work. The user doesn't have to futz around with changing the scaling options on their display, or on their video driver.
On Windows, even with a brand-name card with brand-name drivers and a high profile game, it doesn't get things right. All Windows would have to do is notice the game is asking for a 4:3 screen, and the display is widescreen, and slap two black rectangles on either side, and it should be automatic unless the application specifically requests otherwise.
Widescreens are common, ATI cards are common, 4:3 games are common. There's absolutely no reason Windows shouldn't automatically and accurately handle this sort of situation.
We obviously have a different understanding of the term "just works". In the English language if you say something "just works" it means exactly that. It works properly without any conditions. You adding conditions to the phrase are attempting to reinvent the language. Which is why I'm calling you an Apple marketing tool. "Just works" doesn't mean, mostly, more often than something else, with devices that have drivers etc. It means exactly what those two words mean. And by the English language meaning of the phrase it is not correct to state that OS X "just works". By using that language you are implying exactly what the words mean.
Mac OS X "it just works as long as proper conditions are met".
Sometimes my arms bend back.
"You keep ignoring this video card issue as a perfect example. The card supports scaling. Mac OS can tell it to scale. Whether or not Windows can tell it to, it clearly did not.
An intelligent OS should be able to query the driver to find out if it supports a feature. If it does, it uses it, if it doesn't, and the feature is reasonable to implement in software, it should do that, entirely transparently to the user and the application. Windows clearly did not do this at all."
Oh yeah and one question regarding this point. So based on what you're telling me - if you have a widescreen monitor Mac OS X will setup all of your games to use widescreen? So then say an older game like say Starcraft will support widescreen display with an expanded battlefield and properly sized interface? Because the OS told it that it's using a widescreen monitor? That would be interesting to see. It's exactly what you are implying.
On Windows it works like this: if you have a widescreen setup with a widescreen capable video card, then your desktop will work fine with it. Full screen applications such as games offer to support how ever many resolutions the developer chooses to support. So older games for example may not support widescreen because they are not widescreen aware. The hardware didn't exist at the time they were made. If a new game doesn't support widescreen it is because the developers chose not to support it.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
F.E.A.R. runs widescreen just fine on my Dell 20.1" ... never had issues with widescreen support.
Now you're being abundantly silly. By your definition, absolutely nothing can be said to "just work". Nothing doesn't just work if the proper conditions aren't met.
You adding conditions to the phrase are attempting to reinvent the language.
No, I'm not. There is no requirement in the English language that all phrases must be absolutely and unqualifiedly true.
OK, your initial reaction is to take the phrase as an absolute and unqualified statement. You're not omniscient, and the language isn't perfect, so we're all bound to get things wrong now and then. But I've pointed out that the term is not meant to be taken that way. In other words, I've qualified the statement for you. At this point you really have no excuse for continuing to get it wrong in the exact same way.
If I tell you my car is hot, and you touch the air conditioner and say, "no, it's very cold", was I lying? If I say the ocean is deep, and you wade a few yards in and say, "no it's not, it barely comes to my knees", was I lying? Yes, both statements were said unqualified, but that doesn't make them wrong, except in a universal and absolute sense. Do you think it would be reasonable to hold every unqualified statement made to such a standard? You could try, but you're going to find that a lot of people will avoid talking with you at all costs.
You're deliberately treating the phrase "it just works" in a sense in which it's not meant. I'll attempt to explain it to you once again, but if all you're going to do is try to disprove the "unqualified and absolute" sense of the term, you're just wasting time, because no one is meaning it that way.
Take "it just works" as a quality, an attribute. Like a color. To what extent can an OS be said to "just work"? Similarly, to what extent can a building be said to be red? Your standard brick wall might be very red, with just a small amount of grey mortar. It's not "unqualifiedly and absolutely red", but it's not wrong to call it red. Given the processes which users go through, adding and removing hardware, adding and removing software, running software, accessing the Internet, and so on. To what extent does Windows "just work"? Under Windows, just about everything requires user interaction. Just about everything requires a wizard, or a choice of options, or installation of drivers, etc. None of these interactions are terribly difficult, but they are annoying and wholly unnecessary. Windows has a very low "just works" quotient. That's not an absolute. Sometimes Windows does just work. For example, you no longer have to reboot after plugging in a USB mouse.
For Mac OS X, the amount of work the user has to do to get something done is far less. Far, far more things are automatically and correctly configured. Installing applications virtually never requires any sort of "wizard" to set up. Mac OS X has a very high "just works" quotient.
Does that make sense to you? Do you understand now what people mean by "it just works"? Do you understand how something can be said to have a quality, even if that quality is not universal and absolute? (and in fact, rarely does an object have a singular quality universally and absolutely)
So then say an older game like say Starcraft will support widescreen display with an expanded battlefield and properly sized interface? Because the OS told it that it's using a widescreen monitor? That would be interesting to see. It's exactly what you are implying.
Sometimes, yes, that's exactly what happens. For a game that's hard-coded to 4:3, for whatever reason, it's my experience that OS X will do a sort of "letterboxing", except that the black bars are on the either side of the game, so that the game is still 4:3, and not awkwardly scaled to the widescreen ratio.
I can think of no technological reason why a graphics interface (DirectX, on Windows) can't do this automatically for a game, even if that game was written prior to the availability of modern widescreen displays.
Apple puts a lot of effort into making things work correctly with a minimal amount of effort on the end-user and the developer. Microsoft does not. I don't see why you're finding it so hard to believe that such a disparity of effort won't manifest itself in the end product. For a Windows (or Linux) user switching to a Mac, things "just work" so often it's amazing. Booting from an external drive? It just works. Networking? It just works. How do you install an app? Just run it--you don't have to install (but you'll generally want to copy it to the Applications folder so you know where it's at). How do you uninstall? Put it into the trash. How do you install a screensaver? Just double-click on it. Same with dashboard widgets. How do you tell the OS what application can open a file type? You don't have to do anything. So long as the appropriate application is merely on a drive that the OS can see, it will use it to open a file. These things all "just work" and they do so because Apple put the effort in to make them work. These things don't "just work" on Windows because MS hasn't put in the effort.
And, no, not everything in Mac OS X "just works", and sometimes things can go horribly wrong. But OS X "just works" far more often than Windows does.
My point is simple. Using the term "just works" in reference to OS X is simply a marketing spin term. And I find it an insulting one when things "just don't work".
Just like calling the Mac "insanely great" when some aspects were "insanely stupid" (the extension debacle in OS 9 and lower comes to mind).
The term is bandied about so much it's just ridiculous. You paint a magical picture of the perfect operating system, when it has plenty of issues. I'm not, nor have I been arguing Windows is better, just that at least with Windows you don't have a retarded level of evangelism that gushes about things "just working" and ignores what doesn't. As someone who uses Mac's in business I find that starry-eyed attitude irritating. Most of the people I see with it are consumer's who never dealt with Macs in a production environment.
We'll never agree on this - you think it's a valid "attribute" of an operating system, I think it's a subjective term that orginated in marketing and glosses over any deficiencies in the OS.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
You paint a magical picture of the perfect operating system, when it has plenty of issues.
That's called a "straw man". It's not an argument I'm making (I've pointed this out many times), yet you keep trotting it out and skewering it, and pretending like you've just defeated my argument. You haven't. How many times do I have to say, "OS X isn't perfect" before you stop saying "aha, but don't you know? OS X isn't perfect! I bet you didn't know that!!"?
you think it's a valid "attribute" of an operating system, I think it's a subjective term
"Valid" and "subjective" are not mutually exclusive. I absolutely agree that it's subjective. But that does not mean it doesn't exist. You might as well claim a Mercedes doesn't have that "luxury" quality any more than a Chevy Nova, since "luxury" is subjective and used by Mercedes' marketing firm. It's certainly possible to make and defend such a claim--all you have to do is ignore any measurement of "luxury". That doesn't change the fact that the Mercedes really is more luxurious, it just makes you look like... Well, let's just say it doesn't put you grasp of the subject in a very good light.
This is about the point where you jump in with "Ah! But OS X can't have the quality of 'it just works' because it is imperfect!"
<sigh>
I'm not saying OS X 100% "just works". Just that "it just works" is a significant attribute of Mac OS X. Not a perfect and absolute attribute, just a significant one. And that it's an attribute OS X has in great excess when compared Windows or Linux. That's not to say Windows and Linux don't excel in other areas, just that in the "it just works" dept, they are notably inferior to OS X.
Yes and in my world there is no "it just works" dept. It's a bullshit term that was made to sound oh so cute by Apple. And you are a tool for using it quotes an all. I don't consider it to be a siginificant attribute of any operating system. I consider it to be an invented term in the context of how you are using. It is entirely subjective. For example if a Windows user or a Linux user has an expectation of how some function is performed and it doesn't work that way on Mac OS X it will not "just work" for them. I have users who can't grasp the concept that when you close all of the windows the application stays open. They don't grasp that the top menu bar changes when you are on different applications. For them, this doesn't work, no matter how many times I've told them how it works. One of these people has used Macs all his life. Previous to OS X I would get a call at least once a month where he would say he can't open program X because he was out of memory but he says that he has closed all of his applications. Of course he has just closed the windows and not quit the application so his memory is still being used by the applications. Now this guy has used Macs for 15 years and he still doesn't get that one concept. It's not "just working" for him, it causes him confusion.
Bottom line, it's a stupid marketing term spun by Jobs that is completely overused and helps to create false impressions of the reliability of the operating system. I glad you like it so much, I'm sick of having to explain to users who are confused because their OS isn't "just working" like it does for the smarmy man in the turtleneck.
Sometimes my arms bend back.