The kids I knew who were banned from watching hardly any TV were all relatively more intelligent then their peers, but also were lacking socially quite badly.
The kids I knew who were not banned from watching TV, but had hardly watched it because they had constructive hobbies and parents that supported that, were relatively more intelligent then their peers but also had friends.
But actual Hippies might like it.
on
Hip-e All-In-One PC
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· Score: 2, Funny
I can picture my 50 year old hippie step father thinking this is pretty cool.
This is a chicken and the egg style problem for television shows.
It seems to cost quite a bit more money to present things in a relatable fashion. In order to get that money, you have to lower your standards of educational programming in the first place to get more viewers and more money. Then you get complacent with your success as a station. This is what seems to have happened to many existing educational cable channels. Even PBS seems to have fallen for this, at least my local affiliate has.
I guess.. if Joe Public cares, it will make more money and perpetuate itself.. ok..
But.. fundamentally, isn't it this mentality that has watered down channels that already were originally intended to be particularly educational?
CourtTV Discovery Channel The History Channel Many PBS affiliates..... I'm sure you could go on and on..
They all still have some good shows, but overall, they are way off the mark from how they were originally envisioned.
When you start caring about what 'Joe Public' cares about, you might as well just be straight forwrad and say "Let's appeal to the lowest common denominator."
The roulette type games, are you talking about the 'Stop the blinking light' type things? They are mostly skilled based, but I guess I have to agree that they do evoke images of gambling and in some sense, while it's easy to constantly get the lights right -next- to jackpot, actually getting the jackpot itself seems to be totally luck.
Maybe thats even more insidious then a pure luck game, although it wouldn't be as insidious as carnival games. But in my mind, being exposed to carnival games was an intensely good experience as that's where I learned that people will setup traps to take your money.
The funny trap with ticket games it's relatively too complex overall for a kid to understand. Most kids aren't able to keep track of the fact that the money they spent getting tickets could have bought them way more stuff then they could ever possibly hope to get on spending tickets. Even if they win the 200 ticket jackpot on one lucky press, they'll probably get something that cost a buck. Eventually though they do figure it out for the most part I think and that's a good lesson too, and the games are relatively fun.
Unlike real slot machines, you could actually skillfully win that slot machine in Super Mario Bros 2 if you timed the presses right, in fact, and I sware to god on this, there was a certain setting on the Nes advantage turbo knob that could guarantee you 1ups -every- time if you just turned on turbo and held the button down.
Yea I always liked to think that the far religious right should support Pokemon simply because it abused the term 'evolution' in such a way to make kids more likely to associate it with something fictional and ridiculous.
Establishing that as a platform would've driven their opposition totally nuts, aaahh.. if only extremists actually thought outside the box..
Unless of course the game is not a realistic representation of gambling, in which case it's potentially quite dangerous, if it gives the false security of actually being good when you are in fact a total sucker.
I'd have to say overall for myself though, playing video game versions of house dominated games like slots, blackjack, and roulette is what taught me they are not a smart thing to play with real money. I don't know if weird abstractions and associations with junk like Neopets would have affected me differently.
More generally though, being good at -skill- based games is what drives me away from -luck- based games. So video games that revolve around luck kind of disturb me.
Back when I was a warez kiddy I played and beat Alone in the Dark 1 entirely in French. I had no idea what the heck was going on other then it was one extremely strange game. It's also kinda hard to beat a puzzle/adventure game when you can't read any of the clues. Later on when I played it again in English I was stunned by just how much of the game I originally missed out on by not being able to read all the creepy occult stuff... My opinion on warez? It's something for kids, honestly, if it weren't for being able to warez operating systems and applications I'd really never had the opportunity to learn the skills I use today to be employed. Games were an impetus to all the other useful exposure. The way I buy software using the money I make with those skills now I think I can say with decent confidence has paid off it's theoretical debt to piracy from when I was a kid. Yea, fundamentally it's just not equivocal, therefore my justification is somewhat flawed, but the alternative is basically that I'd never have been able to or be inclined to buy software like I do, so in some twisted way it's paid off to the software industry holistically.
Basically, it'll never have been fair to the people who made the software I pirated, but the alternative is that today's developers would be out quite a bit of money if my case is even remotely common: warez-kiddy turned computer-professional/gamer.
Maybe this concept isn't as strong as it was back then, just getting those games to work back then was a major technical hurdle in and of itself half the time. I think today's warez kiddies have a lot less to deal with. Back then I was so into just -computers- as a toy that I actually thought it was fun to play with office applications and see what they were capable of. That kind of experience was just totally invaluable, figuring everything out without a manual or help gave me a sort of sixth sense for finding my way through most systems towards what I'm looking for.
I think the industry would be shooting itself in the foot in the long run to stomp out all piracy. (hmm maybe it'd be stomping on a rusty nail...)
But how massively different is MacOS from SunOS in terms of end user marketability?
There's just no relationship here. SunOS for intel was a bizarro experiment in trying to get people away from a free server OS to a paid one... it has nothing to do with XP vs MacOS.
I really just can't relate to this post at all, sorry.
Modern realtime games are running a constant simulation, AI is moving around, doing things, the environment is being interacted with whether you are just standing there or not.
The vast majority of applications this is not the case, the interface just statically sits there until you execute some kind of job then something occurs. Unless you are dealing with some kind of realtime fed data, the requirements for _usability_ are going to fundamentally be lower.
I just can't understand how you come to the conclusion that applications are less human input bound then games. Are the average applications doing all kinds of stuff behind the scenes while you sit there looking at it? Real time video editing perhaps, but compared to games that's a particularly small domain.
The part where I don't know how to argue with you is on this assumption that physics simulations will someday all end up in the GPU.
I've seen no indication that this will be the case in the remotely near future, this is particularly substantiated by the fact that CPU requirements have increased over -ten- fold for the same class of games.
We are definitely both speculating, and you make good points, but I have to point out that gaming has been on a reverse trend back towards being very CPU intensive.
Half life recommend system requirements: Around 200mhz Half life 2 recommend system requirements: Around 2.4 Ghz
Games have shot -way- up recently to eat up a lot of that CPU-GPU gap, I'd say mostly because of the way increased use of really detailed simulated physics environments. For a long time most games were like Half life, not much more then shells for driving 3-d instructions down a pipeline, throw in some ok AI and really basic physics.
Check out Counterstrike: Source cs_office map if you want a pretty good example of just how incredibly far things have come beyond simply higher resolutions and, neat graphical effects and more polygons.
All I'm saying with that point is that it creates the opportunity for a real meaningful test-drive that otherwise simply isn't possible. The fact that people are currently relatively comfortable with their PCs doesn't mean they aren't curious about Macs. I know I would personally buy a decent emulator and MacOS in an instant simply for the sake of becoming familar with it.
I guess it is difficult for me to gauge the actual likeliness of it, in fact, I've already acknowledged in my situation I'd continue buying PC hardware for games. Either way my use would be good for Apple because as it stands, I contribute nothing to them whatsoever currently. Giving them my money for the OS and some of my mindshare can only be good.
When you argue against the likeliness of my scenario, what do you think is more likely? Nobody uses the emu? People use the emu but never migrate to Apple hardware? People migrate -away- from Apple hardware and run an emulator (seems pretty unlikely, and is really the only bad case scenerio for Apple ) ?
The poster you respond to implicitly answers your point. It requires a different revenue model to address that. Consumer reports ain't free. Tom's hardware is. Online advertising revenue is not easy to come by.
On the brightside, while benchmark numbers are potentially perilous, they are way better then nothing. Most product reviews have no standards to go by and you just get extremely subjective and vague impressions the reviewer had in regards to it. "It felt kinda funny" "Seemed sturdy enough" "Burned 1 bagel, but maybe that was my fault." For any publicly available computer product that can be benched, even the most bought out partial review site can't last long without being called on falsified bench numbers.
Some subjectivity is built in there. From what I've seen, most Mac users tend to not use their Mac in a CPU bound meaningfully interactive way very much compared to PC gamers. Is that apples and oranges? Kind of, only because there are so few Mac gamers relatively. If a person wanted to be a PC gamer and a Mac user, viola, product massively justified, that's the point, it's a whole new point of entry for a lot of people who otherwise would never touch Macs.
See my reply to the Anon Coward. Basically all I'm saying is that any game less then 2 years old running under a PC emulator on a Mac is probably not even going to be playable, but the _vast_ majority of applications for MacOS are probably going to be workable under a Mac emulator running on a PC.
I concede there are going to be exceptions to that, but from my perspective of functionality, the exceptions in the reverse direction are -way- more.
Basically, for myself and many other people I know, they wish they had a Mac for all their more fundamental activities but are PC gamers and thus will never, ever, buy a Mac until it's actually competitive in terms of selection, aka, probably never. Thus, this product's existence is massively justified, which is what I was responding to in the first place.
You completely fail to ignore the fact that reality is implicitly built into my statements.
My point is that games are more CPU/GPU bound then virtually anything else the average user encounters typically on a computer. Yes, creative apps are surely CPU bound, but which do you think is going to be more usable, Half Life 2 under a PC emulator running on a Mac, or Photoshop under a Mac emulator running on a PC?
Sure, I can imagine there will be some apps on the Mac that will have similarly unusable scenarios running under an emulator, but I won't buy for a second that they even come close to representing the kind of user market share that games do. This is the reality that I am expressing.
I totally agree that there is a lack of fear, and that kids are tending to be under-disciplined, but I'm not entirely sure if the two are so tightly related.
While fear of consequence for actions is important in the vast majority of poor behavior, I think that really sociopathic behavior can't be averted just with fear of punishment. I think fundamentally those peoples' lack of fear comes from a lack of self worth, from whatever, probably mostly from alienation. It's probably often the case that it's the same wishy washy parents that don't show enough interest to build family relations that leave kids with a feeling they have nothing to lose.
I think lack of discipline primarily leads not so much to hardcore criminal activity as it does to general loserdom. Without being put on any kind of path, kids tend to just kind of flounder around without a sense of purpose or goals until they are suddenly adults with no skills and no concept of achieving or striving for anything.
The basis for my belief is that when I moved to California I met quite a few people who had loving but weak-willed parents who didn't really discipline them consistantly. The kids ended up being totally nice people, but don't really apply themselves to anything and end up in low paying retail/service jobs for years. All the kids I knew who started real careers fairly early and achieved independence generally were physically punished fairly consistently. The few people I've ever known with borderline sociopathic behavior basically were just ignored by their parents, the only thing that seemed to hold them back was having friends who kept them in check to some degree.
An interesting side note though, of the kids (including myself) that had consistent physical punishment, we all became extremely excellent at getting away with our various wrong doings. The kids who had no real punishment were constantly being caught but nothing would ever really happen. We'd tend to stay away from those kids because their bumbling ways would make it more likely we'd be caught by various authorities, aka, they were looked down on as idiots. I think there is really something to be said that the skills required to avoid being caught were probably a very significant source of mental development that undisciplined kids miss out on.
Pro: PC users buying Mac OS, PC users buying Mac OS software, PC users going 'Hmm Mac is great, I think I'll just buy a Mac for my next computer'. Basically it way lowers the bar for introduction to the platform, seems like a MASSIVE win for Apple.
Con: Mac users not really utilizing their macs from a horsepower perspective, they are just browsing internet, email, a few things, they think, hmm, I could buy a cheap Dell, put this on there, and probably have an ok machine... hmm. Or... Mac users with an inclination towards games, it's an obvious win for them to have a real PC for games and use MacOS for absolutely everything else that isn't nearly as performance related. Aka: -Actual- hardware competition for Apple.. That alone will probably drive Apple into a frenzy.
I personally think the pros outweigh the cons, just simply because there are a ton of people that will never even try Mac simply because of the high cost and risk of introduction. This could lower that bar to almost nonexistant.
The best reason I can think of is that all the things I'd want to use a Mac for, are almost totally not CPU bound, whereas all the things I use my PC for are massively GPU/CPU related (games). So basically, I could have most of the best of both worlds in one box. Mac for everything internet/creativity related, and the PC for games/proprietary-work-apps.
There are lots of other reasons you could contrive, what if you had Mac friends that visit a lot but constantly lament being unable to use your PC? It fundamentally boils down to you wanting _both_, but you need more performance on the PC side, which I really think is more common of a case, just on games alone.
The implied 3rd choice is that a game is exclusive to a platform and is designed from the ground up for that platform, which has classically been the greatest strength of any console system, developers can get down and dirty and cater directly to the hardware.
Also it's been my experience that cross platform games tend to have a very homogenous look, unless the ports come out several months from each other. All the particularly stylish and artistic games I can think of came out on one platform at first.
I don't think the devs shouldn't use the greater capabilities when developing a cross platform game, but I think sometimes they just abstract the hardware and then do all testing on the best platform and just kinda throw the other versions out there.
True Crime for example, must've been tested on the xbox mainly because the video output on the PS2 is too grainy to see the street signs until you are like right under them.
I realize that, and even mention it at the bottom of my post. I was simply speaking in terms of the typical reality that most people don't have their computers hooked up to $1000+ HDTVs, and if they do hook up to a standard TV, a lot of the PC only type games become kinda unplayable, whereas console games are designed to be played on larger TVs from the get go, so overall, console == bigger screen at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
The Toothbrush plus Toothpaste experiment.
Umbrella in the rain experiment.
The darkness and light switch experiment.
The kids I knew who were banned from watching hardly any TV were all relatively more intelligent then their peers, but also were lacking socially quite badly.
The kids I knew who were not banned from watching TV, but had hardly watched it because they had constructive hobbies and parents that supported that, were relatively more intelligent then their peers but also had friends.
I can picture my 50 year old hippie step father thinking this is pretty cool.
This is a chicken and the egg style problem for television shows.
It seems to cost quite a bit more money to present things in a relatable fashion. In order to get that money, you have to lower your standards of educational programming in the first place to get more viewers and more money. Then you get complacent with your success as a station. This is what seems to have happened to many existing educational cable channels. Even PBS seems to have fallen for this, at least my local affiliate has.
I guess.. if Joe Public cares, it will make more money and perpetuate itself.. ok..
..... I'm sure you could go on and on..
But.. fundamentally, isn't it this mentality that has watered down channels that already were originally intended to be particularly educational?
CourtTV
Discovery Channel
The History Channel
Many PBS affiliates
They all still have some good shows, but overall, they are way off the mark from how they were originally envisioned.
When you start caring about what 'Joe Public' cares about, you might as well just be straight forwrad and say "Let's appeal to the lowest common denominator."
The roulette type games, are you talking about the 'Stop the blinking light' type things? They are mostly skilled based, but I guess I have to agree that they do evoke images of gambling and in some sense, while it's easy to constantly get the lights right -next- to jackpot, actually getting the jackpot itself seems to be totally luck.
Maybe thats even more insidious then a pure luck game, although it wouldn't be as insidious as carnival games. But in my mind, being exposed to carnival games was an intensely good experience as that's where I learned that people will setup traps to take your money.
The funny trap with ticket games it's relatively too complex overall for a kid to understand. Most kids aren't able to keep track of the fact that the money they spent getting tickets could have bought them way more stuff then they could ever possibly hope to get on spending tickets. Even if they win the 200 ticket jackpot on one lucky press, they'll probably get something that cost a buck. Eventually though they do figure it out for the most part I think and that's a good lesson too, and the games are relatively fun.
Unlike real slot machines, you could actually skillfully win that slot machine in Super Mario Bros 2 if you timed the presses right, in fact, and I sware to god on this, there was a certain setting on the Nes advantage turbo knob that could guarantee you 1ups -every- time if you just turned on turbo and held the button down.
Yea I always liked to think that the far religious right should support Pokemon simply because it abused the term 'evolution' in such a way to make kids more likely to associate it with something fictional and ridiculous.
Establishing that as a platform would've driven their opposition totally nuts, aaahh.. if only extremists actually thought outside the box..
Unless of course the game is not a realistic representation of gambling, in which case it's potentially quite dangerous, if it gives the false security of actually being good when you are in fact a total sucker.
I'd have to say overall for myself though, playing video game versions of house dominated games like slots, blackjack, and roulette is what taught me they are not a smart thing to play with real money. I don't know if weird abstractions and associations with junk like Neopets would have affected me differently.
More generally though, being good at -skill- based games is what drives me away from -luck- based games. So video games that revolve around luck kind of disturb me.
Back when I was a warez kiddy I played and beat Alone in the Dark 1 entirely in French. I had no idea what the heck was going on other then it was one extremely strange game. It's also kinda hard to beat a puzzle/adventure game when you can't read any of the clues. Later on when I played it again in English I was stunned by just how much of the game I originally missed out on by not being able to read all the creepy occult stuff. .. My opinion on warez? It's something for kids, honestly, if it weren't for being able to warez operating systems and applications I'd really never had the opportunity to learn the skills I use today to be employed. Games were an impetus to all the other useful exposure. The way I buy software using the money I make with those skills now I think I can say with decent confidence has paid off it's theoretical debt to piracy from when I was a kid. Yea, fundamentally it's just not equivocal, therefore my justification is somewhat flawed, but the alternative is basically that I'd never have been able to or be inclined to buy software like I do, so in some twisted way it's paid off to the software industry holistically.
Basically, it'll never have been fair to the people who made the software I pirated, but the alternative is that today's developers would be out quite a bit of money if my case is even remotely common: warez-kiddy turned computer-professional/gamer.
Maybe this concept isn't as strong as it was back then, just getting those games to work back then was a major technical hurdle in and of itself half the time. I think today's warez kiddies have a lot less to deal with. Back then I was so into just -computers- as a toy that I actually thought it was fun to play with office applications and see what they were capable of. That kind of experience was just totally invaluable, figuring everything out without a manual or help gave me a sort of sixth sense for finding my way through most systems towards what I'm looking for.
I think the industry would be shooting itself in the foot in the long run to stomp out all piracy. (hmm maybe it'd be stomping on a rusty nail...)
But how massively different is MacOS from SunOS in terms of end user marketability?
There's just no relationship here. SunOS for intel was a bizarro experiment in trying to get people away from a free server OS to a paid one... it has nothing to do with XP vs MacOS.
I really just can't relate to this post at all, sorry.
Modern realtime games are running a constant simulation, AI is moving around, doing things, the environment is being interacted with whether you are just standing there or not.
The vast majority of applications this is not the case, the interface just statically sits there until you execute some kind of job then something occurs. Unless you are dealing with some kind of realtime fed data, the requirements for _usability_ are going to fundamentally be lower.
I just can't understand how you come to the conclusion that applications are less human input bound then games. Are the average applications doing all kinds of stuff behind the scenes while you sit there looking at it? Real time video editing perhaps, but compared to games that's a particularly small domain.
The part where I don't know how to argue with you is on this assumption that physics simulations will someday all end up in the GPU.
I've seen no indication that this will be the case in the remotely near future, this is particularly substantiated by the fact that CPU requirements have increased over -ten- fold for the same class of games.
We are definitely both speculating, and you make good points, but I have to point out that gaming has been on a reverse trend back towards being very CPU intensive.
Half life recommend system requirements: Around 200mhz
Half life 2 recommend system requirements: Around 2.4 Ghz
Games have shot -way- up recently to eat up a lot of that CPU-GPU gap, I'd say mostly because of the way increased use of really detailed simulated physics environments. For a long time most games were like Half life, not much more then shells for driving 3-d instructions down a pipeline, throw in some ok AI and really basic physics.
Check out Counterstrike: Source cs_office map if you want a pretty good example of just how incredibly far things have come beyond simply higher resolutions and, neat graphical effects and more polygons.
All I'm saying with that point is that it creates the opportunity for a real meaningful test-drive that otherwise simply isn't possible. The fact that people are currently relatively comfortable with their PCs doesn't mean they aren't curious about Macs. I know I would personally buy a decent emulator and MacOS in an instant simply for the sake of becoming familar with it.
I guess it is difficult for me to gauge the actual likeliness of it, in fact, I've already acknowledged in my situation I'd continue buying PC hardware for games. Either way my use would be good for Apple because as it stands, I contribute nothing to them whatsoever currently. Giving them my money for the OS and some of my mindshare can only be good.
When you argue against the likeliness of my scenario, what do you think is more likely? Nobody uses the emu? People use the emu but never migrate to Apple hardware? People migrate -away- from Apple hardware and run an emulator (seems pretty unlikely, and is really the only bad case scenerio for Apple ) ?
Snopes reference to this
The poster you respond to implicitly answers your point. It requires a different revenue model to address that. Consumer reports ain't free. Tom's hardware is. Online advertising revenue is not easy to come by.
On the brightside, while benchmark numbers are potentially perilous, they are way better then nothing. Most product reviews have no standards to go by and you just get extremely subjective and vague impressions the reviewer had in regards to it. "It felt kinda funny" "Seemed sturdy enough" "Burned 1 bagel, but maybe that was my fault." For any publicly available computer product that can be benched, even the most bought out partial review site can't last long without being called on falsified bench numbers.
"all the things I'd want to use a Mac for"
Some subjectivity is built in there. From what I've seen, most Mac users tend to not use their Mac in a CPU bound meaningfully interactive way very much compared to PC gamers. Is that apples and oranges? Kind of, only because there are so few Mac gamers relatively. If a person wanted to be a PC gamer and a Mac user, viola, product massively justified, that's the point, it's a whole new point of entry for a lot of people who otherwise would never touch Macs.
See my reply to the Anon Coward. Basically all I'm saying is that any game less then 2 years old running under a PC emulator on a Mac is probably not even going to be playable, but the _vast_ majority of applications for MacOS are probably going to be workable under a Mac emulator running on a PC.
I concede there are going to be exceptions to that, but from my perspective of functionality, the exceptions in the reverse direction are -way- more.
Basically, for myself and many other people I know, they wish they had a Mac for all their more fundamental activities but are PC gamers and thus will never, ever, buy a Mac until it's actually competitive in terms of selection, aka, probably never. Thus, this product's existence is massively justified, which is what I was responding to in the first place.
You completely fail to ignore the fact that reality is implicitly built into my statements.
My point is that games are more CPU/GPU bound then virtually anything else the average user encounters typically on a computer. Yes, creative apps are surely CPU bound, but which do you think is going to be more usable, Half Life 2 under a PC emulator running on a Mac, or Photoshop under a Mac emulator running on a PC?
Sure, I can imagine there will be some apps on the Mac that will have similarly unusable scenarios running under an emulator, but I won't buy for a second that they even come close to representing the kind of user market share that games do. This is the reality that I am expressing.
I totally agree that there is a lack of fear, and that kids are tending to be under-disciplined, but I'm not entirely sure if the two are so tightly related.
While fear of consequence for actions is important in the vast majority of poor behavior, I think that really sociopathic behavior can't be averted just with fear of punishment. I think fundamentally those peoples' lack of fear comes from a lack of self worth, from whatever, probably mostly from alienation. It's probably often the case that it's the same wishy washy parents that don't show enough interest to build family relations that leave kids with a feeling they have nothing to lose.
I think lack of discipline primarily leads not so much to hardcore criminal activity as it does to general loserdom. Without being put on any kind of path, kids tend to just kind of flounder around without a sense of purpose or goals until they are suddenly adults with no skills and no concept of achieving or striving for anything.
The basis for my belief is that when I moved to California I met quite a few people who had loving but weak-willed parents who didn't really discipline them consistantly. The kids ended up being totally nice people, but don't really apply themselves to anything and end up in low paying retail/service jobs for years. All the kids I knew who started real careers fairly early and achieved independence generally were physically punished fairly consistently. The few people I've ever known with borderline sociopathic behavior basically were just ignored by their parents, the only thing that seemed to hold them back was having friends who kept them in check to some degree.
An interesting side note though, of the kids (including myself) that had consistent physical punishment, we all became extremely excellent at getting away with our various wrong doings. The kids who had no real punishment were constantly being caught but nothing would ever really happen. We'd tend to stay away from those kids because their bumbling ways would make it more likely we'd be caught by various authorities, aka, they were looked down on as idiots. I think there is really something to be said that the skills required to avoid being caught were probably a very significant source of mental development that undisciplined kids miss out on.
It's really a double edged sword for Apple.
Pro: PC users buying Mac OS, PC users buying Mac OS software, PC users going 'Hmm Mac is great, I think I'll just buy a Mac for my next computer'. Basically it way lowers the bar for introduction to the platform, seems like a MASSIVE win for Apple.
Con: Mac users not really utilizing their macs from a horsepower perspective, they are just browsing internet, email, a few things, they think, hmm, I could buy a cheap Dell, put this on there, and probably have an ok machine... hmm. Or... Mac users with an inclination towards games, it's an obvious win for them to have a real PC for games and use MacOS for absolutely everything else that isn't nearly as performance related. Aka: -Actual- hardware competition for Apple.. That alone will probably drive Apple into a frenzy.
I personally think the pros outweigh the cons, just simply because there are a ton of people that will never even try Mac simply because of the high cost and risk of introduction. This could lower that bar to almost nonexistant.
The best reason I can think of is that all the things I'd want to use a Mac for, are almost totally not CPU bound, whereas all the things I use my PC for are massively GPU/CPU related (games). So basically, I could have most of the best of both worlds in one box. Mac for everything internet/creativity related, and the PC for games/proprietary-work-apps.
There are lots of other reasons you could contrive, what if you had Mac friends that visit a lot but constantly lament being unable to use your PC? It fundamentally boils down to you wanting _both_, but you need more performance on the PC side, which I really think is more common of a case, just on games alone.
It.. is.. the.. worst.. job..
please.. do.. not.. enter.. the.. field..
so.. that.. I.. can.. get.. a.. job.. easier..
thank.. you..
The implied 3rd choice is that a game is exclusive to a platform and is designed from the ground up for that platform, which has classically been the greatest strength of any console system, developers can get down and dirty and cater directly to the hardware.
Also it's been my experience that cross platform games tend to have a very homogenous look, unless the ports come out several months from each other. All the particularly stylish and artistic games I can think of came out on one platform at first.
I don't think the devs shouldn't use the greater capabilities when developing a cross platform game, but I think sometimes they just abstract the hardware and then do all testing on the best platform and just kinda throw the other versions out there.
True Crime for example, must've been tested on the xbox mainly because the video output on the PS2 is too grainy to see the street signs until you are like right under them.
I realize that, and even mention it at the bottom of my post. I was simply speaking in terms of the typical reality that most people don't have their computers hooked up to $1000+ HDTVs, and if they do hook up to a standard TV, a lot of the PC only type games become kinda unplayable, whereas console games are designed to be played on larger TVs from the get go, so overall, console == bigger screen at the moment.