Ok, I am all for the Mac - my first 'puter was a II-GS back when I was 6 or so. But I haven't been following the hardware "jam XP into a Mac" soap opera like some have, so I'm not sure of the complexity of getting both OSes to share one living space (Talk about "The Odd Couple").
I am, interested, however, in hearing about it as it pertains to adoption by non-techies. I read/. but I've never had a dual-boot system myself. I have a Powerbook, an Ubuntu box, and my company thinkpad, so I've never needed to. Each box does its particular tasks, and does them pretty well (with the exception of the T23 my company insists is SOTA).
However, the specs from this article look quite promising. Like many of you, I salivate at the thought of running not only WoW on my MacBook, but games from developers who don't touch OSX. I'm not foolish enough to presume I'm in any kind of majority on that, but I think it has ramifications beyond the hardcore. I think when the new intel iBooks come out, they will be the perfect computer for just about any non-technical person; i.e. students, moms, grandmoms, whomever. If you can give them something familiar, adoption is going to be 1000 times easier. I'm not asking that Apple blow away other OEM's while running windows. The fact that it comes close (in all of the tests so far) is good enough for me. And grandma too.
I didn't say I'm cool or healthy. I am a 1337 couch-potato most of the time. Nor am I trying to degrade anyone. Sure, I'd like to have the tier 1 epic eq'ed characters. Hell, I'd kidney punch my mom for a frickin' mount at this point. Grinding spiders gets old fast. All I was really trying to say is that moderation isn't a bad idea. And that joining a server in a slightly different time-zone may alleviate some of the lagqueues a lot of people seem to be dreading. Frankly, I can't wait to run Baron Geddon. Your monster level 60 doesn't make you better/cooler than anyone, but neither does my 'casual gamer' behaviour make me better than you or anyone else.
As far as people who are against the whole sharding/realms thing to begin with... I actually like this system better than the one D2 had. The reason D2 didn't hold my interest past level 75 was the lack of options. There were no other areas to explore, no other NPCs to talk to other than the same quests over and over on different difficulties. There was very little crafting (no skill-building involved), no guilds to speak of, and certainly no ability to own a buidling or a shop (not that WoW has implemented this, either).
I like having a smaller population. The larger the population on your server grows, the more gold-farmers, gold-buyers, ninjas, and overall scum you're going to get. So yes, it would be cool to have a Horde that was actually horde-like (and not outnumbered 2:1 or 3:1) with thousands of people running around, but Blizzard would explode. Just thinking about the logistics of having a single world holding all WoW players boggles my mind.
I hope I stated that point without condescending or offending anyone.
I am surprised at the comments in this thread. No Blizzard shills! But then here I come. I just picked up the game a few weeks ago because Target had it for 29.99. Seemed like a fair price to me. I've been playing on Kirin Tor (an RP server) and haven't had any problems thus far. The realm went down for about an hour the other night which was weird.
One thing that might help me is that I'm in California playing on a Central Time server, so I have generally 2-3 hours behind everyone else. Consider this as a method of avoiding queues. I have only hit a queue once or twice, and it was the usual Saturday-night crunch, but my wait was only about 7-10 minutes iirc.
"But what about my raids?! BWL/MC/AQ/BBQ!!!". You can still do this on the weekends, which is the best time in my opinion. And if you're on the west coast rocking an East coast server, you won't be up nearly as late. Raiding from 6-9PM here is 9-midnight on the east coast. You could still go out and grab a few pints after scoring some phat lewt! Is there anyone out there that actually runs these things nightly?? If so, there is a reason gamers have a rep for being smelly and single. You have to put time into other aspects of your life! Yeah, i've put 3 days play time into a char and he's only level 25. So what?
I've been using Camino since it wasn't really all that stable. My question (which I've also posed to the developers) is - when someone is going to include a 'Search Web for "x"' right-click option? This is probably the single most-utilized feature of Firefox that I have come across. And it's not even a clever extension, it's in there right out of the box. Even better would be the ability to link this to multiple/different search engines through preferences. I've looked for this, and the developers said this had been brought up, but made no mention of plans to actually implement this feature.
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I am, interested, however, in hearing about it as it pertains to adoption by non-techies. I read /. but I've never had a dual-boot system myself. I have a Powerbook, an Ubuntu box, and my company thinkpad, so I've never needed to. Each box does its particular tasks, and does them pretty well (with the exception of the T23 my company insists is SOTA).
However, the specs from this article look quite promising. Like many of you, I salivate at the thought of running not only WoW on my MacBook, but games from developers who don't touch OSX. I'm not foolish enough to presume I'm in any kind of majority on that, but I think it has ramifications beyond the hardcore. I think when the new intel iBooks come out, they will be the perfect computer for just about any non-technical person; i.e. students, moms, grandmoms, whomever. If you can give them something familiar, adoption is going to be 1000 times easier. I'm not asking that Apple blow away other OEM's while running windows. The fact that it comes close (in all of the tests so far) is good enough for me. And grandma too.
I didn't say I'm cool or healthy. I am a 1337 couch-potato most of the time. Nor am I trying to degrade anyone. Sure, I'd like to have the tier 1 epic eq'ed characters. Hell, I'd kidney punch my mom for a frickin' mount at this point. Grinding spiders gets old fast. All I was really trying to say is that moderation isn't a bad idea. And that joining a server in a slightly different time-zone may alleviate some of the lagqueues a lot of people seem to be dreading. Frankly, I can't wait to run Baron Geddon. Your monster level 60 doesn't make you better/cooler than anyone, but neither does my 'casual gamer' behaviour make me better than you or anyone else. As far as people who are against the whole sharding/realms thing to begin with... I actually like this system better than the one D2 had. The reason D2 didn't hold my interest past level 75 was the lack of options. There were no other areas to explore, no other NPCs to talk to other than the same quests over and over on different difficulties. There was very little crafting (no skill-building involved), no guilds to speak of, and certainly no ability to own a buidling or a shop (not that WoW has implemented this, either). I like having a smaller population. The larger the population on your server grows, the more gold-farmers, gold-buyers, ninjas, and overall scum you're going to get. So yes, it would be cool to have a Horde that was actually horde-like (and not outnumbered 2:1 or 3:1) with thousands of people running around, but Blizzard would explode. Just thinking about the logistics of having a single world holding all WoW players boggles my mind. I hope I stated that point without condescending or offending anyone.
I am surprised at the comments in this thread. No Blizzard shills! But then here I come. I just picked up the game a few weeks ago because Target had it for 29.99. Seemed like a fair price to me. I've been playing on Kirin Tor (an RP server) and haven't had any problems thus far. The realm went down for about an hour the other night which was weird.
One thing that might help me is that I'm in California playing on a Central Time server, so I have generally 2-3 hours behind everyone else. Consider this as a method of avoiding queues. I have only hit a queue once or twice, and it was the usual Saturday-night crunch, but my wait was only about 7-10 minutes iirc.
"But what about my raids?! BWL/MC/AQ/BBQ!!!". You can still do this on the weekends, which is the best time in my opinion. And if you're on the west coast rocking an East coast server, you won't be up nearly as late. Raiding from 6-9PM here is 9-midnight on the east coast. You could still go out and grab a few pints after scoring some phat lewt! Is there anyone out there that actually runs these things nightly?? If so, there is a reason gamers have a rep for being smelly and single. You have to put time into other aspects of your life! Yeah, i've put 3 days play time into a char and he's only level 25. So what?
I've been using Camino since it wasn't really all that stable. My question (which I've also posed to the developers) is - when someone is going to include a 'Search Web for "x"' right-click option? This is probably the single most-utilized feature of Firefox that I have come across. And it's not even a clever extension, it's in there right out of the box. Even better would be the ability to link this to multiple/different search engines through preferences. I've looked for this, and the developers said this had been brought up, but made no mention of plans to actually implement this feature.