Forget the MacBook. How about either 1) putting a decent 3D card in the iMac, or better yet, 2) give us a consumer-priced tower with a replaceable video card?

It's a sad joke that to get decent gaming performance on the Mac platform, you have to drop $3k on a Mac Pro.

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Na the screen is the worst

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Go back to having a dedicated card in the MacBook. Even an extremly low-range card will do. Anything but the bottom of the barrel Intel crap that does nothing for gaming.

Of course, that's how Apple suckers people into getting the MacBook Pro. =/

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This topic comes up every 2-3 months somewhere and the same points are always made...1) the gaming market is saturated. It would take huge amounts of money to enter the PC or console gaming market. 2) 95% of the gamers on PCs are powerusers and wouldn't venture out of the box of PC games if the same thing on Mac is on PC. 3) The newest (and most profitable) games require huge amounts of hardware power. Apple has seen the future and it is mobile gaming, the Mac as a gaming hub will never happen as much as the community wants it to.

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What else does Apple need to do? They provide the SDKs, the APIs for 3D, video, sound, networking... what more? Free cookies and milk?

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I totally agree with what blinkcowz182 said!

... so don't waist money or battery life on trying to make the MB into something it's not!

... and was never meant to be!

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in all honesty I'm glad OS X doesn't have a lot of games, it helps me stay focused because i know that i have to reboot into crappy windows to play games. the only thing i wish os x had was audiosurf...then again, that would majorly hurt my productivity too, so I'm glad it doesn't.

besides, if os x did gaming well, windows would have no reason to exist!

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If there was a huge demand for games on the MacBook then somone would make games that ran on it. Games were around when computers were less powerful than the MacBook. Garphics are not everything!

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The hardware is not the only problem in getting mac gaming to take off again. The Open GL framework doesn't provide enough benefits for developers to switch to it from DirectX. Without game developers using OpenGL, you can't reasonably expect them to ever port the game to the mac (much less co-develop for the mac). So getting the GPUs to handle Open GL as fast as DirectX, and getting OpenGL to be a much better framework than DirectX, will let Apple do the steps already obvious such as getting game developers onboard and producing gaming hardware.

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I disagree

noone should buy a macbook to do" gaming"

but an integrated intel is not so bad. many nice games works with it. not the alpha new 3D game. (well it runs, but not with all nice marvels)

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and I don't think gaming is so important. Imac can have already a good 3D card. not the latest of nvidia and ati ? hoo I don't care ! it's nice enough for warcraft and eve online

if you want the latest shining stuff to play, go buy a macpro or in your local pc shop to buy newest cards and spend time with it. I don't think the differences worth the price.

well, of course, I'm not really a gamer. but I still looking for Spore and Starcraft 2. (nothing else)

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Here's a thought. How about simply buying a game console for playing games, and using a MacBook for GTD? ;)

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I doubt the Macbook will get a *decent* video card, it'd rival the Pro model; they could add a cheap 2 year-old GPU (like a nVidia 7300GT) though.. wouldn't do much to run the latest games, but the latest games aren't available on Macs anyway.

I love Macs, I adore OSX, but it's a terrible gaming platform.

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Alot of good comments are here, so let me add mine:

Steve, it's Drake. PLEASE drop the Intel integrated graphics chips and go NVidia. The performance on Intel's chips is pitiful, and until they support OpenGL 2.x (is 3.0 out now?) they will always be lagging behind. The Mac Mini would be a perfect gaming machine if it had even a low-end NVidia Geforce 7-series in it. Everyone will understand, and Intel will get another kickstart to make their X-series GPU's work even better. So please? Nvidia across the board?

Oh, and can you get that high-end Macbook 15" up to 1680x1050? No-one but Dell seems to be doing that now...

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Not going to happen. Come 6 months from now, it'll be iPhone, iPhone, iPhone, and that's all. If anything, people will hack the iPhone games to play on their MacBooks, but I don't see this huge surge in MacBook game development as a reult of the iPhone SDK. It's just wishful thinking.

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The day that Apple adds dedicated video to the Macbook is the day I buy one.
The day that Apple adds a decent video card to the lower-end iMac is the day...that I buy one.

On my PCs, I've always waited for sales on certain parts, bought them, and assembled it for about half retail price simply because I can't afford better. An iMac is barely within my price range(and still double what I can build a PC for), but I'm not going from a 512mb X1950 to a 128mb HD2400; that's just stupid. Apple apparently doesn't want the gamers...

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I find it strange that so many Mac users are unwilling to expand the uses of their computers, and go far to make up weird excuses for it. Apple has only one market to take shares from, the PC-market, and one of the biggest and most common excuse for not getting a Mac among PC-users is the lack of games. Why in the world would you think of games as not needed?

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