You're missing the point entirely. The Mac platform is rapidly expanding... according to NPD data as reported by FORTUNE while the US desktop sales declined 5% year-to-year from Feb 2007 (newest data), Macs INCREASED 55%. Similarly, notebooks increased 20% while Mac portables increased 64%. This is an expanding platform and more and more consumers are choosing to abandon the monopoly.
MAC platform is a PC like any other... my supermicro computer with two Xeon quad core, 8 GB RAM, Nvidia 8800 ultra 768 mb, 3 TB Harddisk is similar to a MAC PRO... only difference is that i have more connector and bus that a MAC PRO... and mainly that a similar machine by apple will be 300% more expensive... i have run the apple configurator and for a machine like i have, i go over the 15000 euro... with supermicro, i was at 5000 euro !!!
Developers should be rushing to secure their place in this market, I'm making the appeal. I LOVE my macs, I took into account limited games whenever I buy them. If I want, I can install windows and play them (why Linux? Sorry guys, hope for this really gave out in 2003).
Yep, all machine are identic now... the difference is the operating system...
But what is the OSX from the MAC... OSX is based on BSB unix/linux version... Safari is based on Mozzila ( Firefox is part of Mozzila )... and i can continue... OSX is a system based on free code from the UNIX/Linux communauty... apple have add some custom icon, change a few line of code... and ask a lot of money for their little work...
From the apple developper site :
If you like open source development, you'll love Mac OS X. This fully-conformant UNIX operating system—built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5—bundles over a hundred of the most popular Open Source products. You can shell out with bash, tcsh, ksh, and zsh; edit your code with emacs, vim, and nano; and build your projects using gcc, make, and autoconf.
Need something a little higher-level? Run your X11 apps side-by-side with native apps using X11R7 from X.org. Serve your web site with Apache 2.0 and PHP 5. Start scripting with Ruby and Python, and build web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. You can even measure your application's performance using DTrace from OpenSolaris.
All these Open Source products are integrated into every Mac, ready to useApple is more bad that Microsoft... Microsoft make software with a lot of bug but Apple steal the free work from other and earn money with it...
Other example is transgaming cider... based on the code of trangaming Cedega... yes, the windows game who can run now via cider on MAC was make possible by the several year of pay subscription from Linux user to Cedega...
Sins was listed in the list of request on Cedega the 28 feb... now yet enough vote for working on it... but soon of later, since sins is a great game, a future version of Cedega will allow Sins on Linux... once this have happen, in the next few days, a new cider version will appear for supporting the Sins
More bad... since Apple was not able to stop the OSX 86 who can be run on any PC, they plan to make a infineon chip on any new motherboard... these ship will be needed to run OSX in the future version... it is like that microsoft put a special ship on all new PC who obligate you to use Windows Vista... sure that it will not long before apple rise his price again for the future lawsuit... never forget the result in Europe with Microsoft who was obligate to remove some software from his windows edition for give the choice to customer...
Now Macs are probably more numerous than Linux, but there are still very few compared to Windows boxes, so the economics still holds true.
When count system by processor... linux/unix have 81% of the world market... Mac is not yet at 0.6%... Don't forget that a lot of developping country choose Linux, specialy after Kubuntu who was shipped for free... interesting for people in Africa without internet... more, the program "a computer for each child" have create a laptop at 100$ with Linux... a lot of server for the internet use Linux and Apache... without forget the huge computer farm who are Unix/Linux system... don't forget the numerous machine like your big screen LCD TV with record system, your new intelligent coffee machine, etc... who are with embedded linux...
For people who need a embedded operating system, Linux is perfect... money speak... if you sell one million of Satelite decoder with linux embedded, it is gratis... let say that microsoft ask a licence prise of 2 euro by machine, it is already 2 million $$$ lower for benefice...
Simply, Linux was not good for desktop... a few year ago, desktop was almost non existing... but all the new visual thing in Vista have already exist long time ago onlinux with all the 3D/effect desktop... before this, Linux was the first system to support EMT64 for intel and the AMD64... long time before the version of windows XP 64 bit... localization is great with Linux... you have all the language of the world... and some distro have some funny localization like old egytian or klingon language !!!
For information, sins run under linux... with wine... with some work... main problem was the xml... windows use his own xml and don't follow the standart rule... you need the Microsoft XML version 6... second problem was the font... all can be resolved by running the following script http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks after having installed wine... remain a sound problem... sins have problem with my system 7.1+2HD ... driver exist only for Linux... with windows, it is only 7.1 ... Sins send signal to my two high definition box and i need to remove the jack each time... if in my bios, i put on the option "discrete MTRR allocation" ( work only with Linux and machine with more of 4 GB, it boost my graphic card to the sky... when starting a new game, i have reach more of 1000 frame by second... it drop with time since the game grow... again with bios, put on the HPET ( high precision event timer )... it produce periodic interupts at a much higher frequency than a real-time clock of RDTSC ( cpu )... work only with Linux!
So, high end machine are made for Linux... performance are high... but gamer have not the money for buy so machine... same for me, 5000 euro is a big amount ( 15000 if i have choose a apple )... it is my 3D work and realtime render of a 3D world ( garden architec ) who pay the machine... of course, nothing prohibith me to use it for game... just finish Crysis in a few days with all at very high ( a tweak was needed to allow all at very high with directx9 since cedega is not compatible directx 10 )...
Now, about the devs of Sins... it is not their work of responsability to make a game run on every type of operating system... it is the work of the operating system to work together for create a compatibility platform... a example was the java language from Sun... in the begin, it was working on all machine... until Microsoft decide to use his own implementation who was not fully compatible with the sun java... each time that some standart apear, you have always a OS developper who will create his own version with time and make it incompatible with other system... if the creator of OS can work together and give to the game dev a standart format who work on any platform, game will run on all world computer... more, dev will be able to invest more time to create a quality game...