NationStates Jolt Archive

Ok, so as you may have guessed from the title, this thread contains two dilemmas, and rather than clutter up the forum unnecessarily I thought I'd merge them like so monstrous bizarro-beast of a thread. Do feel free to offer advice on either one, or both if you feel up to it.


Dilemma One: The Mobile Malady!

Ominous title I know, but fear ye not, this tale is not a horrifying one. So I've had my trusty old phone for some time now, and it functions as everything I need in a phone - it calls, it texts, it has a not overly mind-numbingly dull game on it, it stores numbers and so forth. However, what with one thing and another - it's fairly huge, it has no keypad (long story involving blank texts being sent, and £11.80 of my life being wasted) and it's just generally getting old, I'm starting to think I should get a new phone.

So I look around the O2 store, and lo and behold, a rather sexy phone comes before my watchful eye. It does all sorts of shiny things - all the nifty stuff I'd rather like. Camera, video, music (handy as I have no mp3 player) and so forth. It's also fairly cheap - a mere £60. Fair enough my girlfriend insists that it's ugly as sin, but ah well, I have no sense of style anyway, and I find this one rather appealing.

But then I think wait, didn't I hear a certain something about an iPhone recently? Being a dedicated Mac user, and having heard that it's pretty awesome anyway, I decide to investigate further. Having done so, I conclude that yes, it is pretty awesome. It is also, apparently, unavailable in the UK.

So the crux of this dilemma, NS Gen, is this: do I go for the quite nifty, more standard O2 phone, or is it worth waiting for and paying the extra for, the iPhone, whenever it's available over here? Anyone have any tales of woe or joy about the iPhone? What d'you reckon?


Dilemma Two: The Computer Confusion!

Ok, I'll be honest, I'm just having fun with these titles now. So now we reach the second half of this tale of woe. As I said before, I'm a dedicated Mac user, and I feel proud of the choice I've made. However, I'm also a dedicated gamer, and as you may guess, these two lifestyles do conflict somewhat.

Joyfully, I do have a solution to this problem. Two in fact. The first, and to my mind best solution, is to purchase a shiny new Mac to satisfy that craving, and then to build myself a dedicated gaming rig (I have a good friend who is a genius with building rigs, who has consented to show me the way). This would cost me... probably between £2000 and £2500, depending on how sexy the stuffs I were to purchase were.

Then, whilst perusing the Apple site (in search of news of the iPhone as it happens), I happen across this. (http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=C36EFAB5&nplm=TN831) Aha! Say I, this is rather groovy. For a mere £50 (on top of the price of the sexy Mac) I'd be able to game on my Mac. However, dual OSing would considerably affect performance.

So we reach the climax of this adventure into storytelling. The problem I face is this: if I buy two seperate computers, I get far better performance, but it does cost me a good £600 - 700 more. If I dual OS, performance takes a hit (probably a fairly significant hit, but it would still run) but I do save a fair whack of cash.

Now I'm not exactly well off, but if required I would be able to get my hands on enough money with no problems. Getting the money isn't a problem, but if I spend it on a computer I don't have it to spend on anything else, obviously. It's really just a question of price against performance. As usual I guess :D


So there they are. What do the fine peoples of NS Gen think?

If you're getting a new Intel Mac, there's an easier solution. Currently there's a piece of beta software from Apple called BootCamp, which allows you to install Windows and start-up directly into it, as opposed to emulation under Parallels Desktop. Thus no performance hit.
If you wait until October, the release of Panther (10.5) will contain the finished version of BootCamp fully integrated.

Obviously you can't customise a Mac to the same degree as a PC box, but a Mac Pro with the top-end graphics card (512MB) will easily handle anything you want to run on it.
It'd probably cost about the same as getting a Mac and a PC.

I really wouldn't recommend trying to game through Parallels Desktop, and I'm pretty sure they don't recommend it either. It's intended for running custom Windows-only software, like databases or checkout software, not processor (and graphics) intensive games.

As for the iPhone, I guess you'd need to find out what the release timetable is for the UK, and which service would host them. Then decide if it's worth waiting for.

Dilemma Two: The Computer Confusion!

Ok, I'll be honest, I'm just having fun with these titles now. So now we reach the second half of this tale of woe. As I said before, I'm a dedicated Mac user, and I feel proud of the choice I've made. However, I'm also a dedicated gamer, and as you may guess, these two lifestyles do conflict somewhat.

Joyfully, I do have a solution to this problem. Two in fact. The first, and to my mind best solution, is to purchase a shiny new Mac to satisfy that craving, and then to build myself a dedicated gaming rig (I have a good friend who is a genius with building rigs, who has consented to show me the way). This would cost me... probably between £2000 and £2500, depending on how sexy the stuffs I were to purchase were.

Then, whilst perusing the Apple site (in search of news of the iPhone as it happens), I happen across this. (http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=C36EFAB5&nplm=TN831) Aha! Say I, this is rather groovy. For a mere £50 (on top of the price of the sexy Mac) I'd be able to game on my Mac. However, dual OSing would considerably affect performance.

So we reach the climax of this adventure into storytelling. The problem I face is this: if I buy two seperate computers, I get far better performance, but it does cost me a good £600 - 700 more. If I dual OS, performance takes a hit (probably a fairly significant hit, but it would still run) but I do save a fair whack of cash.

Now I'm not exactly well off, but if required I would be able to get my hands on enough money with no problems. Getting the money isn't a problem, but if I spend it on a computer I don't have it to spend on anything else, obviously. It's really just a question of price against performance. As usual I guess :D


So there they are. What do the fine peoples of NS Gen think?Parallels is not the solution to your problem. Parallels lets you run another OS on top of OS X which means two things: 1)you take a performance hit due to all the overhead, 2)Windows won't have direct hardware access which it will need if you plan to play anything more intensive than Minesweeper. What you need is bootcamp (http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/). If you get past the eerie Nazi-esgue name, bootcamp is the solution to your problems. You would need an Intel Mac (ie less than a year old) and the latest updates to Tiger and your firmware. It will let your run Windows natively on your Mac by simulating BIOS. There one system that can do both: be a Mac, and game.

As far as the first:

I only care if a phone sends and receives. So when one goes dead I get on ebay and buy someone's used phone. The last I got was a blackberry that cost me $30 (14.8 pounds) . Not the newest version but it does more than I need. Before that I never spent over $15 (7.4 pounds) for one that would make a phone call.

If you don't need the very newest, there's always someone who's dumb enough to buy it then sell you the second to the newest.

Go cheap on the phone.

Ah, my thanks to you both, Posi and Yaltabaoth. I must confess that Bootcamp had slipped by me. Looks like just the thing I need, thanks guys :) I think I shall most definitely keep my eye on that, see how it turns out. Might leave it a while after release, let them get it sorted out and straigtened up and such, but it does look like rather groovy. Plus it gives me the perfect excuse to buy the finest Mac I can find :D

As for the phone business, Good Lifes, until now I've been perfectly content with my bog-standard calls-and-texts phone, but lately I've just had a niggling desire for more. Nothing hugel fancy, just those things that would be handy if needed (usually for laughs) like camera, video recorder, and definitely mp3 player. Things that I can easily get by without, but would quite like to have handy.

Ah, my thanks to you both, Posi and Yaltabaoth. I must confess that Bootcamp had slipped by me. Looks like just the thing I need, thanks guys :) I think I shall most definitely keep my eye on that, see how it turns out. Might leave it a while after release, let them get it sorted out and straigtened up and such, but it does look like rather groovy. Plus it gives me the perfect excuse to buy the finest Mac I can find :DIn all honesty, I think that Apple using the beta tagging on bootcamp for the same reason Google does on Gmail: it lures people in with a 'its the latest, and therefore greatest, technology' scheme, then gives them the perfect scape goat for when a bunch of users screw up something far beyond there patience to learn.

In all honesty, I think that Apple using the beta tagging on bootcamp for the same reason Google does on Gmail: it lures people in with a 'its the latest, and therefore greatest, technology' scheme, then gives them the perfect scape goat for when a bunch of users screw up something far beyond there patience to learn.

You reckon? I dunno, that doesn't seem their style. They've always seemed to me to be a genuinely decent company. I've certainly never had any complaints with any of their products.

In all honesty, I think that Apple using the beta tagging on bootcamp for the same reason Google does on Gmail: it lures people in with a 'its the latest, and therefore greatest, technology' scheme, then gives them the perfect scape goat for when a bunch of users screw up something far beyond there patience to learn.

Not really. To quote the first paragraph from your link: "In the next major release of Mac OS X Leopard, Apple will include a new technology called Boot Camp that lets you install and run Windows on your Mac. If you have an Intel-based Mac computer and would like to try Boot Camp, you can download the public beta today."

OSX 10.4 (Tiger) was released before the switch to Intel. 10.5 (Leopard) will be the first major update since the switch, and will include Boot Camp fully integrated. In the meantime they have released a beta version for users who want it sooner. Hardly a deceptive tactic.
They also clearly state that it's an unsupported pre-release beta version (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303572), not for the faint-of-heart. Plus the beta release gives Apple a lot of feedback, meaning the final version in Leopard will already have had a lot of user-testing.

I don't understand all the suspicion about Boot Camp - Apple could very easily have dug their toes in and refused to allow Windows integration (can you see Microsoft ever including Mac integration in Windows?), instead they chose to enable it themselves. Which makes perfect sense for a company trying to increase its market share.

Nokia N-Gage solves both your problems - ah ha ha ha :p

Nokia N-Gage solves both your problems - ah ha ha ha :p

Hey, I know someone who has an N-Gage. Fair enough everyone mocks him for itt, and there have been several attempts on his life since, but... :p