100%.
If you use the base spec and attach an external SSD it cannot be beat. It is impossible. You cannot build a faster PC at $600.
The fact that it draws like 30W and is completely silent speaks pretty well for it, too.
Most of the people around the world are âpoorâ.
If you want a pc for gaming, you not gonna buy a mac for 3 times the price just for an apple icon.
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If you just want to play WoW on the cheap the M4 Mac Mini is the best offer available by far. I am not budging on that one; it eats WoW for breakfast and it does so at almost no cost or power draw.
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Mac mini M4 is 699 euro. It plays WoW on 4k max settings easily. Show me a windows pc with 1/3 of the price (200 euro) that can do thatâŚ
The whole âappleâs products are all expensive and poor people canât affordâ is very misinformed and limited.
If one is poor and only wants a pc to play wow, then he should buy Mac mini instead of Windows PC. Mac Miniâs performance/price ratio is unbeatable.
isnt gaming just generally better on windows?
Not really. Just that more games are available for Windows.
The M-line processors are quite impressive, performance-wise (even graphical). Itâs just a matter of getting AAA-studios to actually make titles for MacâŚwhich is a bit of an issue as the player-base using Mac is smallâŚ
And I totally agree with the Mac Mini statement above; very good price-quality balance, as long as you stay away from the default-upgrade options. Those are hostile.
Itâs really infuriating to see some of these comments about Macâs being outpriced for gaming and that you can buy PCâs for much less money and get better performance. You guys posting this clearly arenât reading the whole thread because youâve already been told that this âIS NOT TRUEâ any more.
As several people have mentioned, the M1 switch by Apple has changed the game for this argument. Pay ÂŁ699 for an M4 Mac mini and you have a machine that you arenât going to beat for a PC priced at the same point.
In 2020 I bought a brand new iMac which was the latest model at the time. It cost me ÂŁ2,800 pounds. I literally bought it before I learned about the M1 Mini coming through, which would cost me ÂŁ699, if I had gone that route. Now that iMac was a bit more powerful and obviously has a fantastic built in retina screen but it was clearly obvious that things were rapidly going to change. I sold it on for ÂŁ725 last year and bought an M2 Pro for ÂŁ1200 instead. Now we have M4 Proâs already but thereâs no need for me to start thinking about changing again because my machine still plays WoW at any configuration I want to play it at.
To my knowledge WoW is actually running in a compatibility mode here as well, as Blizzard arenât going to be building the game to take advantage of the Macâs added capability. As they seem to be heading towards no longer supporting them at all, itâll probably never change. And, while the state of Mac gaming is still pretty poor, mostly itâs because of Appleâs previous attitude of not really caring about or needing the gaming customers to worry about it, they have changed recently, and now embrace gaming in a much bigger way.
There are several games being ported currently, or even already out there, that are being built specifically for the benefits that these new machines offer. Cyberpunk and a new Assassins Creed, for example. And a specific Mac version of No Manâs Sky is already out there and runs amazing compared to the version I used to play on my Windows laptop.
Apple have had Apple Arcade for a couple of years now, and have specifically released the game porting toolkit for developers to have the facility to build for Mac a lot easier as well. This has also had a useful side-effect of allowing a lot of specific Windows games to be run on Macâs anyway, and often just as well, even though they arenât build for the machines.
I think Apple are now doing enough to try and change the mind-set of the people who donât think they care about gamers at all. Whether they can actually get enough people to embrace it that it becomes viable for developers to put their games on Mac is another story, however.
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Not true. WoW is a native Apple Silicon binary and on my M3 Max it maxes out, 4K 120 FPS. On a laptop. For 2 hours. On my M2 Mac Mini it runs at 1440p 7/10 settings, but I need to turn down spell density.
Btw they dropped the price on the Mac Mini. The new one is ÂŁ599, and itâs got 16GB of RAM so no need for that ÂŁ200 (lol) upgrade either.
1440p 7/10 settings for ÂŁ599, and thatâs assuming M4 isnât faster than M2 which is definitely not true, is sick.
My friend, perhaps you missed the part where I said I am using a Mac Mini M2 Pro. Hence it will run WoW any way I want it.
Interesting that they are building the Mac version as native, however. That goes to show they already have the technology, support and ability to do that for any of their products. They just choose not to.
Microsoft have changed their mindset on Macâs outside of gaming though, as we have Office available these days, and probably other apps. Hopefully theyâll change their minds on gaming later too. Especially since it probably wouldnât cost them much to do it, if the infrastructure is already in place.
I didnât, but I donât know how that relates to what I quoted? Remember Iâm also typing it out for other readers; itâs not a personal recommendation to you. 
AnywayâŚ
Indeed⌠
WoW (and other games) run great on Linux, just raytracing is problematic apparently.
Iâve been doing it for 5 years and posted about it 3½ years ago:
And actually raytracing works now, too.
In that thread I mention that you wonât be able to tell the difference between it and a native client, and thatâs⌠not quite true right now, but close.
Sometimes you have to fiddle with wine/Proton because the battle.net launcher update doesnât play well with the new version. This never happens to WoW itself, just battle.net, but still. It happens often enough that itâs annoying. I donât know why - Blizzard must be doing some insane technical mumbojumbo in that cosebase. It seems like it is agent.exe that explodes, which is hardly unusual. That thing sucks on macOS, too.
I also think they can deliver a better game on Linux if they go native. Maybe they wonât get too much on the graphics API side, but they will get the ability keybind the with the windows key as a modifier, and theyâll get something thatâs much easier to support - a stable API with no translation layers! And the game should also run faster because it doesnât need to translate method calls from Windows style to UNIX style.
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Well⌠SWTOR is about to get a Mac client, so you got options.
ESO has a mac client as well, though rumour has it that itâs just a wine wrapper 
If Mac canât handle applications made for pc, thats a Apple problem, not a Blizzard problem. Apple has always been notoriously terrible when it comes to compatability with anything outside their own eco system, so much so, that it took a EU court order to make them use the industry standard USB C for their phone chargers.
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Itâs good if we leave obsolete stuff in the past.
Let the world move on from the stone age.
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When did you last use Windows? 1995? (jk)
Windows has included most of those things for free for some time now (RIP Wordpad). Despite being able to do some unholy things with early Sound Recorder, I donât think Microsoft ever offered anything close to Garage Band, even for money. I miss Movie Maker. Clipchamp flipping sucks.
Got any distro recommendations for an ageing Surface Pro 3 with 4GB of RAM?
Earlier today. We use it at work.
Windows comes with Notepad. Thatâs it.
And they turned it into a bloody web app in order to give it tabs. Meanwhile on macOS, literally every single app in the entire OS supports tabs. They can put them where ever they want, but if the dev doesnât do it, itâs put at the top.
Microsoft did have that iLife competitor you mention, with WMM and WMP and all of that, but they dropped it. And it was only to compete with macOS that just came with all of that for free and it still does. Unlike Windows.
Windows even needs the browser to display a PDF. macOS not only has Preview, but the whole desktop is built with PDF.
Straight out of the box a mac can edit photos, videos and create music. Straight out of the box it has a fairly robust Word processor with cloud sharing support and autosave (Office only has autosave if using their particular provided cloud services), an absolute trash tier spreadsheet, and probably the best slidedeck program - certainly better than PowerPoint.
Oh and it still has its equivalent to WordPad, too. Itâs called TextEdit.
Oh and it can organize your photos and music without needing a third party program, which Windows also cannot do.
No - instead Windows comes with a bunch of social media apps and mobile games preinstalled.
You get what you pay for.
Except with Linux. Linux is a miracle. Idk how that happened.
Itâs not going to run anything super well unless itâs lean, but you can play around with some? Because of the RAM, obviously.
Linux Mint is very popular and very easy to use. Pop!_OS is very good, too. So is Ubuntu, but itâs quite resource hungry. For KDE I definitely recommend Arch, which is unfortunate because itâs a little scary to install the first time. You can try Manjaro KDE - itâs pretty well preconfigured Arch, but there are some problems with it sometimes. Helps you learn Arch though.
Zorinâs pretty cool but itâs made in China, so if you donât trust them then better keep your distance. Iâve never checked.
And as for running Windows games on Linux:
Step 1) Install Steam
Step 2) To left, Steam â Settings â Compatibility â Enable Steam Play for all titles
Step 3) Install basically any game (assuming it doesnât have antichaet)
Got games outside Steam? No problem!
Step 1) Install Lutris
Step 2) Click the +
Step 3) Search for your game
Step 4) Wait until the script is done, log into sites where you need to download from.
The games basically play anything. Linux games of course, but also Windows games, Wii U games, 3DS games, Switch games, DOS games, GameCube games, anything support by Retroarch (aka darn near everything), PS1, PSP, PS2, PS3, PowerPC macs. It runs everything.
Weâve even got an Android emulator because it turns out Android uses the Linux kernel, so all their games just work if you have the right libraries installed (which is a bit tricky). 
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Are they branching out into new markets. 
Most modern games tend to be very GPU heavy. How good is the graphics chips on apple devices?
For laptops, pretty good Iâd say.
The M4 is pretty mediocre as the lowest end but the GPU is still faster than the one in an Xbox Series S. The Pro performs about the same as a 4070 laptop GPU ( which is considerably slower than the desktop one)
The M4 max stands toe to toe with the desktop 4080, being about twice as fast as the Pro.
IT isnât the fastest, and it is expensive, but these GPUâs consume anywhere from 15W to 60W depending on model and theyâre in a laptop, and theyâll definitely pay WoW no problem.
They donât slow down when you unplug them either.