Macbook pro doubts

[Sriteja25]

I am considering buying a macbook pro

I want to play games like ea sports cricket , gta 4 , batman arkham city, fifa .

Which laptop should i buy 13 inch retina or 15 inch non retina .

Wll my goflex satelite work with macbook pro.

Will macbook pro play videos of all formats.

Can i play games and watch movies without using bootcamp because i cant buy anything else if anything happens to my laptop because its so costly.

Does macsrore only have same apps like app store is ios devices .

Should i wait for haswell will it improve the graphics so that some more games can be played.

Please help me out by giving reply to all my doubts.

Thank you.

 

[johnnnw]

Okay here we go:

If you want to game and want it to be good, you'll want a 15. Nothing wrong with the Intel 4000, but it ain't a gamers dream.

Yes, although it may need to be formatted in a osx friendly format.

Not out of the box, Quicktime is pretty picky. However there is a free video program called VLC Player which is 30x better than Quicktime, and it will play all video formats.

Depends on the game. If it has Mac drivers then yes, if not, then no. Steam has it's own Mac library and while not as big as the Windows one it still has some stuff. As for videos, see above.

Not sure what you're asking, but if you mean does it only have iOS apps, no. The Mac App store is Mac apps. There are thousands of apps written for the Mac and written for OSX.

You are very close to Haswell, so if you are able to wait, do it. If not, it's not a big deal. However as Haswell will be a little bit of improvement if you can wait then why not do it?

There ya go.

 

[marddin]

I currently have a retina 15" and love it. I've played Diablo 3, Skyrim, Wow, and Starcraft on it. It all runs great. If you don't want to pay the premium for the retina then the 15" non retina should work just fine for you.

Your external drive will work with the new macbook but it all depends on how the drive is formatted. If you are using it with windows right now it's possible it's formatted only for windows so you won't be able to read or write to the new hard drive until you re-format it. Again, it all depends on how the drive is formatted.

Any Macbook Pro can play all video formats but for the odd ones like MKV and some AVI's you will need VLC player. A third party app that allows you to play almost all video formats. Flip4Mac will be required to play WMVs on your mac as well. All third party, free, stable software.

I'm assuming your question is can you play games and watch movies on the mac side. Yes, as long as there is a mac client for the game. You won't see any problems with movies. If your trying to play windows only games you can buy VMFusion or Parallels and run windows directly inside of the mac OS.

The Mac App store has some apps like the app store for iOS devices but not all. It depends on whether or not the developer has developed an app for the mac and not just an iOS device (iPad, iPhone). The Mac App store has all programs like Logic, Operating Systems, system apps, etc.

Nobody knows what haswell will bring and what updates. It's purely speculation. My opinion is haswell will bring moderate processing upgrades and possibly an upgraded discrete GPU, but there aren't very many GPU's better than whats currently in the retina and non retina 15" MBPs.

In closing, I would get the 15" non retina base model and select the 2.6 i7 upgrade which gives you the NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB GDDR5 memory. I would then purchase extra ram from crucial.com and upgrade it yourself to save some money.

Hope this helps!

 

[thundersteele]

Why do you want a Macbook? None of the points you listed require a Mac, but some require Windows (in particular gaming!). If you restrict yourself to OSX games, then your selection will be very limited. You should plan on using bootcamp.

johnnnw answered most questions, no need to repeat him. But for the record

1. A MBP is powerful enough to run many games, but it is not optimized to be a gaming machine. The 13'' is not a good choice for gaming in my opinion.
2. Most games need bootcamp + windows. Ports for the Mac are not always available, arrive late sometimes and in many cases give lower performance.

You really should think about why you want to buy a Mac.

 

[Sriteja25]

Thank you for ur replies

 

[dusk007]

You can forget GTA4 on Mac. You need bootcamp there it is a resource hungry game. It is a bad port that already just barely runs well in Windows. In OSX I wouldn't even bother.

Sport games aren't usually as resource hungry. If there is a Mac Version it should run fine.

In general there aren't many games that run on Mac and fewer still that run well. All run with worse performance. Some run fast enough like Starcraft 2, Diablo as the the hardware is fast enough to offer a good experience even with the worse drivers and optimization. Many are just complete crap and virtually unplayable or so buggy that they drive you mad eventually.

For bootcamp you only need a Windows license. But then you can run the games you already own and Mac games you'd have to buy separately except for Steam games. A Steam game usually includes the Mac Version if there is one.
Some games work fine on the 15" with 650M. Some even work on the HD 4000 of the 13" but in all cases the Windows experience is better. Many new games don't come in a Mac version still (or with a long delay) and the Mac version is almost always worse. Usually in performance from about 30% worse to 10 times slower and the bugs.
Only some of those big budget multiplayer cash cows are decently maintained for OSX.

 

[leman]

From what you describe, you are probably better off with a windows machine.

 

[yusukeaoki]

GTA 4 would not run at good quality with 13in.
You first need windows and a 15in would still struggle to run at high quality and high frame rate.

If you're buying a Mac just for gaming, just build your own.
For 1500~2500USD, you would be able to build a Extreme Quality gaming machine.

 

[SMDBill]

Waiting for Haswell won't help your gaming in regards to GPU because during gaming you will be using the nVidia graphics capabilities with far greater horsepower than the GPU in the Haswell chip.

If your gaming requirements are already available on Mac, then your experience should be fine. However, if you run games that are not built for Mac you'll definitely need Bootcamp and a license for a full version of Windows (not an upgrade).

When you get into 15" Macbooks you are stepping into expensive territory. I would carefully review your requirements and decide if the Macbook can fulfill all of them and if the investment is worth the result you get. Buying a Mac to spend most of your time in Windows will give you a really nice Windows machine, but you can get one to do exactly what you want with similar hardware for less to leave you able to buy accessories or games or software.

Although, there was a ZDNET article recently IIRC that stated a Mac was best to run Windows on Take that with whatever sized grain(s) of salt you like, but they are indeed great machines.