jetpilot79 :
I have heard so many great things about apple and have always been afraid to try a new OS. Does anyone have any insight into MacBook Pro, especially as it relates to running windows based games? Especially performance in conjunction with Oblivion and SupCom.
A MacBook or MacBook Pro has only three things that make it different from any other notebook out there:
1. A TPM chip with Apple's decryption keys inside that lets a user use a non-cracked version of OS X x86 on their computer. This is the only thing that prevents somebody with any other x86 machine from booting OS X, which is something Apple does not want (as they reap most of their computer $$$ from hardware.)
2. EFI rather than a BIOS. This is a little sticky with Windows as Windows requires a BIOS to boot, but there are BIOS emulators that can give Windows enough of a BIOS-like interface to boot. Linux and BSD don't care if it's BIOS or EFI, they can use both.
3. A godawful single-button mouse. That will be painful to use in Windows or any other OS as Crtl+Click doesn't right-click in any other OS (well, you can get a system running X11 to remap that to a right-click, but...) You'll need an external mouse to use another OS on a MacBook.
Otherwise, a MacBook will perform exactly like any other notebook with similar specs, which is pretty much most notebooks of a similar size. So I'd say don't buy a MacBook unless you pretty much only want to run OS X on it as they're more expensive and have a terrible one-button mouse that's bad to use in any other OS. If you simply want to try out another OS, why not give something that's free and runs on anything, such as Linux, BSD UNIX, or Solaris a whirl on a non-Apple notebook? It's much less expensive and will be a tad easier to run Windows on if you don't like the other OS, due to the two-button touchpads and an actual BIOS.