So I’ve been looking at a possible machine upgrade from my Macbook–and while it’s pretty set that it will be an iMac, I’ve been playing with the idea of getting an Air. I’m not very serious with that, but then we can all dream and drool, can’t we? ;)

While torturing myself with the Air, I looked for posts and reviews about the performance of World of Warcraft on Macbook Airs. I’ve seen a really good review last January about it which started my “serious” Air obsession–it looks like it was playing WoW better than my Macbook (I play on Low/custom settings, at 20-30fps)! It was a surprise, although it shouldn’t be: Airs have solid-state drives, and these new babies should certainly be more advanced than my 2-year-old Macbook.

Rcently, I went on another hunt to just see if anyone else had more to say about it, and came across a Battlenet post about it.

Look at how a shocking number of posters (maybe even the majority?) claim that the original poster was a troll.

Seriously, what? It’s devolved into a PC vs Mac war, which I suppose is rather inevitable, but honestly, the guy was just sharing his experience playing WoW on an Air! It’s definitely useful for other people. I get it, Macs are more expensive than built PCs, and they can get to 100+ fps or something. That’s fine, good for you.

But not everyone uses computers to primarily play games. I don’t. I want my machine to play the computer games I play well enough for my playstyle, but I am not going to buy a computer whose sole purpose is to play games.

I’ve built PCs before. I’ve pored over price charts and built CPUs accordingly. Oh, yes, they’re cheap and they’re powerful. But, uh, they were a pain, too. I’ve had hardware issues that required bringing it in for fixing once a year, at least. And being the “only techie” in the family, that meant I needed to do all the grunt work for that. And the ease of upgrading–oh my. I needed, just needed, to have that really cool new video card, a bigger memory, better drives…and so on and so forth.

I haven’t sent my Macbook in for repairs, ever. Oh yes, it’s expensive. My machine right now is running straight from the power socket because the battery is alarmingly bloated but I’m too much of a cheapskate to buy a new battery, because it’s expensive. It’s also difficult to almost impossible to get upgrades, but that’s fine with me–I don’t feel the need to get the biggest and the best anymore, because what I have works just nice.

And on the subject of “30 fps is unplayable”–really? I play on 20 fps in raids and I am doing very well. Unplayable is 7 fps. I’m a casual raider–I’m certainly not on par with the top raiders in the game, nor do I want to be, and unless I’m in that level, I don’t think 30 fps is going to gimp you so much. It’s not ideal, of course–ideal would be to have 60fps+ in Ultra–but I’m willing to make that trade off because World of Warcraft and other games is not the biggest part of my life, even if it’s big enough to warrant a dominant section of my blog.

I play on a Mac because it makes sense to me and what I use my computer for. I play on a Mac because I’m not someone to have multiple machines when one will do just fine, thankyouverymuch. I play on a Mac because specifications don’t matter to me as much as my experience of the output of those same specifications and the aesthetic, no-fuss quality of Macs.

You have your powerful, amazingly-modded computer. I have my Mac. To each his own.