I've been a PC user for at least the past two decades. After shunning the use of Apple products for so long, I've been giving some serious thought to replacing my current PC (a Sony Vaio EA series laptop with an i3 purchased in early 2011) with a MacBook (running a Windows partition, of course. Baby steps). There are some conditions I'm going in with, so it'd be nice to get some recommendations from those that know.

• I'd like to get one with enough power to adequately run non-intensive Steam games. For example, I have no problem running games like Papers, Please and Hotline Miami on my current system. However, I tried to play Gone Home and The Stanley Parable on it with lowest settings applied in both cases and it chugged miserably.
• I'd like it to have at least 500 GB of storage space
• I'd like it to cost no more than $1,800.

At this point, I'm looking almost exclusively at the MacBook Pro and not an Air. However, if the Air in question fits the description, please recommend.

I have the latest Air and it should be able to run all those games. As for hard drive space and pricing, well just play around with the configurator on Apple's website.

@royalewifcheese: Last month I got a 2013 15" Macbook Pro Retina (2880x1800), 2.0 i7, 8gb RAM, and 256gb flash storage for $1749 at Best Buy, normally $1999. It has the Iris Pro graphics but it still does great at most games. Last night I was playing Hotline Miami in Parallels (for native 360 controller support) while transcoding a video on the Mac side with Handbrake and it was smooth as can be. It can also handle Dark Souls as well, and I'm currently playing the Mac version of Civ 5 on it. That's about the extent of games I've tried on it besides other simple titles like Starbound which it runs flawlessly, as expected.

My only real recommendation is to spring for the high resolution display. It is soooo nice, it was well worth the price difference for a computer I'm going to be using daily for a few years, if not longer.

I finally know what MB stands for. Money Bags

That laptop does sound awesome, but an $1800 PC sounds way more awesome. But then, you can't take it with you in a backpack, so.

Anyway, I don't even know what point I'm trying to make here. Just, macs are really expensive, but if I were to get a new laptop, it'd probably be a mac... maybe. They look good.

I guess I'm lucky that I'm a little old fashion when it comes to taking things with me and don't have a need to. I barely keep a phone with me for emergencies and never take a laptop or tablet or anything else. That holds true even when I travel. I don't even bring books or anything like that. I usually look out a window and or listen to the radio.

Then again I've never held a job or went to school where I needed a computer with me at all times. So I hate the fact that you pay like a 75% premium on portability when that could all go towards power on a desktop.

My MacBook Pro lasted me 7 and a half years. It was money well spent. It was useless for gaming after 4 years though. I maybe wouldn't spring for the high resolution display. I imagine it eats battery life more than the regular display. I had to replace my battery 3 times. Of course, my laptop was from back when you could replace the battery yourself so it was easy. If I'm not mistaken, now you need to get apple to replace it for you.

Gone Home chugged on my MacBook too, but I think that game is just unoptimised.

I'm pretty sure all of the 15" Pros have the Retina display now and are rated for 8-9 hours of battery life. I've been getting slightly better than that. For 13" MacBook Pros, the low resolution display model is the only one with a platter type drive and is rated for 7 hrs of battery life. All of the Retina models of the 13" have flash storage only and the battery life is increased to 9 hours or so.

As far as battery replacement for MacBooks with batteries that aren't user serviceable, the Airs cost $129 and the Pros with Retina are $199.

The Retina display is really something else. Earlier I was looking at the display of my 13" Air which is 1280x800 and it looks like straight up garbage compared to the 15" 2880x1800 screen I've been using daily for the last month. I don't think I could ever go back to the lower resolution.

@mosespippy: I just got a mbp 13.3" retina thing and the screen is so worth it. Fantastic machine, just a shame about the OS.
Spent about 7 hours installing stuff and changing things around and it was almost usable, but I ended up just installing ubuntu on it in the end. Quicker than making os x work right.
And yeah, the new slim retina models the battery cells are glued to the inside of the thing, very much not user replaceable.

@mb Airs use a TN panel still, don't they?

sad puppy is sad

@rorie: Jesus Christ Rorie, why are you up at 5 AM on a Saturday? Sad puppy is sad indeed.

He's fighting the good fight. Death to Macs.

@mb said:

Yeah, I have a 15" MBP with Retina too and it has utterly ruined non-HiDPI displays for me. Aside from the increased clarity, it's also really useful when using applications with dense UIs like Xcode because you can drop the scale factor to get a higher useable resolution.

That said, while Retina is great for general productivity, it's not really all that useful for playing games. I have a 750M which is fine for playing at 1080p, but that's only 1/4 of the display's actual resolution, and the few games that support and are playable at 3840x2160 typically don't have @2x UI scaling.

My MacBook Air (the baseline 2012 model) can run games like Hearthstone, Hotline, and FTL with no problems. Civ V as well. It gets a little warm but that's it. That said, I use it mainly for work and have my desktop PC for gaming. I still advocate for a Mac laptop paired with a desktop PC, I think it's a nice combo and you could totally afford it on an $1800 budget.

I would get an official refurbished model. I don't like refurb from other companies, but Apple refurb is practically brand new.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

Like this:

The hard drive is a little smaller, but it has a much better video card. Also it's an SSD so it's super fast.

$1,599.00

15.4-inch (diagonal) Retina display; 2880-by-1800 resolution at 220 pixels per inch

8GB of 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM

256GB Flash Storage

720p FaceTime HD Camera

NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory

Or this if you really need 512GB:

13.3-inch (diagonal) Retina display; 2560-by-1600 resolution at 227 pixels per inch


8GB of 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM


512GB Flash Storage


720p FaceTime HD Camera


Intel HD Graphics 4000