- Mac OS/X: Tested by a friend with a single core OS/X machine: Compiles and runs just fine (albeit in single-threaded mode). I don't know if OS/X GCC has adequate support for OpenMP; if it doesn't, GCC 4.3.2 will surely be available for it soon. Talk about portable code!
- Truth be told, I discovered this feature by accident. Some of my colleagues were also caught by surprise, while others have relied for some time on a third-party app called Moom, which has some of.
Truth be told, when you have 1 GB of RAM, Leopard benchmarks an insigificant 4% slower than Tiger. Is It Worth Maxing the RAM in Old G3 and G4 Macs?, Simon Royal, Tech Spectrum, 2009.04.15. Increasing memory can make your old Mac faster and make you more productive, but it probably won't improve resale value by the amount you spend. Truth be told, there aren't as many direct competitors as you'd think. The recently upgraded Microsoft Surface Book, the 14-inch Razer Blade and the Dell XPS 15. Mac OS 10.12 Sierra. According to the proponents of this myth, Apple has abandoned their open source initiatives as they move to Intel, because they are afraid that, armed with the Darwin source code, pirate 3lit3 haxx0rs will p0wn them and have Mac OS X running on generic PCs. They're wrong, here's why.
Sleepjumper mac os. Malware on the Mac: is it mostly hype or a real problem faced by real people? If you ask John Gruber, the answer might be the former—there are lots of proof-of-concept scenarios and virtually none that manifest themselves beyond a slow news day. If you ask Ed Bott, however, the answer would be the latter—he recently interviewed an AppleCare employee who claimed that the recent release of fake antivirus app 'MAC Defender' has caused a spike in malware reports among Mac users.
The truth is hard to tease out. Partly because Mac OS X still makes up a comparatively small percentage of the global OS market share, and partly because Apple itself is a secretive company, it's not easy to find out whether malware on the Mac is indeed becoming more common, or it's simply being reported on more often.
Still, we tried to do exactly that. Ars spoke with 14 different Mac support specialists—including several Apple Store Geniuses—in order to get a handle on whether things have changed when it comes to dealing with malware. Their experiences are all over the map, but the general consensus does seem to lean towards a low amount of malware problems—until you get to the Geniuses.
Not an epidemic?
Many third-party Mac support specialists told us that they had not seen a noticeable spike in malware issues on the Mac recently.
'The majority of Mac users I support are somewhat technical, but even the ones that aren't have been trained (by me) to be paranoid and come running to me if they're not sure about something,' longtime Ars forum member Comp Guru, also known as Sean Murphy, told Ars. 'MAC Defender is just like 'Security Center 2011' that plagues the Windows 7 users in my office, and a few have actually installed it. One came very close to paying the $85 to make the 'infections' and 'drive errors' go away. Luckily she came to me first and I removed it with Malwarebytes. On the Mac side I'm glad it's an easy-to-remove application if someone does happen to install it.'
'In the last 6 months, only one of my clients reported a possible malware [scenario]. I have consulted with other Apple services and the rate is basically the same: one or two people out of 750-1,000 in six months,' a Chile-based Apple Certified Help Desk Specialist named Pablo Toledo told Ars. 'Mac users here tend to be alert and informed, and only very basic users fall into the trap.'
AdvertisementTwo out of a thousand in six months seems like a pretty good track record, but others claim to have never seen a single instance of malware on a Mac.
'It certainly hasn't affected the fashion/casting/design/law offices I support, as nobody has made a peep about it. We have deployed the managed preference setting to turn off 'open safe files after downloading' by default for all computers we come into contact with, though,' Allister Banks from a consulting firm called POINT said. 'When it comes to average home users, the closest to malware I've ever seen is slight JavaScript tomfoolery when SEO people poison Google Image Search results. Sorry, zero evidence, anecdotal or otherwise.'
Northwestern University technical support consultant Adam Turetzky agreed. 'I've been a departmental user support and server admin at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL for 11 years. During that time I have not once seen a user's Macintosh infected with a virus or malware more serious than a Word macro virus (and I haven't seen one of those in a long time either),' Turetzky said. 'I currently support 42 users and administrate 50+ Macintoshes. Granted, my users are told not to install software on their workstations without consulting with me first, but they don't always obey the rules and even still we've had no instances of malware.'
Tom Bridge, a partner at a firm called Technolutionary, seemed to think that Mac users might be better at avoiding malware because of previous experiences on other platforms. 'We have yet to see a single one of the Macs we support be hit by MAC Defender or its like,' Bridge told Ars. 'We have clients that have been taken by these scams before on PCs, and perhaps they are just more well educated against this particular type of scam, but generally speaking, we're not seeing this here in the DC area.'
MAC Defender worked on someone—actually, a few someones
Despite the numerous support and IT people we found to testify that malware—MAC Defender, Mac Security, Mac Protector, or any of its other knockoffs—isn't any more of a problem now than it has been in the past, we heard just the opposite from Apple store employees.
Advertisement'MAC Defender has changed everything,' one Apple Store Genius, who requested to remain anonymous (we'll call him Lenny) told Ars. 'We probably get 3 or 4 people with this per day. Most of them only got as far as installing the program and haven't entered their credit card details.'
Lenny went on. 'This always sparks a debate at the bar on whether antivirus software is necessary on the Mac. This is difficult, as the store sells several antivirus products implying that Apple supports the idea, but as many customers point out, the sales guys aren't shy in making the claims for Mac OS X's security. Internally, Apple's [IT] department mandates the use of Norton Antivirus on company machines.'
Update: At least one other Genius has brought it to our attention that Lenny's claims about Norton Antivirus might not be 100 percent accurate. It's either a per-store policy (in which case, not all stores have this policy), or there's some confusion about an old policy about requiring Norton Antivirus on machines that had Boot Camp installed. He did say that Apple prefers Norton for antivirus solutions and has a company-wide license for it.
Update x2: We've had several other Apple Store employees now write in about the Norton Antivirus point, especially now after Gruber's new post. One former Genius writes, 'All back-of-house Retail machines are imaged using pre-configured images from Apple Corporate. Among the other applications that come as part of the image, Norton Antivirus and Timbuktu Pro are installed. However, most Geniuses create their own images to circumvent the Apple Corporate images and passwords, and because Apple Retail is the deal-with-the-devil arm of Apple Corporate, they turn a blind eye to whatever the Geniuses do. [..] Also, Apple Corporate employees have no idea what goes on in Apple Retail and vice versa.'
A support specialist who we'll call Carl works at an Apple Authorized Campus Store and threw in his two cents as well. 'I have never had to remove a virus or malware from a Mac until this month,' Carl told Ars. 'Now we have had a handful of people come in with MAC Defender on their computer.'
And Apple Certified Mac Technician Kevin Copeland at BeachTec agreed. 'Since starting my own business in December 2009, the volume of repairs I deal with is a small fraction of the number of machines I saw while I was with Apple (I'm a small, one-man shop). But, anecdotally, I have to say that the MAC Defender trojan appears to have impacted more of the general Mac-using public than all the previous trojans I've dealt with. When I was seeing thousands of computers per year, I ran across maybe half a dozen trojans each year. Now that I'm seeing about two dozen computers per week, I've seen the MAC Defender trojan at least three times in as many weeks.'
System cleanup in one click
Since the early days, Macs have never been associated with hardcore gaming, unlike their PC counterparts. Games for Mac were customarily more simple and none of the top games were even present on the platform for a long time.
Top games require top-level setups. But with Apple's focus on beauty and simplicity of design, Macs have always been offered as turnkey solutions in few variations. That meant little wiggle room for all the customizations best Mac games required.
Meanwhile, the gaming industry skyrocketed, mainly on PCs, which made it easy for people to build powerful computers to take full advantage of all the latest games and then update those computers with even more processing power, RAM, and new video cards to keep up with the gaming evolution.
Macs eventually did catch up, or maybe games have reached a plateau of sorts, when most top computers' power and graphics got good enough to run just about any new game, short of VR. Today, gaming on Mac is becoming increasingly more popular, and more developers are dedicating resources to producing new (as well as porting older) hit games for the operating system. Thus the iconic StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was developed for both PC and Mac at the same time, while hugely popular Stardew Valley was ported to Mac at a later date. Steam games for Mac are also gaining popularity worldwide as the Steam platform continues to grow.
Set up your Mac for gaming
We know what your Mac clearly lacks. Games. Install Setapp and prepare your computer for a perfect gaming experience.
So if you have a Mac today and want to dive into the gaming world — it's not that hard. All your Mac needs is just a little tweaking and optimization to make sure you can really enjoy the experience.
How To Optimize Mac For Gaming
When you start thinking how to play games on your Mac and about what you need to do to optimize your Mac so you can get maximum performance out of it, first of all, think about getting more space, freeing up memory, clearing up clutter, turning off unneeded features, and lowering your graphics card requirements. If none of those do the trick, you probably need another Mac, which we'll also discuss.
Free up space for Mac games
Whether you're getting Steam games for Mac or download one-off titles from the App Store, one thing is for sure — they take up lots of gigabytes on your hard drive. More than that, besides the actual size of the game, it's also recommended that you keep at least 25 GB (and preferably more) of your hard drive free, as some of that space would be used while you play.
How do you free up so much space? Start by going through your Mac's folders and see if there is something you truly haven't used in a while. Check Movies, Music, and Pictures folders in your user Library — those tend to be quite heavy. Even if you can't delete something, consider moving it to the cloud.
Then go to the Applications folder and check if you can purge an app or two there. Anything you haven't used in a year is probably better deleted and reinstalled than kept occupying space on your disk. And, of course, don't forget to delete games you no longer play.
This process may take a while, and in fact it's quite hard to delete things off your drive completely, as various affiliated files are always clinging on and hiding in the most remote folders of your Mac. The good thing is you can use software to detect clutter and remove it completely, leaving you enough space for even the best Mac games.
To start, download a pro-level disk analyzer like Disk Drill. Besides its main purpose of recovering lost files and data, it's a top utility for revealing what your disk space is consumed by. Simply use the 'Clean up' tab to scan your disks and remove anything you don't need anymore.
When it comes to uninstalling applications, solely removing the folder from Applications could potentially leave hundreds of associated files all over your hard drive. With an optimization utility like CleanMyMac X, you can use an Uninstaller scan and find everything that belongs to the application to delete it at once.
Keep an eye on your Mac's performance
While having lots of free space will generally boost your Mac's performance, it's not the only contributing factor. For instance, RAM and CPU are just as important. And once you hear the overheating fans, you really need to take a look at how your processing power is being consumed.
Built into your Mac is a useful utility called Activity Monitor. Launch it from your Applications folder to scroll through tabs like CPU, Memory (RAM), Energy, etc. Activity Monitor shows all the active tasks consuming your Mac's resources and allows to terminate those tasks right from the app as well.
But in most cases, CPU, RAM, and energy levels won't give you a complete picture of what's really happening with your computer. That's where you need to use a top-tier utility like iStat Menus, which in addition to all the above shows air flow, network usage, frames per second, and much more. It also lives in your menu bar, making it easy to monitor your Mac continuously.
Improve gaming with secure VPN
ClearVPN is the best full-featured VPN app to install on your Mac in 2021 (and, very likely, the upcoming years too). What does it have to do with games? Well, if you are into online gaming, ClearVPN makes sure you can always count on low-ping server connection.
Using innovative DynamicFlow technology, ClearVPN analyzes your current network status and then automatically connects you to the best idle server available. And that's only a small part of what the app can do. Whether you want to watch movies unavailable in your region or boost Twitch streaming, ClearVPN has a shortcut for anything. Thanks to the best industry-standard encryption, your gaming (just as anything you do with ClearVPN) is 100% safe.
Optimize your Mac
While ClearVPN will give you the best gaming experience your Mac can handle, you can make your Mac handle even more.
The best way to increase your Mac's performance is to regularly (e.g. once a month) use high-quality software devised for that purpose. CleanMyMac X here is a leading program that boasts millions of users worldwide, mostly due to its simple one-click improvements. Through various scans, from speed optimization to mail attachment removal, you can resolve problems exactly where they come up.
Anytime you use CleanMyMac X, it would take your computer 95% there in terms of its capabilities. To achieve the final 5%, there are a few more things you can optimize with some manual work.
For example, if you don't find Notification Center useful at all, you can turn it off and save the power your Mac uses to keep it running in the background. Marshys double rage mac os. Unfortunately, macOS doesn't give you a way to turn it off in the settings, so you need to use Terminal:
- In Terminal, enter launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist
- And then follow up with killall NotificationCenter
- Notification Center should now disappear and won't relaunch with the next system restart
Likewise, you can disable the Dashboard utility if you don't use it often:
- In Terminal, enter defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
- Then restart the Dock with killall Dock
If you think through every process running on your system, you can probably come up with more functions that you don't need. However, Dashboard and Notification Center are probably the most common once people want to see gone.
Finally, when you're playing a game, check if you can lower the strain on your graphics card in its settings. Frequently you can change the resolution, level of details, and shadows to increase processing speed. To get a little extra game booster for Mac, try playing a game in an app window rather than full screen.
Choose the best Mac for gaming
If you had the most powerful computer available, no game would be a problem. And truth be told, PCs are easier in the sense that you get a box to fill up with everything you need and reshuffle the parts with ease. When it comes to Macs, parts are difficult to change, and most of the time you have to decide on what you need right away.
So how do you not make a mistake? What is the best Mac for gaming?
The two most important Mac components to games are processor and video card. While processing power is fairly straightforward — the more the better (with Macs you also have to note the Turbo Boost each model can provide) — video cards have always been somewhat tricky.
Video cards can be discrete or integrate. The former are faster but independent from the processor. The latter are part of the system and able to use available processing power. That's generally what you want here.
There are currently three integrated video cards available on Macs: Intel HD Graphics 5000, Intel Iris Graphics, Intel Iris Pro Graphics. So any computers featuring these are more or less suitable for gaming. Just remember to opt in for the highest CPU you can afford. Generally, this means selecting from such models as:
- 15-inch MacBook Pro
- 27-inch iMac (5K or regular)
- 21.5-inch iMac (most powerful model)
- Mac Pro
Laptops of 13 inches and smaller are significantly less powerful and thus not recommended for serious gaming on Mac. And if you choose to employ your 15-inch MacBook Pro, keep in mind that games for Mac are the greediest when it comes to energy consumption.
You can try all sorts of manual hacks to increase your battery life, from dimming your screen to quitting apps to turning off WiFi. But for a seamless way to make your battery last you up to 20% longer on every charge, use an automatic app like Endurance, which takes advantage of all ways to prolong your gaming on Mac and balances battery life and CPU at the same time.
Following recommendations above will ensure that your computer is 100% prepared to face the best Mac games out there. Sure, you can perform a few tweaks manually, but nothing will compare to using specialized software to get your Mac to its top shape! Best of all, apps mentioned here are all available for a free trial through Setapp, a platform of over 200 best-in-class Mac utilities and tools designed to elevate your everyday experience. Now you're ready to buy all those Mac games!
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