looking at buying a macbook for my kid, i think this one fits all his educational needs, but curious if he can play blizz games (wow and overwatch) with it? he has the ps4 that he uses for OW and can play WOW on our Mac that we have, just curious if he can use the laptop as well.
Overwatch is Windows-only sadly, so you’ll have to use Boot Camp to install Windows alongside macOS to be able to play Overwatch on any Mac. With a 256GB SSD, I wouldn’t advise that though, because at least half of that will need to be dedicated to Windows.
Looking at those specs, it looks like this is a MacBook Air? WoW will run on it, but it’ll have to be on low-medium settings at 50% or below render scale.
Linux user here. I am just curious, can you use Wine on Mac? How well does it work? Thanks
I really hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this Macbook Air will run WoW, but it will for the most part be the most choppy experience you could imagine. You’ve got the combination of super thin chassis preventing the CPU from sustaining turbo speeds, the CPU’s base clock is very, very far below minimum spec for the game, you’ve only got 8 GB RAM, which is barely enough to play the game (you’ll hit swap a lot), and you’d be running off integrated graphics.
In a nutshell, that’s the worst possible setup you could use for WoW.
Wine does work in OS X, but you’re much better off just booting into Windows via Boot Camp if you can fit it onto your drive(s). Not sure why you’d need Wine for WoW though since there is a Mac native client.
I was aluding to the Overwatch case, I forgot to clarify. Well, if that Boot Camp thing is like a VM then it will occupy lots of space, I think that would be a reason for just using wine. Besides, don’t you have to pay for a win license? (genuinely curious, I don’t know much about the mac world)
Boot Camp isn’t a VM. It’s basically Windows booting via a CSM (compatibility support module) process (a.k.a. emulated BIOS). While you can run Windows 10 for “free”, you will be periodically “nagged” about buying a license and be unable to change most desktop settings. But it is a good idea to have a paid license key so you get both Microsoft support and if you play a lot of other Windows-only games, ease of installation and use therein.
Overwatch can possibly run via Wine, but it would be pretty slow. Wine use is a VM, so you’d have an extra layer or three of troubleshooting if, or more likely when things go wrong. As long as you have sufficient space for both the Windows OS and Overwatch, it’s best to just boot to Windows to play it. It isn’t supported any other way.
Thank you very much for the info! However, I must correct some things you said about Wine.
Wine is a compatibility layer, games run natively on Linux with Wine, so not a VM. It basically makes applications believe they are talking to windows dlls but they are really talking to Wine versions of them. In fact, Wine can sometimes be faster: ~https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Is_Wine_slower_than_just_using_Windows.3F
I never had any of these issues myself using wine on Linux.
It’s slightly different for Wine in OS X. In OS X, Wine uses the Xquartz runtime layer, which has much more instability than in Linux. Thankfully most users won’t see Xquartz unless the app “package” trips out and somehow leaves it running when the Windows app itself has crashed or exited. For less intensive apps, it’s relatively speedy. Usually it’s the Steam games under Wine that are relatively well optimized. GoG’s versions are a bit more hit and miss though, sadly.
OS X isn’t entirely like Linux, though it has a lot of similarities. It’s an amalgomation of NeXtStep, FreeBSD, and more recently, parts of ZFS (APFS is based on ZFS with a few additional features). There is more overhead to running on OS X via Wine, and if a game utilizes certain functions, may run markedly slower than expected. As I said, you can likely get Overwatch to run, but it won’t be anywhere near native speed due to how it calls the DirectX API functions (it uses a hybrid function that lets the game use IGPs for the HUD while rendering the game world via the dGPU if available - Wine generally doesn’t handle that very well).
Your issues aren’t really going to be with code so much as lack of fully accessible DMA. Linux handles it so much better with Wine (and Proton). I’ve seen some pretty slick setups on Manjaro for gaming.
CrossOver may be your best bet on OS X as its configuration options are much easier to deal with than manually configuring a Wine wrapper and ensuring dependencies are met. And oddly enough, WinAmp works better in CrossOver via its Wineloader configuration than it does natively in Windows. For some reason it doesn’t balk at multinational character sets when run via Wine, probably because they appear as non-UTF8 characters whereas in Windows they are fully UTF-8/16 and w/o the language pack WinAmp hangs.
Now, DOSBox on top of Wine…that’s another story entirely. 
This is very interesting indeed. Thanks for the detailed explanation, my friend! I think this will be useful for OP too.
My kids run on similar machines. They can play the game but raiding or epic battlegrounds will require setting graphics way down.
Swapping tends not to be so bad when you have SSD disk. There rest of your points are valid.
Even on an SSD it’s very noticeable. Keep in mind that with only 8 GB RAM, the most the game will be able to utilize is 6.5 GB minus whatever the OS eats on startup because the IGP will also take 1.5 GB from system RAM. I guarantee you, an MBA will be rather unpleasant to play on except possibly at the lowest settings. An eGPU helps, but at that point you’d save more money just getting an iMac with a dedicated GPU built in. The sad part here is that the components themselves aren’t ultra bad (except the CPU’s abysmal base clock speed), it’s that being in an MBA chassis means thermal throttling left and right. Also bear in mind that constant swaps will eat away at the SSD’s lifespan, and quite noticeably.
Reports on gaming with a MacBook Air, even with the i5 option and an eGPU, are not positive. It’s not very good at dealing with heat. I would guess that you’d have better luck with even the 8th-generation i5 version of the MacBook Pro.
Of course the big question is what happens next year when these machines start shipping with A-series chips instead of Intel.
OMG a wild Lhivera has appeared! *noms*
/hides in the shrubbery