Links for Monday November 11^th, 2013

• Switching from Windows to Mac: What I learned: I thought this was a decent overview of the pros/cons that one person experienced when switching to the Mac. This part stood out to me though:

  "...applications that are installed using the Mac App Store simply install themselves without requiring any drag-ad-drop or DMG mounting. Obviously this is Apple’s preferred method of distribution but I’ve found many application developers aren’t using it yet."

  I'm not ready to declare the Mac App Store a failure yet, but I'm getting close. The fact that so many popular, important, and essential apps are either no longer on the store or have never been accepted into the store is a strong indicator that something is broken here.

• Full Steam Ahead: Inside Valve's Grand Plan to Replace Game Consoles With PCs: I'm super interested in what Valve plans to do with Steam in 2014. This part of the article really caught my eye, however:

  Apple, Newell said at that conference, is “more threatening to the PC in the living room than anything that would be happening on the console side.” While Apple has still yet to announce the long-rumored Apple TV update that will bring its App Store gaming environment to the living room, it remains a very real threat that could upset the next round of game consoles the same way Wii did during the last generation.

  “If you pressed us to say, who are the players in the living room who could curtail what we’re trying to accomplish,” says Greg Coomer, “we spend probably more time thinking about Apple and the success that they’ve had upending the PC space with tablets. They could bring a lot of energy to bear on the living room, more than they have. And if they did that in a certain way that sucked all the oxygen out of the space for us for a while, we may have more of an uphill road to get as many customers well served. So we think about that.”

  I still think Apple is fairly disinterested in gaming, but they could surprise us.

• Want to see how the iPad Air benchmarks translate to real-life use? Here’s the video: The short version: the new A7 chip is awesome.