Ah, vast pricing discrepencies-- just another of the many glorious little annoyances that accompanies being a Mac user, along with lack of software and social ostracism. Now that Apple's on its way back up, perhaps some of these problems will lessen or dissipate entirely over time, but right now, they're the price we pay for sticking with our platform of choice. We can handle being viewed as the lepers of the computing world, and there's precious little software only on the PC side that we really want to run on our Macs, but the price differences for similar equipment really toasts our cheese.

Let's take a specific example. Say you're a Mac gamer, and you want the latest and greatest 3D acceleration technology to pop into your G3 to make those long hours of Unreal and Myth even more magical. Right now, that means getting a card equipped with a Voodoo 2 chip-- which should be make your choice pretty simple, since there's only one company actually making such a card for the Mac platform. So you're drooling over the specs for the Micro Conversions Game Wizard and mentally calculating how many straight meals of ramen noodles it's going to take before you can scrape together the $350 you'll need to buy this ultimate gaming accessory. That's when you notice a similar card from a different company-- also PCI, also Voodoo 2, also with 12 MB of texture memory-- selling for a mere $99. And it's PC-only.

Now what makes this all the more galling is that the hardware is, as far as we can tell, completely identical. The only thing different about the Mac version is the inclusion of Mac drivers. (That was, after all, the promise of PCI-- Mac users would get to use a wide variety of formerly PC-only cards because manufacturers would only have to write new drivers to make their hardware Mac-compatible.) While we're fully aware that the Mac market is much smaller than the PC market and therefore prices need to be higher for manufacturers to recoup costs and make a profit, we have to say that charging $250 for some drivers seems like downright price gouging.

Which is why we can totally understand (though not condone) the recent posting of generic Mac Voodoo 2 drivers on the Internet. People who download these apparently illegally-leaked drivers are reportedly able to use any PC-branded Voodoo 2 card in their Macs, thus saving themselves hundreds of dollars. You can read more about these leaked drivers at Accelerate Your Mac-- including how they may inflict untold damage on the already fragile Mac gaming market. After all, if nobody buys Mac-specific cards, nobody will sell those cards, and nobody will write games that would use those cards. But the simple fact that people are frustrated enough to resort to using stolen drivers should indicate that current pricing on Mac Voodoo 2 cards is completely out of touch with reality. Hopefully we'll start seeing some changes soon.