So ive always had a mac, and over the years of playing sims 3, ive come to terms will all the issues surrounding it. While I still want to keep my mac for personal use, I have been considering purchasing a used PC laptop for all my sims needs, and I need advise on what to buy. As far as specs go, i am pretty PC illiterate, but I would like to know what kind of minimum memory/graphics/etc. people would recommend for my situation.

One of the other reasons I want to purchase a PC is because I want to learn to use CAW, if that factors in to the type of computer necessary.

Thank you in advance!

We've discussed this here in the past, but I may need a reminder before the PC spec suggestions start rolling in. Is Bootcamping Windows onto your Mac and playing on the Windows side totally out of the question? If interested, which exact model Mac (from Apple Menu > About This Mac) do you have, with which processor and graphics card, and how much drive space do you have total and how much free to work with?

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports)
Processor - 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
Graphics - Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB

Ive always. been under the impression that sims 3 drained my memory to a point that I couldn't possibly download an entire version of windows.

There's memory (RAM) which is what is used when operating systems, processes, and programs are actually running, and then there's hard drive space, how much space things take up whether they are running or not. I think you have 8 GB of RAM, if so that would be plenty. Under Bootcamp, the macOS and Windows do not run at the same time, we select one or the other when the computer starts up or reboots and the unused partition stays dormant.

So the missing factor on the above is hard drive space. If you have let's say at least 256 GB unused to work with (more would be better) that can be taken away from the macOS side of things, or can free up that much space to take away, then Bootcamping and an install of TS3 for Windows are feasible. If you only have 256 GB or less total to work with, that's not really going to be enough once we divide it into two partitions.

Your Intel Iris graphics would then be the weak spot on the Windows side because that's not a dedicated graphics card. You would still get the benefits of the Windows version of the game and its more lenient almost 4 GB RAM usage that would be impossible on the Mac version of the game, but the heaviest of the EPs (Pets and Seasons; IP and ITF might be iffy) might not work out too well and we would be talking about medium settings for graphics on the Game Options at best. This might be a tough call, but of course purchasing a retail standalone copy of Windows as required is much cheaper than buying an entire PC to play the game.

Maybe, maybe not. The machine I Sim on is a refurb desktop that I bought for $100 from Newegg. It came with 64-bit Win7 Pro, 4GB of RAM, a 3.0GHz Core2Duo processor (which is what I wanted for playing TS2, my primary game; for $30 or so more, I could've gotten a multicore) and a 500GB HDD. I maxed out its RAM (to 8GB; happily it uses the same RAM as the machine it replaced did, so I could pull the chips from the old machine and add them to the new and it didn't cost me anything.), also pulled and reformatted the old machine's 1TB HDD, and bought and installed a 4GB NVIDIA GTX 1050Ti video card, which was the best I could get without needing a more powerful power supply, which I can't get because the machine has a proprietary one, unfortunately. The video card cost $140. So, for ~$240 I got a machine that TS2 loves (both in terms of processor and OS) and that runs TS3 well enough, though I don't think it likes the processor as much as TS2 does, and it could probably do with a little more RAM, since I don't just run TS3 when I play it. But 8GB is the most it can have.

Of course, that's a desktop, which I prefer to use because I like a nice big monitor, and they're easier to fiddle around with the innards of than laptops. Unfortunately, I'm not much good for giving advice on what's best, hardware-wise, for TS3, but my point is that, once you find that out, I'd do a bit of cost analysis. Find out how much a Windows machine will cost vs. the cost (including your time, if it takes time to set things up) of setting up the Mac to play the Windows version of the game, and see which is more cost-effective. And of course, if there are other considerations, like not wanting to cause wear and tear on your Mac, then that's a consideration, too.