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Pixar Switching to Mac OS X

Posted by pudge on from the ipixar dept.

DavidRavenMoon writes "MacCentral reports that Pixar technologist Dr. Michael Johnson says Linux, Sun and Windows-based systems are being replaced by Mac OS X. 'The studio's entire team uses Mac OS X not only for creative work, but for workflow and custom application development.'"

2 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Predictable - really? by SpamJunkie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes this does seem all fine and predictable given that Steve Jobs is CEO/iCEO of both. But really the interesting part is how long it took.

    I hate to keep bringing up Microsoft, I really do, but remember when hotmail was bought by MS? Right away MS forced them to convert their Sun servers to NT. And, remember all the problems that resulted?

    What is really impressive then about Pixar switching to Mac OS X is that Steve J let them wait until OS X could do everything Pixar needed.

  2. Re:Misleading headline? by Snowfox · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I can't imagine that it would be too difficult for pixar to port their current rendering software over to OS X... plus it would be a great advantage for pixar (having the connection through steve jobs to apple), as they would almost be guaranteed apple's top notch technology. (or is this a false assumption?)
    To play devil's advocate:

    Apple's top notch technology wouldn't be good for the renderfarms. Those are all about speed, and the fastest Mac is about half as fast as the fastest PC. And Macs really fall short on memory-intensive tasks in dual processor configurations, owing to the slower bus speed. (The fastest Mac memory bus is 133MHz. The fastest PC bus is effectively over 1GHz.)

    Even if Pixar got the Macs for free and had to pay market price for the PC racks, it's likely that the cost of electricity from the additional machines needed would take away the Apple benefit in under two years. This is to say nothing of extra maintenance when there are twice as many machines, the value of the extra space used, and the cost of porting the render farm software over to the new system architecture.