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Pixar Switches to Mac OS X and G5s
fmorgan writes "No big surprise here: when Apple introduced the G5 at 2003 WWDC, it become more a question of 'when' Pixar will move to G5s, than 'if'). At the same conference, Apple showed a new codec for Mac OS X named 'Pixlet,' developed with Pixar. In last year O'Reilly's Mac OS X conference, there was a presentation on how Pixar moved their desktop/office environment to Mac OS X. Now it seems it's the main production work: 'Apple's Don Peebeles said that Pixar has used Linux and Intel-based architecture in 2003, but that Pixar was switching to Mac OS X and G5 workstations for its production work: Peebles went on to say that this switch was "a move that no doubt made common CEO Steve Jobs very happy."'"
After all, with Jobs as CEO of both companies, why wouldn't Apple be used for Pixar's needs, especially if they're capable? An american kiritsu?
I don't see this as big news. It would be big news, if, say, they moved to a linux distribution (considering that Jobs is CEO of both Pixar and Apple, and linux could be seen as a competitor to Apple). This is nothing more than free publicity for apple, and probably an "at-cost" transaction for Pixar for new hardware and software.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
So Mac OS X isn't free software, and that means one less big, technically-savvy GNU/Linux user contributing to the community.
But still much better than if they had gone with that other OS, and a real gain for platform diversity.
Now if someone the like (DigitalDomain, anyone?) would go to GNU/Linux on the G5...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Not necessarily. Forget the Linux evangelism for a moment and remember that Apple makes some damn good hardware, regardless of anyone's opinion of the company or their software. Making animated movies of the sort that Pixar produces would certainly be very hardware-intensive. I think it just makes sense.
G5 + OS X + Maya + Photoshop + Pixlet = one kickass expensive production environment
Except that Steve wouldn't have made the change if it were not cost effective. He's a businessman, and the kiddies that like his fancy animated fish don't care if it was rendered or developed on a Mac or not. At some point, the compute power of the G5, please the ease of installation and ongoing maintenance made it worthwhile to switch.
In all actuality, he probably didn't even request that his company do this - its not the kind of thing a CEO tends to think about. His CTO probably did the evaluations and ran the numbers...
Apple hardware is tied to the OS when you buy it. It's the same reason why Apple will never port OS X to x86 - Apple's a hardware company first, using the software to help sell the hardware. Either way, I'm sure Apple's selling the systems to Pixar at-cost anyway, so it's not like it's going to add to the cost, and OS X is a worthy Unix system that happens to have a rather pretty interface on top. So the question is more why wouldn't they go with OS X?
Really though do they need to change the Linux farm? I'd be surprised if they did, there's no real need...
There is no need to, strictly speaking, and long term this move will likely be rather costly to Pixar and their shareholders, but with Steve Jobs as CEO of both Pixar and Apple, and the probability that this initial transaction was conducted "at cost," it is hardly surprising.
My overall take on this is a little controversial (tin-foil hat optional):
Steve Jobs isn't a particularly staunch fan of GNU/Linux, nor of software freedom. He sees an opportunity to close out a rival (Linux) before it threatens him, kill off a competitor or five (SGI and a dozen small Linux rendering solution companies), and to do so while our attention is occupied by SCO and Microsoft.
Remember, software freedom is, long term, as big a threat to Apples business model as it is Microsoft and SCO's. The difference is that, as a non-monopolist used to competing, the threat isn't as immediate or acute. It is, nevertheless, quite real, and Jobs would like to have Apple well entrenched (and Linux perhaps starved of the multi-media applications that make it a competitor today) before the paradigm shift to software freedom threatens his company with relegation to a mere hardware vendor directly.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If we're talking about open-source alternatives to Mac OS X, we could also talk about open-source stuff that's relatively compatible with Mac OS X at the non-GUI level, and runs on x86. :) Maybe they could keep all the Xeons in their render farm, and just install Darwin on them, then the back-end apps could run on both Xeon and Mac.
The great thing about OS X is that it's an industrial strength OS with a pretty and easy to use GUI. The GUI might not be your cup of tea, and some will argue about the ease of use, but the underlying OS is a multiuser *nix system.
;n)
As far as your being unable to justify the price, please join me in a nice glass of kool aid, here under the pleasant shade of the RFD.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
SGI hardware is expensive and not so far ahead these days, many have been replacing SGI boxes for Macs and Linux boxes.
Look!. And here!.
IAALS.
Just as likely not, he may want to keep clean hands on this one for credibility. Remember that the high-profile VirginiaTech project had tons more marketroid benefits for Apple but the whole deal was basically retail. They wouldn't have to get discounts for this decision fo fly anyway, the price/performance&quality ratio is favourable.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I know you're making a joke, but since gambling winnings are taxable, shouldn't gambling losses be deductable?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
To the contrary to your comments, I haven't seen Wimdows on screen, while I've seen Macs in films. I think it's copyrights issue, while apple allows some productions to use their products in the film purely for promotional reasons. I've seen KDE on desktop in some films (yay!), but I can't remember which one.
You apparently were not using Hotmail back when they got purchased by Microsoft. When they first tried to switch the servers to Windows, they couldn't come close to handling the load.
It works perfectly now, but it was a disaster at the time.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
In the real world you spend money to get the tools you need. It always gets me when I hear someone outside the industry complain about how much a copy of Photoshop costs- it's professional software, and it's a necessity. It costs that much because it's worth it.
With the level of success Pixar has had, money isn't the issue- quality is. They can easily afford a couple million in equipment and software. What they can't afford to do is to produce inferior work.
Why select a slower, more expensive platform and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
Because for the applications Pixar has in mind, G5 Macs are neither slower nor more expensive. It's really that simple. G5s deliver the best bang for the buck in the video editing world, period.
I would really, really like to see the "Macs are more expensive" meme disappear from these arguments. They're not more expensive than PCs of comparable power and quality, and haven't been for years.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
G5's with optimized software being slower for production work is debatable. You haven't seen the next generation of hardware yet, they already have a 1GHz bus, and these production machines have enormous internal bandwidth requirements. Use one for video or 3D work sometimes, then come back here and complain about their speed.
more expensive platform
Since these are production machines, they need to be very reliable and plug-it-in and go. Make me a machine with the same level of reliability, quiet, power requirements, speed, connectivity, and production capabilities with equivalent warranty then let's compare pricing. Never mind, I just finished a committee-based 3-week shopping grind for similar production requirements and I already know the answer: apple hardware wins by about 5% on price alone, and still spec's out better for multimedia production. Oh, and ROI in terms of productivity, support, and longevity.
and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
RTFA. They aren't porting anything new since these are production machines, not render nodes. Maya, photoshop, shake, pixlet, backed by a top-notch interface and bsd, mmm... hey, you're not an artist, are you?
Anyway, for the ROI alone, this is good for shareholders, especially if creativity flows better.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Um... I assume that you are referring to the myth that Macs are more expensive. I would point you in the direction of reality on two counts:
1. Take a look at price/performance on the dual G5's. Many other people have, and they have been pretty unanimous that the Apple's win. See University of Virginia. The client computers are also competing against mainly SGI boxes... You will have a better time in your comparison of the linux render farm, but then you start to have to look at boxes competing against the XServe, and you will find them also very price competitive against the other server farm boxes they are competing against.
2. In terms of the price of production the hardware is one of the smaller costs. The big price is the people, this is also the place where the difference between a failure and a success will happen. If someone blames hardware for a bad pixar movie, they are simply stupid.
Any lawyer who cannot convince a jury of both of these points is incompetent.
It can't. SCO owns the sucessors to the SYSV licenses originating from AT&T. BSD's ancestry (& ownership line) is much more clearly established as independent of what SCO currently "owns".
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Not knowing the details of what they're running, I'm guessing when I say the answer is AltiVec. The cheapest way to run Apache or Samba isn't necessarily the cheapest way to do heavy computation.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What linux distro do you use? How much software did the distrubutors "steal" for that distro? OS X uses its own kernel, own *nix variant (Darwin, which is open source), and almost every GUI app was made by Apple or NEXT...
As my first venture into Linux, recently installed Mandrake on my PC. It's very nice, but except from the various *drake installers and configurators, everything (as far as I could tell) is third-party.
SGI Octane + Irix + Maya +
Windows Box + Windows 2000 + Photoshop =
one kickass really expensive production environment.
Compared to what they used before, the G5's dirt cheap.
D
For many years, Apple's core business at the high end has been driven by just this decision: give the artists the best machines on the desktop that they can handle. The annual upgrade cycle for design and graphics industry makes sense, since any second wasted is expensive, and faster machines mean better ROI. Upgrading is ultimately cheaper.
Damn those pesky terrorists
In the graphics and 3d business, time is money, so equipment upgrades tend to happen every couple of years. They are moving to macs less for the OSX side of things (but I am sure it helps) and more for the processing power and bus speeds allowed by the new G5s. Their workstation boxes were X86 with some SGI scattered about and if there were a couple of years old, they new G5s could render frames and refresh much faster than those older X86 machines. With Pixlet being a software renderer, it would make sense for them to be on the fastest boxes available because without the help of hardware, all that matters in decompressing those frames for viewing is the spped of the box. Remember, for a company like Pixar, it is not about the money, it is about time, and the G5 will save them time on the workstation side.
If Steve had ordered Pixar to switch to mac, they would have done it at 10.0. Apple earned that customer.
You don't seem to understand the modern rendering workload. Its all I/O. A typical frame of geometry (>10GB) won't even fit into most memories, much less the textures which are often orders of magnitude larger. This is not your typical game or raytracer which loads everything in a couple seconds at the beginning and spends half an hour crunching numbers. Tremendous effort is spent paging stuff in and out and keeping memory from overflowing. Also keep in mind that it needs to probably be sucked over the network in the first place.
Having the additional address space of the 64-bit system will help a lot, as will the high throughput of the G5.
The Opteron may make sense here as well, but the software isn't mature enough yet for them to be able to run all the systems on it. Windows doesn't support the 64-bit yet, of course, and Linux stuff varies. For example, they presumably will want good 3D acceleration for the modeling if they really want to be able to use a certain system uniformly in their operation, and the performance of Linux 64-bit 3D drivers isn't up to the traditional x86 yet (and often won't even work if you have >4GB RAM).
Consider the XserveG5 -- uses less power than a similar Intel box and is cooler-running. What Pixar will save over the long run in electricity bills alone is probably worth the upgrade.
Doesn't make a difference if you're running 1 or 5 machines in your house, but it does make a signifigant difference if you're running 500 or machines.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The article says they're replacing their workstations, not their render nodes. Most of the work on a workstation is done by the graphics card. Where you really need cheap CPU power is the render nodes, and x86 still gives more bang for the buck than the PPC970 / G5.
Good luck convincing a jury that you switched to a 2- to 3-times as expensive per seat
Uh, right. Apple's G5 systems (both tower and rackmount) are very compeditive. If you are talking about a corporate desktop environment where you don't need a G5, a single virus outbreak can make short work of the money you "saved" by going with PC's. Not only do you lose money fixing the latest Windows virus, you also lose money because you can't get your work done.
Why is the parent modded up? RTFA, they're desktop workstations. Maybe it's so they can run photoshop, maya, shake, renderman and pixlet, and still open excel files, without any config time.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Quite lossy? Are you setting the quality slider all the way to Best? Yes, Pixlet is lossy, but it's also a keyframe-less CODEC that brings data rates well over 3MB/second at DV resolution. That's almost as high as native DV and right around the same data rate as MJPEG. Yes, it's not uncompressed video, but that's not what Pixlet was designed for.
I don't know what % Jobs personally owns, but insiders own 57% of the company. Jobs stands to gain a lot more money by doing something to help Pixar than by doing something to help Apple that hurts Pixar.
Pixar will switch to whatever is currently going to suit their needs the best... in their business, they aren't going to sit around and use "legacy" stuff just because of previous investment.. you will see them re-tool much more often than a traditional business.
Steve probably didn't force it down their throats but he probably made a suggestion or two in the positive direction of Apple.
Another scenario is that Steve made it a challenge for Apple to get into Pixar. "Apple team, Pixar has requirements x, y, and z to switch to Macs. Go get 'em." It raises the bar for Apple and gives them a credible shot at other studios (except DreamWorks, which seems to view Apple as the enemy).
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Personally, I cheer any victory for Apple, the company (among many) that got shortchanged thanks to the dominance and abuse of the Microsoft monopoly that spread across all the IBM clones in the early 90s.
Pixar switching to Macs? Apple commercials before movies showing everyone a *real* operating system as opposed to their XP boxes at home? Hell, yeah.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Also for math (especially floating point) calculations, the G5 (PPC970) is much superior to the Intel IA-32 (not really a big thing if all you do is run Word, of course).
According to a talk by "Dr. BigMac" (from VA Tech) the only other high-volume CPU approaching it was the Intel Itanium, and here (quite an irony) Intel was under-clocked! (The G5, last year, was shipping at 2Gh, the Itanium less than that).
As for price, you can't compare a Dual G5 with a $200 walmart pc; but check the prices of any dual Dell Xeon system.
Either way, I'm sure Apple's selling the systems to Pixar at-cost anyway
This is about the third time I've read this remark, in +5 comments no less. Why on earth would anyone assume this to be true? If you own a grocery store would you just walk in and take anything you wanted without paying for it? Maybe. But more likely you would pay just like everyone else, and the profits would flow back to you. For the same reason, I would not assume Pixar was getting any special deals just because Jobs is CEO of both companies. Sure, he's the CEO of both companies, but all Apple employees are not also Pixar employees.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
Um... I assume that you are referring to the myth that Macs are more expensive.
Anybody who wants to quote the "Macs are more expensive" line of FUD has never taken a look at the price of Sun or especially SGI hardware.
Hell, SGI doesn't list the prices of things on their page, they tell you to call and ask. That's the computer equvalent of "market price."
OS X:*nix for the real world.
You gotta remember that they just switched to Linux a little over a year ago, right? At the time, everyone was amazed that Steve would let that happen. Obviously, Linux was a better choice then, and it now is not.
Steve makes most of his money from Pixar. He's not going to risk that!
production machines do not have to be plug-in-and-go. this is where it-pros get on stage. They deploy clients and servers following a specific design and demand.
Home Users need computers to plug-in-and-go. If you'd had followed former developments at pixar, you would know that they put _lots_ of IT and coding skill into the equipment they're using.
Don't get me wrong, i think osx is a great platform. Of course it is worse for a linux hacker to use windows than a mac, but after a while it gets damn close.
So mac has definitively it's place in the market and on the desktop. But i don't wan't to be the one customizing thoses systems to such a complex enviroment.
It's not even close to reasonable to assume that Jobs (as CEO of one public company) would give a break to another company of which he is a substantial stockholder. That would open him up to all sorts of lawsuits, especially in today's legal environment. I would be willing to bet that he stayed as far away from this deal as he could, other than approving someone else's recommendation (as Pixar CEO). Jobs may be a lot of things, but he's not stupid.
If SCO pulled a magic rabbit out of there but and somehow proved they had IP rights to all of Linux and killed it off would the world grind to a stop? Would Slashdot go with it? Would people who participate in Slashdot die from grief? I don't think so. To imagine that Linux will be around forever and that encouraging that at ALL costs is foolish. I work in the real world where companies have to make money and protect their IP. To me GPL goes against this. If given a choice of a GPL license or a BSD license I opt for BSD every time.
People who take the holeyer than though view of Open Source are definitely walking the high road. It's a narrow-mindedness that I can't believe I'm hearing when coming from someone that I would normally consider to be highly intelligent. To me an example of the true spirit of Open Source is Apple. They took BSD and created Darwin and then release regularly the modifications to that operating system. That is truly honorable considering that with the freedom of BSD they do not HAVE to do so.
Plus, I don't think Steve Jobs would care if his xservers were running Linux or better yet BSD (pref Darwin) without OSX. Apple makes their money selling hardware. I really don't consider Microsoft to be a competitor of Apple. I think the real competitors are Dell, HP, etc..
Anyways, please step down from your Open Source soapbox and take a breath of air with the rest of us down here in the real world.
I realize that this comment might catch me some heat but Jesus I can't listen to this self centered propaganda any more.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Mac OS X comes with all Macs. You only pay for major OS upgrades or for Mac OS X Server.
Gabriel Ricard
The biggest effect it would have would be that Apple would indeed have the baddest, slickest 64 bit personal computer around. There was a time when being "wicked fast" belonged to Apple and no one else. I'd like to see them do it again, instead of just being back to par with the PC world.
Apple should not only be on par, they should stomp the PC world into dust in the speed game. They can do it now, it's just a question of do they have the balls?
all the BSD developers who freely allowed us to steal^H^H^H^H^Huse your code
If I give you a beer, you didn't steal it from me.
You know, it's rather bizarre... the Linux/GPL fanatics will scream endlessly in the war against SCO about how licensing lets the copyright-holder do whatever they please with their code, and if the copyright-holder wishes to give it out for free with a license like the GPL which says it has to always remain open-source then that's their god-given right by law. Isn't that the counter to SCO's claim that the GPL is illegal?
So listen: you can't have it both ways. If licensing lets the copyright-holder come up with whatever terms s/he wishes, then that includes the BSD license which the copyright-holder VOLUNTARILY used. The people who wrote FreeBSD gave it to the community under the terms of the BSD licenses so that things like what Apple did could SPECIFICALLY happen. In essence, FreeBSD freely gave itself to Apple.
How is that stealing? FreeBSD said "Feel free to use our code to make money however you want". Apple did just that. Give it a rest.
I imagine that on a large enough scale operation, the cost to upgrade anually is decently offset by the power savings from not running the machines as long for the same output. I'm sure the remaining cost is easily made up for in the value of earlier release. Or along the route of higher quality frames, the same amount of power cost plus more in depth graphics is valuable to be seen as the pioneers in the field, plus having more visually appealing movies.
It is probable also very much what you're saying that hardware is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount they're making.
If not now, when?
I'll not post any findings, nor will I give you any numbers of my OWN personal experience.
...,nor support my position with anything else, not even a google search:
Your search - "default install size" XP os x - did not match any documents.
and
Your search - "default install size" XP osx - did not match any documents.
Actually they would be porting stuff. I'm a 3d animator myself. Pixar runs their own set of tools for animation. Maya may be on MAC... but Pixar's own software is not. Well it probably is, or will be very shortly. But rest assured that if ALL of pixar's workstations for animators are being converted to MACs... then Pixar WILL be porting over their entire animation suite of tools that are and have been developed by Pixar for over 15 years now.
I'm not just talking about renderman. Pixar has their own animation tools and 3d control environments for scripting, rigging, animating, shader editing etc.
Pixar only uses Maya for modelling mostly. Infact i know a few Maya drivers at Pixar.
It's really not much of an endorsement, considering how closely married the companies are. Pixar certainly doesn't have to worry about being shaken down for expensive licenses and somehow I doubt they're paying retail price for the G5s.
This is not, incidentally, a knock against either OS X or the G5, both of which are fine products. I'm just noting that this is a bit like MSN using Windows XP on x86 hardware. Big deal.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
What's the advantage to Pixar??? WTF!
The teams at Pixar are at the pinnacle of their industry. They do not take software and hardware choice lightly. They have not and would not till this day switch to using Apple solutions unless they proved superior. They have no use for hardware and software politics.
The evolution has been going on for some time at Apple.
Jobs has remade Apple software and hardware Pro Lines specifically for Hollywood, the CGI industries and this.
XServe, Xserve Raids, OpenGL direct rendering, xCode Tools for Rapid Development and distributive computing, XServe licensing and OS X licensing all are extremely cost effective. linux and Unix software has been ported OS X. G5 optimized Render-man, Shake, and the necessary tools are there.
This is the future and Apple is very much a part of it, deservedly so. A lot of extremely talented people have been working their asses of pursuing this dream for years and years now. This is just the first picking of an abundant and fruitful harvest for these folks.
More power to them!!!!!
.
Check the latest NASDAQ composite.
I don't care where you buy your eye-of-newt from, fortunetelling is still fortunetelling. Predicting tomorrow is a dangerous game in stocks.
Doesn't look that good way below S&P 500
Gee, let's look at the chart in recent history!!!
I can't believe you tried the same lie twice in a row.
September 2000
Whoa! Who's doing the Monday morning quarterbacking now?
Well, I decided to pick the date *you* pulled from thin air actually. Remember, the supposed launch of OS X? If I picked my dates and the real current price the numbers are much better.
Uh. Where's the transaction costs? You know,
the brokerage commission?
Actually, I did forget to factor that in - my bad.
Hey. Have some fun. Plug in any other date.
The picture gets worse.
Unless you use my original dates and the price today. Then it's still pretty respectible. And who pays $10 a transaction? Increase the investment to $500 and the trade to $7 or so and it's not that big a deal.
Again, to get back to my orignal point if you believe in your code you should invest in it as well. Apple has not been as bad an investment as you make it out to be, especially after the launch of OS X. I can understand you not wanting to face reality but you need to get a better handle on your figures.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Also for math (especially floating point) calculations, the G5 (PPC970) is much superior to the Intel IA-32 (not really a big thing if all you do is run Word, of course).
That's a VERY broad statement there, and not really backed by much fact. For certain applications I'm quite certain that the PowerPC 970 is quite a bit faster than any x86 chips, but in other applications it's probably quite a bit slower, while overall they would seem to be fairly close.
Probably the most comprehensive cross-platform CPU benchmark we've got is SPEC CPU2000. It's far from perfect, but at least it's widely used. The best numbers I've seen for the PPC 970 is 937 CINT_base and 1051 CFP_base at 1.8GHz (numbers available in this product overview from IBM). Very respectible performance, and the 2.0GHz PPC 970 should be a bit higher, but it's not quite class-leading.
For comparison, a top-end Opteron system (Opteron 148, 2.2GHz) managed 1304 CINT and 1505 CFP. The Xeons in the same basic range with a score of 1532 CINT and 1338 CFP. And before anyone goes crying foul because of unfair compilers or anything like that, the Opteron numbers are achieved using GCC.
According to a talk by "Dr. BigMac" (from VA Tech) the only other high-volume CPU approaching it was the Intel Itanium, and here (quite an irony) Intel was under-clocked! (The G5, last year, was shipping at 2Gh, the Itanium less than that).
Ol' Dr. BigMac was basing his decision only on the specific performance tests he felt were important. In this case, that test was Linpack, where the PPC does very well. Linpack is certainly not the only measure of processor performance, it's actually a VERY limited test, albeit one that is applicable to many types scientific computing.
As for the Itanium it's likely more an issue of price rather than clock speed. When you look at the real-world performance of the Itanium2 1.5GHz vs. PPC 970 2.0GHz in Linpack, they're pretty close (probably within 5%). However a "cheap" dual-Itanium node will set you back a cool $15,000 or so, while a similarly equipped dual-G5 system from Apple will only cost you about $5000.
As for Pixar themselves. It's quite possible that they went through some benchmarks and found that the PowerPC 970 offered better performance for their particular work than any x86 chips. As mentioned above, there are some areas where the PPC970 does excel. However, I suspect that there was a STRONG incentive to find the PPC970 fastest regardless of what the actual performance was.
Insightful?
I seriously doubt that power consumption is in the minds of anyone over at Pixar. Compared to the costs of administration, personell, and the hardware itself, power isn't even close to the top of the list.
Pixar will use whatever systems they need to make production time resonable. If that means an extra few thousand bucks a month because of the extra 30 servers, who cares.. drop in the bucket.
There's other (more rational) reasons for reducing the number of servers, and the lower electric bill is simply a bonus.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Others have already addressed the point that for this application Macs are neither slower nor more expensive.
I'd point out that there are a couple of very good strategic reasons to go with Apple. First off they are in a niche that Apple is intent on dominating and is on the way to succeeding in this desire. Apple produces (or has bought) a lot of technology that is important to the broad category of film/video production that Pixar is part of. Beyond just Apple the other software vendors in this niche support the platform, a few don't support the *other* platforms.
Secondly, of course, is that Steve Jobs - the CEO and majority shareholder of Pixar is also the CEO of Apple. For obvious reasons Pixar is in a good position to get great service and consideration from this particular vendor. The "CEO mandate" dynamic you worry about on behalf of Pixar's shareholders (who are for the most part Mr. Jobs himself) works both ways. Apple which is already focussed on dominating the film/video market can act almost as a HUGE auxiliary R&D department for Pixar. They've already developed a new codec at Pixar's specific request. Apple has a huge amount of relevant technology it has already developed and/or bought. One might also notice that the XServe from the very beginning was configured as much for the video production market as it was for the server market - how many other servers have a FireWire port on the *front*?
but costly to Pixar's shareholders. One wonders what sorts of fudiciary issues such a maneuver might raise.
Since Jobs is himself the majority shareholder at Pixar with 55.4% of the shares not many. I would worry a great deal more about Jobs abusing his position at Apple to benefit Pixar's shareholders (i.e. himself) than vice versa.
to donate my dual 2GHz G5's night-time spare cpu cycles to producing the next Pixar movie. That would be cool.
Donate? Pixar is a successful corporation. If you're going to "donate" CPU cycles, give them to a non-profit like protein folding. If Pixar wants your CPU, then let them pay for it, or at least give you free tickets or merchandise for the movie you "helped" with.
1. Depends what you mean by make. Apple design their own hardware, their mother boards are all in-house designs that use a fair few custom chips that they also created. They outsource the manufacturing though like almost all the PC makers. Very few PC makers do any hardware design at all and that includes case design.
:P
2. Mac OS X 10.3 is not entirely 64bit. It does support 64 bit addressing so it can access more than 4GB of RAM. It also has 64bit optmisted math libraries. Since 32 bit code runs on the G5 with no performance penalty this will do for a while. People with G5 machines will get the main benefits of the 64bit-ness and the programs will still run on older 32bit systems.
3. 64bit Windows is still in beta. Linux is available on Apple hardware too.
4. I suppect not. It's more likely that Pixar paid the going rate for those machines. Apple has spent the past few years persuing the movie content creation market. The advantage Pixar had was an existing link with Apple to communicate their needs. Apple choose to fulfill those and so obviously they become the preferred platform.
Pixar will use the best tools for the job available at the time. Remember Steve Jobs take stage at an Intel conference when Pixar bought a shed load of Xeons for their render farm in 2003?
5. Don't go out and spec "okay" systems and then compare price. Spec comparable systems and compare price. That means keeping the differences between the two systems to a minimum.
Hell my old iMac was much cheaper than that Dual processor Xeon, I used that iMac for years and it was an okay system...
Fact is that the fastest available PC is slower in many respects than the fastest Mac available and the PC costs more. Blame the PC chip manufacturers for putting such a high premium on their newest chips for the price difference.
If you are willing to sacrifice a few MHz on your box the dual proc PC price will drop below that of the Mac. But it will also be slower still.
And remember if you are inclined to run a non-free OS on the PC especially as a server then the Mac costs much less.
Don't blame me - this
Somehow I don't think Jobs is in this game for the money. Ego maybe. But money no.