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Oculus Founder: Rift Will Come To Mac If Apple "Ever Releases a Good Computer" (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It's been almost a year now since Oculus announced that the consumer version of the Rift virtual-reality headset would only support Windows PCs at launch -- a turnaround from development kits that worked fine on Mac and Linux boxes. Now, according to Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, it "is up to Apple" to change that state of affairs. Specifically, "if they ever release a good computer, we will do it," he told Shacknews recently. Basically, Luckey continued, even the highest-end Mac you can buy would not provide an enjoyable experience on the final Rift hardware, which is significantly more powerful than early development kits. "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn't prioritize high-end GPUs," he said. "You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top-of-the-line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn't match our recommended specs."
If a high end Mac won't support it. You will need a higher end PC which will be beyond most people's budgets.
Not even slightly. Because iMacs have basically shit graphics and aren't upgradeable due to being all in one.
And the mac pros have specialist workstation graphics cards certified for CAD etc; which are extremely expensive, and very good for CAD, but not so great for games; and they also ship with Xeons etc which push the price way up.
Meanwhile a basic PC tower with a decent i5/i7 and a highend video card can be had for $1500 or less.
Merriam-Webster begs to differ:
http://www.merriam-webster.com...
High end Macs come with Work Station graphics cards. They're not meant for rendering games in realtime, they're meant for running Maya/Photoshop (think editing a 12k image), Autocad etc, etc. They can run games, just not very well.
The rest of Apple's range ships with Intel Graphics, which they swapped back to as soon as they were good enough to do 4k+ light 3D (think Bioshock Infinite levels).
Apple can sell you a $2000 laptop with $400 worth of hardware. There's no way they're going to bite into that profit margin for the sake of a few early adopters and drop $300 worth of graphics in there. They only do that on the workstation because the computers would be basically worthless otherwise, and there they crank the price up to 6k to compensate...
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Posting AC, just because. I bought a 2015 MBP... guess what, when doing anything serious with it, it overheats, and sometimes it might throttle back, othertimes, it just thermal-halts, or gives the pinwheel of death. I've had to grab an app someone wrote on GitHub to scale back my stuff when the thermal pressure of the Mac went above a certain level. Memory pressure, same... Run too much stuff, and Macs don't swap gracefully... they thrash, pretty much requiring a force-off with the power button. Genius support can't really do much because all fans are within parameters, and thermal shutdowns leave zero in the way of logs. Yes, I've done OS reloads, even booting the box from a Linux USB flash drive, typing in "blkdiscard -v /dev/sda" to ensure that the flash drive is absolutely clean, then reloading from that.
The ironic thing... my old MBP from ages ago, which is the same size... just keeps on ticking. It gets a new OS every year, but I've never had it just thermal suicide.
Now, lets look at Apple's other offerings.
The Mac Mini. What a joke. It was a four core machine until the last refresh two years ago... now it sports two cores + HT, slower, and less upgradable. Desperately needs some love.
The Mac Pro. The old Mac Pros used to have the ability to use RAID. This one? One SSD, and that's it? For a computer that will cost you $4000 for something with reasonable specs, this is just unacceptable. It also is a bitch to rack, requiring a third party kit.
The 2015 MacBook. WTF? These specs are good for a 2010 laptop, but with one expansion slot (which is used for power), and nothing else, this may be a great thing for a college students to write papers on, but this isn't a serious machine.
The iMac. It drives one screen OK... but most people run two or three heads these days, if only to play a game on one screen or VM while doing something on the other. Try that with an iMac, and you have a nice slideshow. Apple seems to use the absolute minimum it takes to drive a machine, GPU-wise.
Don't forget repairability. There isn't any.
Yes, Apple makes their money on the iPhone, but they really should not neglect their other product lines, and from what I've been seeing the past few years, the Mac offerings have been becoming more of toys at best, expensive paperweights at worst.
Maybe Apple just should get off their ass and make the old school Mac Pros, or just make toys and spin off the Mac line to another company that can focus on making a quality product.
False. Eons use exactly the same architecture as desktop CPUs, they just have additional support for (originally SMP), and more recently, NUMA. A 12 core Xeon is directly equivalent to a modern 4 core i7, just with 3 times as many cores.