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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."
It has been awhile since I have been impressed with the performance of apple hardware
If a high end Mac won't support it. You will need a higher end PC which will be beyond most people's budgets.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Unfortunately, the same can be said about general boneheaded behavior of top company officers.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Don't kid yourself, they are focused on selling overpriced hardware to maximise profits. No battery problems with a desktop mate. The article says it perfectly in that Macs are just not good enough.
You're sounding a bit like an Apple shill. It's a tad harsh to blame virtual reality companies for requiring fast GPUs. It is virtual reality after all. All that is being said here is that the top GPU that Apple provides isn't fast enough for it. No one's fault really. Apple's choice to select the GPUs they select, and I'm sure OR wouldl like to have support on as many systems as they can.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I can hear them typing away furiously on their Macbooks from here.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You know what, that's how I feel too.. but an awful lot of people in the market go for that user experience, and I'm long past blaming Apple for going for that market. I would never buy it, but a lot of people do.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I haven't seen a system crash since Windows XP myself, I suspect most Windows crashes these days are more due to cheap flaky hardware and drivers as opposed to the OS.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Apple tends to choose under powered systems because they protect users from short battery life.
In an imac or desktop computer?
They are protecting regular users from having a cord to a tower under their desk were all the high performance parts are, and giving them a laptop built into a screen instead.
Mac Pros cost a wild bundle because they are "workstations" with xeons and CAD certified graphics cards marketed to people with those specific needs or just too much money. In any case they are a great way to spend a LOT of money on all the wrong specs for an optimal gaming system.
You can get a good gaming computer that the oculus rift supports for $1500 if you buy the right parts. Apple just doesn't give you the right parts... at any price or in any configuration.
Are you sure you belong here on slashdot? A Mac Pro is worthless as a gaming machine. I have a top end top spec macbook pro, and it too is worthless for gaming. Not even remotely close to a good experience. Its better at other things if that makes you feel any better. However buying a mac pro then expecting to have it be useful for high end gaming and (VR) which easily doubles the demands is an error on behalf of the consumer not Oculus. Double screens with wide FOV at a nausea reducing fast refresh rate is very hardware demanding. The hardware capacity to do things like VR/Oculus are just now reaching scale to reach a first early adopter generation. I doubt you are the target audience judging from your lack of information, and unrequited outrage.
GPUs and CPUs keep getting faster and faster. It won't be long before phones come with better silicon than a PS4/Xbox One. Two refreshes of iMac or Macbook and they'll be good enough for VR. Luckey's right that there's no point doing anything before then of course.
Graham
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Right.. because hardly anyone gets serious work done on Windows PCs.. You're going a wee bit far on those comments. Also, Windows these days is pretty stable. The problem is that many people install it on flaky cheap hardware. The fact that it is their prerogative to do so is a good thing.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
no, apple is simply not interested in gamers.
They also don't make blade servers, managed switches, raid arrays
They are focused on the people who actually buy their products, not on the people will never buy a mac no matter what they build.
These people include engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, micro biologists, bioinformaticians , chemists, astronomers , etc etc etc etc
As it is now, Lucky is just another redneck at the corner gas, spitting his baccy on the woodturner and arguing with the others about "Ferds and Chivvies". If you don't want to release it for Mac, don't. Don't be a fucking asshole about it. Oops - too late.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
While I got a chuckle out of the burn against Apple, it does just seem in general like they aren't working on cross-platform support at all anymore.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
we 'have' to have apple macs at our uni because they are full of creatives. even though all they do is use the adobe suite which is exactly the same between platforms (ok, subsitute cmd for ctrl and you're good)
the base spec at academic is more in line with the lack of power. recently we bought the 5k 27" imacs at a base price of £1245 I think. overpriced but compared tro the arse fucking that dell indulges in with its 'partners', not shocking.
upgrades however make you spit coffee at the screen. that machine comes with 8gb of ram. an upgrade to 32gb is (academic pricing remember) £422. WTF? luckily those machines can have a memory upgrade. Crucial will charge £33 an 8gb module, so making the upgrade under £100
512gb ssd? to the man in the street, about £100 to buy. apple - £250 upgrade from their 1tb fusion drive.
and their fusion drives have gone from 128GB of ssd to 28GB,
microsoft always had the idea of a machine per desk. apple want to be an exclusive product.
Ummm - http://www.dell.com/us/p/alien...
Don't think there is too much that wont play.....
no they arent. CPU's and GPUs have not been getting faster and faster. Just more efficient. But the days of guaranteed CPU growth in terms of speed is long gone.
Bingo!!! Pretty tois for fanbois.
I busted a gut laughing when I found out they under clocked CPU/GPU's due to heating problems in laptops.
So you weren't even getting the advertised speed of the proc.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
They don't mention their own piece of hardware as being poorly priced (almost the same price as a PC capable of driving it) and that the applications are quite limited.
I've been an early adopter for Leap Motion. Never again. I'll just wait for Oculus/Vive V3, if they ever make it there.
The drivers are the OS by definition. You can't have it both ways where a web browser is part of the OS and a kernel level driver is not.
Also I still see a lot of crashes but then again I see a lot of computers and have a lot of people complain to me when they go wrong, so I don't hear anything from however many people who never see crashes.
WoW and minecraft are games too. I don't know what WoW needs now but it used to run on not very high end Macs.
That said, of course Oculus needs a serious amount of GPU grunt.
Typically when I tell the truth I get called a troll. Well, if being an Engineer, doing the testing and knowinf the facts makes me a troll, who am I to tell the Internet its wrong
Why do they sell Cadillacs to old people? Geezers crawling around town in your cars make them look ridiculous.
Have gnu, will travel.
High end bikes not ideal for snowboarding. News at 11.
bioinformaticians
What flavor is the company KoolAid this week? Purple?
How is it not a workstation? It's beefy and overpriced, that's pretty much the definition.
I've been using nothing but Macs around my house for many years, and I'm on a Mac Pro right now. I guess I'm what you might call a die-hard Mac user. However. . . I'm not going to fight reality on this one. I've already ordered a gaming PC with Windows to power a Vive. The Mac will continue to do everything else for me, but when it comes to games and VR, I knew it just didn't make good sense.
Mac users have griped for years and years about Apple never producing a reasonably specified mini-tower suitable for gaming. Sad fact is, Apple as a company has no gaming in their DNA or their corporate culture. Steve Jobs didn't get games, didn't like games, and his attitude filtered down through the ranks. To the extent that gaming is viable on the Mac today at all, it's almost entirely due to Valve and Steam, not Apple.
After years, decades perhaps, of people calling Apple computers "toys" we have someone complaining that Apple no longer makes a "toy" computer.
I remember in college someone telling me that while Macs were good for graphics they sucked for doing "real" math. This was at a time before 3D accelerator cards existed. I pointed out to him that graphics to a computer was nothing more than a series of mathematical computations, so I asked him how exactly a computer capable of such a feat of performing such complex computations was incapable of performing "real" math? He was struck silent.
Now I have someone telling me that while high end Macs might be good number crunchers they suck at graphics. Okay then, but what makes the Windows computers so good at graphics? It's not the OS. It's not the processor. The difference is the GPU, which is available as an add-on.
It took me a matter of minutes to find that people have been adding GPUs to Macs on a Thunderbolt port for years. I happened to click on a link that showed me that this same feat has been done on Windows computers as well. Running Windows on an Apple is a trivial feat so therefore I can only assume that Apple computers are fully capable of functioning with Oculus Rift hardware to those willing to go through the minor inconvenience of installing Windows on their computer and purchasing what is likely to be a video card that they'd have to buy anyway if they bought a computer that had Windows installed out of the box.
Sounds to me that the guy doesn't want to bother servicing Apple owners out of laziness more than anything.
Perhaps I missed something important here. I'm not much of a gamer and I don't follow the changes in hardware like I used to, my current job doesn't require me to recommend hardware purchases like previous jobs did.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The Mac Pro his dismissed because the "market is too small"
Hey, you know what else is really expensive and has a small market? The Rift.
If you think about it, targeting the Mac Pro would have been a perfect combo, that would have driven sales of BOTH the Rift and the Mac Pro. I might have even considered buying a Mac Pro to go with the Rift I'm getting, but Oculus has made it clear that's not going to happen soon so I've given up on the Rift for my own use much less development.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
no they arent. CPU's and GPUs have not been getting faster and faster. Just more efficient. But the days of guaranteed CPU growth in terms of speed is long gone.
Half true, but GPU's and CPU's are dedicating more space to specialized instruction sets. Meaning they're becoming more efficient because of higher clockspeeds and better extension support. They are getting faster though. Hell, ~18 years ago your GPU memory speed was 200Mhz at the very high end and GPU speeds were in the 150Mhz range. These days it's 1Ghz GPU speeds and 1500Mhz memory speeds. Same with CPUs, you're seeing more cores in the same die area as ~10 years ago where you had single cores. Saying that growth in terms of speed is gone, though is wrong.
Om, nomnomnom...
I have really powerful GPUs on my Linux desktop. Why doesn't OR support that? I think they are just making lame excuses for bloated inefficient software.
I rescued a Core 2 Duo out of a skip..... Dropped in a Core 2 quad, and a NVIDIA 750TI. This shite PC, now pumps out more GFLOPS than the highest end Apple you can buy today. Now, I like Macs, I am using one to write this comment, and I really dont want to fuck around with linux or sell my sole to the devil (microsoft).... But, for raw GPU power, macs have lost the race long ago....and it doesn't look like the management give a fuck anymore.
I think most Windows issues come from people installing malware and "toolbars" that eventually grind their systems to a halt.
1% of 10 million users on Steam - that's 100,000 people. Sounds like an important set of potential customers. (Source: peak of 11 million concurrent users logged in over the past 48 hours).
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
What's the definition of a workstation? Is there something special about them that I'm not aware of?
A workstation is a machine you do work on. In the case of the rift it needs to have decent graphics and no apple has decent graphics.
I bought a basic 2015 Macbook pro because people claim it is easy to use. Well its not, constantly struggling with drivers for printers, settings that won't stick unless you set them in the right order or set them multiple times, features that just break with updates without massive troubleshooting. Seriously disappointed. Speaking GPU wise, it turns into an oven if you use Chrome to open some tabs with videos instead of using Safari. It plays HOTS but again heats up and fans go nuts.
I'm about to unleash a harsh opinion. I worked for Apple from 1995 until 2001.
It's over honestly. I own no current Apple equipment, and I'm not interested in any. (more below)
Steve Jobs was the savior of the company to be sure- but he also pulled Apple out of the computer market in a big way. During my time you could by a Mac that would run circles around anything you could obtain on a PC. Heck going back to NuBus there was astounding graphics capability on Macs. When the company rolled out the G3/G4/G5 processors- they were stepping all over Intel based machines in big ways. And you could get aftermarket GPUs which were the equals of their PC counterparts.
Then came the start of what I consider to be the "dumbing down" of these computers. One of the first things I noticed was that Apple was making machines that were a generation behind in memory architecture. Then they moved off of RISC and starting using Intel chips. Then the logic boards were reportedly "Asus compatible".
What has happened since the glory days? Well- they stopped focusing on computing. It appears to be an afterthought. It's iPods... iPhones.... iWatches. The Mac is essentially a PC architecture with an alternative operating system. Anyone who knows that buys a PC, unless they think that Mac OS has something really compelling.
It is sad that this is happening. Apple had a compelling reason to be in the marketplace, and many firsts ion new and killer technology. Now I'm looking at artsy fartsy foo foo machines with no guts. I don't mind foo foo design- I might even like it. But I've got 8 x86 cores, watercooled,16gb of RAM, and a GTX 980 sitting next to me which cost me $1400.00 to build. And you could buy the machine assembled for not much more.
Rift isn't going to support VR on the Mac. And I certainly do not blame them. The platform is not not being maintained well or growing. From my perspective Apple is sucking the marrow out of the Macintosh until the bone is dry.
If in fact VR is the "next killer app" on the desktop- Apple appears to have not prepared for it at all.
So once in a while I pull out my old G3/604 machines. Load up Rhapsody Dev release from 1998- and enjoy the wave of nostalgia. Then I go back to my PC and do some work, with multiple virtual machines, running multiple OS's, with a movie playing on my third monitor....
This is of course my opinion. Apple isn't in the computer market anymore....
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
... hipster ...
The1960s called, they want their vocabulary back...
No, but I was doing stereoscopic 3D at 800x600x60Hz on a 32MB TNT2 back when it was the heavy hitter GPU.
There's no REASON to force that resolution or framerate as a requirement. None. Remember the first Oculus? THAT WAS RUNNING HALF LIFE 2. It didn't NEED some heavy GPU back then.
It's pure bullshit, all around.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Son, I played with stereoscopic VR back when the headsets were so big they had to be mounted to hardware solid enough to handle 1970s-era guitar amplifiers.
Screendoor effect? DECREASE PIXEL SIZE or change lenses.
Motion Sickness? STILL HAPPENS AT HIGHER REFRESH RANGES! Until you've got your inner ears' weights matching up with what your eyes see, you will ALWAYS get motion sickness and disorientation.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I might also add that, sort of, Moore's Law is still in effect. The law is about transistor count and not about a guarantee of faster speed (which it can be). And while I've seen folks argue against the transistor count aspect, they seem to not be paying attention very well. What has gone up, even if not so much in the machines you and I are buying, is the core count.
I think it was just a couple of weeks ago when AMD submitted a patch that indicated that they're going for up to 32 cores. Unfortunately, many (most?) things aren't actually optimized to take advantage of multiple cores and hyper-threading. Most people don't compile their own stuff and throw in the switch to optimize for however many cores they have and that's only valuable if the code itself will benefit from it - or so I'm given to understand.
At any rate, computers are (as you say) getting faster. They're already fast enough and we, the plebeians, aren't going to be spending that much money on our desktops. I've not crunched the numbers - I've not even looked at them, but they're constantly improving and adding more cores. Those cores are fitting in the same amount of space. That means that Moore's Law (not as tasty as Cole's Law) is still probably fairly accurate.
We're just not noticing 'cause we're not buying 32 core CPUs and the improvements, at this scale, seem a bit trivial. I was babbling about that in an earlier post. For the most part, and for the average user, the state of the compute hardware is Good Enough©. It's more than Good Enough© now and has been for quite some time. Just because it's good enough and just because we're not noticing it doesn't mean that it's not getting faster.
I usually run benchmarks on new hardware. Those numbers are still going up. Even though I refresh often, the numbers are still going up. I have an addiction and refresh more often than is necessary (at least a couple of times a year - probably more often but I'm not going to admit to anything) and the numbers continue to go up or, at least, can go up if I want them to. I really don't know why I bother refreshing so often. I don't even bother with the cutting edge any more. I haven't even bought the most recent generation of GPUs in a long time. I don't need it. I do fine with a $200 GPU. Hell, I do fine with on-board graphics.
But yes, you're very much right. The speeds and capabilities (which is something more than speed) are still increasing. I just think we're old enough to remember the seemingly larger jumps from the heady days of 1990 to 2010. Man, those were exciting times. They're desensitized us and conditioned us to expect more and to be less able to see it unless they're really drastic. Find someone who's never used a PC newer than one built in 2005 and give them a computer built in 2015. They'll probably explain the difference to us better than we can explain it to ourselves.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I never hear the fan on my my macbook. It's quiet as a mouse and it's one of the things I love about it. The fan fires up only when I play War Thunder or another graphics intense game to play and then sometimes I don't hear it because I put on headphones to immerse myself. My guess is that Apple doesn't put high-end overclocked GPUs in Mac's to keep the heat and noise levels down. It's just a guess though.
windows-users are 20% more busy with OS/computer interaction than mac-users
I use both and I'm equally productive on both. I boot the system, launch my applications, and work. Thing is, my PC boots in 3 seconds (literally) while my newer (by 3 months considering release dates; the PC is actually newer to me) Mac takes 15, my PC starts my applications faster (the same applications), and my PC has a 4k display, compared to my Mac's 2.8k. Mind you, I'm also comparing 2 laptops, here. My PC has dial M.2 SSDs and a spinning disk for bulk storage, a high-end GPU (970M with 6GB GDDR5, not the highest-end, but better than the M370X with 2GB GDDR5 you can get in a MacBook Pro; don't take my word for it though), is .1mm thinner and .33lb lighter, and is user-serviceable (which came in handy when I dropped it, over-flexed the display bezel, and destroyed the display cable in the process; it was a $24 part, shipped, and about 20min to replace -- mind you it would have taken longer had I not already familiarized myself with the inside of the machine, maybe an hour in total).
Don't get me wrong, I love the direction Steve jobs had planned out for OS X, and was a huge fan of Snow Leopard. I skipped Lion and went straight to Mountain Lion, then Mavericks, then Yosemite, and I refuse to touch El Capitan. the hardware is great for what it is; it's just not what I need it to be and the OS hasn't really been since Mavericks came out. But for my daily work? For actually being productive? Both systems work just fine, the PC just does it faster and with more screen real-estate. In either case, once I've got my applications open, the OS stays out of my way... until it's time to install updates, then OS X nags me (and doesn't remind me to install them when I tell it to; it always waits 2 or 3 days, instead of reminding me the next day as the menu option states, and seems to know right when I've started being productive. Windows nags about updates, as well, but it usually doesn't start until my work day is through and I can actually deal with it.
In all, I've spent more time fighting with OSX this year than Windows, which is sad since I've only used the MacBook Pro (aside from waking it weekly to sync some files and install updates) for the 2 weeks I was waiting for the display cable for my PC to ship; and it's not lack of familiarity, I'd been using a Mac full-time for 6 years, right up until I bought this PC in mid-November. And yes, I'm also counting the trouble I had reinstalling Win 10 on a Lenovo tablet I got a couple weeks ago when a BIOS update wiped out the keys for the encrypted (from the factory, so no recovery key was available for me to have possibly recorded and used) drive and toasted all my data. Well, not all my data, I had gotten as far as installing Firefox, Chrome, and driver updates; the fault lies with Lenovo (or whoever refurbishes systems for them) on that one, though, not Windows. But, again, and in fairness, I'm still counting that in my "time spent fighting with Windows this year" for the sake of this comparison.
As for the PC having needed a repair, yeah, so? I dropped it. The Mac would have failed in some non-user-repairable way had it been dropped in the same manner and landed the same (very unlucky) way. And it still would have been down for two weeks, as well; the difference is that I would have been paying Apple an arm and a leg for the repair and, if the Genius taking it in for repair was having a bad day, been without my data for that time, as they would insist on having the drive left in place. Assuming the drive made its way back to me without having been wiped (or.. at all).
Computers are tools and I strongly encourage everyone to use whatever tools they work best with. When I was in school, that was a Windows PC because that was what was expected of me; for 5 years after, I stuck
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I don't know what WoW needs now
A gaming GPU. The Mac Pro ships with a workstation GPU, optimized for a completely different set of operations than those used to render a frame of WoW, so it does so poorly.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
This "lets tell everyone how bad Apple is" has been going on for as long as there has been an Apple computer. For years the punch line was "Apple is about to go out of business". Now it is Apple sucks at game.
Uh, Apple is not just here, it is on and off the most successful company in the history of the world. You know why? Because PEOPLE LIKE APPLE PRODUCTS AND SUPPORT. Geeks don't need or want it - fine. But this may come as a surprise to a few here, but Apple is not and never has been in business to make geeks happy. They are in business to make money, and they are very good at that.
Tell me again how wonderful Samsung phones are, and then lets compare profitability - you see that is why corporations exist, not so you can shove a memory card in your phone, but to make a profit. Apple makes money - because the average person likes their product and their support.
Not everyone likes Apple - DUH, does everyone like Ford or Chevy? DUH. To constantly for decades bring up these lame dog whistles about how Apple won't do this, or my home built is better is just proving you do not have a clue.
Bicycles make lousy snowboards, I think we should all boycott Canondale.
Don't son me, when I started in simulation (before this fancy VR) this was still considered high technology. You can do as much pixel trickery as you like you're still pushing a lot of pixels at a high refresh rate. Obviously we still have the issue of motion sickness but research from current batch of front-runners is showing that higher refresh rates can alleviate effects over lower more standard rates. If you seriously think the only differences between your TNT2 and modern graphics used in today's VR are panels built into a visor and a motion tracker then go back to your neck-breaking ceiling-mounted CRT helmet crap that can barely achieve standard-VGA. Resolution matters and pumping out pixels is expensive.
Now get off my lawn.
I gotta say, I just ran the SteamVR Performance test and was shocked at how poorly my A10 APU scored using their metrics. For fuck sakes this thing clamps down 1920x1080 @ 60 FPS with AA and AF in plenty of games (including "recent" Valve games), and when it doesn't then going to 1280x720 (which is fine) usually brings back the 60 FPS with AA and AF still on.
..
So I wonder if the issue isn't something imposed by inappropriate graphics API's (DX / OGL)
"His name was James Damore."
Last I saw of WoW it was deliberately cartoony and did not need a top end GPU to be played so it did not matter if the GPU was optimized for a completely different set of operations. Not much memory for textures? Who cares when solid color predominates?
Somewhere down the line Big Fruit is going to release their own VR thingie and show everyone how it's done. Existing VR execs are going to mock it as a toy while Apple goes ahead to redefine a market and make margins of 20% while doing so.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You're totally right. They are a great company. They just aren't a computer company anymore.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Agreed, they haven't been just a computer company for a long time.
If I can run WoW on an EeePC 701, something sound really wrong with your hardware/OS.
Are you sure it didn't work on Windows on the same hardware?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I'm a self-confessed Mac guy, but Palmer Luckey is exactly right. Apple has become too involved in creating fashion statements like the watch. The Mac Pro, the Mini, and to some extent the MacBook Pro are all being neglected. As TFA mentions, Apple doesn't want to equip its devices with the best GPUs for some reason.
I'll admit I havent played WoW in literally forever (as in.. never) and got my wife to stop years ago, so I haven't seen it on a whike, but it was pretty textur-rich last time I saw her play. Cartoonish, yes, but not all solids and blocks. It also uses shaders, lots and lots of shaders, which workstation cards tend to have fewer of.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"go back to your neck-breaking ceiling-mounted CRT helmet crap that can barely achieve standard-VGA. Resolution matters and pumping out pixels is expensive."
You must still be a child, or lived in a cave, because we had 2048x1536x2 CRT jobs like 15 years ago. That's well higher than VGA resolution.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Sorry, didn't RTFA because I'd rather not give flame bait more page views.
"...Apple just doesn't prioritize high-end GPUs..." ~ https://youtu.be/ijyBMpm2bqQ What about this? http://bit.ly/1OPiOba
Geeks don't need or want it - fine. But this may come as a surprise to a few here, but Apple is not and never has been in business to make geeks happy.
That is completely untrue. Apple, like SUN, always was a company for geeks. That started to turn slightly after 2004 or so, and hence there are so many complaints about Apple.
Quite shortly after Macs became successful we had SmallTalk, Lisp etc. on Macs, an Apple Unix called A/UX and a cut down version of it as a "cygwin like" environment called "MPW" for "MacApp" development. A unix like environment for C++ and Pascal programming in a "virtual machine", well, see "cygwin" not a real VM with make files etc.
Macs offered EVERYTHING, esoteric programming languages, object oriented frameworks, relatively low cost development environments for C++ and Pascal, unix "integration" or alternatively "their own unix" and third party alternatives like "MachTen".
The first graphical internet browsers, running Gopher, obviously, ran on Macs. HTTP and HTML where developed on: a Mac.
Then somewhere came HyperCard, AppleScript, now "Automator" ...
But then: Steve Jobs openly proclaimed: "We will make Mac Os X the best platform for Java!" And then silently the support for Java became worse and worse. It is still ok ... but well, instead of Swift, we could have a much deeper involvement into Java from Apples side. (All my Mac software, I write is written in Java ... and 20 years ago it was written in Think C/Symantec C++)
Yes, you might consider "Java Programmers" not geeks ... however most geeks I know left C++ behind long ago. And obviously non of them is working on windows, otherwise they would not be geeks.
Right now Mac OS X goes downhill because it goes the windows way: ... just straight forward "I install something new" works out of the box ... all named 'Untitled 1' to '25') Now, I like to "deactivate" cloud sharing. Friendly as Mac Os X is, I get the warning: if you deactivate cloud sharing all files in the cloud get removed from this computer HEEEEELLLLLLOOOO????? WTF? Sorry, my language. But WTF???? what has cloud storage to do with my hard disk? I have now to manually back up the relevant files to somewhere and then I can deactivate the cloud storage that was deactivated from the start!!
a) UI not simplified to the max, but to the most ridicules way
b) Configuration options you need all the time "hidden somewhere"
c) random failures, misbehaviors and glitches, just like windows, and no one knows how to fix it
d) stupid things like: oh, cloud sharing is active (I switched it off when I got this Mac. no idea how it got switched on But as it is asking for the password all the time, I figured something is wrong. And wow: TextEdit.app has managed to store 25 files in the cloud
e) Same with iTunes and Music on my iPad etc. I disable "synching" and it say: oki, now we delete everything form the iPad! Hello? What? You simply should not synch anymore, that is allllllll!!!! Keep the rest as it is!!!!
Oh, and I saw a Mac running Mac OS X 10.x a few days ago ... I nearly vomited into the show room ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Maybe in name, like they claimed Unix support. But, I just verified, again, that even after all this time... you cannot fork() (without exec) when it cannot guarantee you that the libraries you are using are safe from async-signal-safe. The POSIX standard demands that your code can be forked, even in a signal handler at any time. I could go test how pthreads are handled again, but I very much imagine it will be the same BS.
Yeah, I wrote stuff in Java 1.1 that was fully compatible with Sun JRE 1.3, MS Java 1.1. Used awt as a the graphical interface and on OS X, it would just randomly replace certain awt widgets with Aqua widgets and cause different parts to flash in a way to induce seizures. The 'better' support that was offered by Apple was access to an additional set of APIs to write Aqua natively which was ridiculous, particularly because it meant writing custom code only for OS X and I couldn't figure out how to even to get that working at the time if I was willing to maintain two different UIs without distributing two different binaries.
Such stereotyping. I guess I can't be a geek under your definition since I'm platform agnostic which in turn means I use Windows depending on circumstances.
I've used OS X for a very long time and the UI has always been somewhat limited...
Typically, the 'hidden' configuration options in Windows aren't hidden, they're just in the group policy editor that few people seem to be aware of. There is a high degree of customization that exists in Windows that a lot of people aren't very familiar with apparently.
I don't know what you're speaking of. I've pretty much accurately tracked down every failure/misbehaviour/glitch that I encounter more than three times ever, even to go as far as debugging runtime environments, an operating system subsystem or the kernel it self. A few times I've even diagnosed a problem where people were complaining a graphics driver was terrible was crashing the system was actually an AMD processor claiming it supported certain instruction sets but then stubbed some of them causing an issue that should have never occurred to begin with. But I have to say this, on Windows, the tools for debugging issues are excellent. Event viewer, core dumps, crash dumps and the debugging tools are pretty top notch...
That's not really a stupid thing, a stupid thing is like... When you buy the Mac, you setup Wake on Lan on the thing, then Apple decides in their next OS update, that for your hardware (because they didn't do it for all of course), the EFI will intentionally power down the Ethernet connector, regardless of the power setting in Energy saving when it's turned off, preventing you from using WOL despite it being advertised as a feature. No, it's not just the matter of resetting the SMC either.
Or how about the fact that I/O scheduling after all these years is still broken and blocking. Dare you use a HDD instead of a SDD (which typically happens when you want something more than 250GB), applications are blocked. Meanwhile Windows and Linux on the same hardware are more responsive than the hardware 'd
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I would mod you up but I can't use points in a thread I've posted in.
Excellent post.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Mac user here. Amen.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Dare you use a HDD instead of a SDD (which typically happens when you want something more than 250GB), applications are blocked.
No they are not, how should that be even possible on a unix system?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I meant to say 'SSD'.
X Is Not Unix
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I've been using Apple for years, and for a long time they did ship with decent graphics cards. This allowed me to also run games on the various Macs I have.
They used to have things like the NV 8600GT, 9600GT, ATI 6770, GTX 680, GTX 780, al at times when these were very decent graphics cards, also for gaming.
I've been playing most of my games on Apple hardware since about 2007.
But their new offerings with only Iris (Pro) are just useless. Only the 27" iMac has a decent GPU, and even that isn't too great.
I just want a sub-$2000 Mac with a decent to good GPU. I've been able to buy that from Apple for the past 8-9 years, but today I'm looking at building a Hackintosh with a GTX 970 because Apple is no longer selling anything that. I am very disappointed in Apple.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I don't care ;D "XNU as in X is not Unix" is just a name. Bottom line it is Unix.
For me it is Unix, like for most others. It is based on FreeBSD, so by any definition it is Unix.
I understand you meant SSD. But how should copying large files stop applications is beyond me.
It does not, and can't on a preemptive operation system.
However on old Macs/Powerbooks the ATA interface is shitty, no idea if it lacks DMA or what the problem is, and there GUI gets a bit sluggish if you do back ground file operations.
However it is more a problem with CDs/DVDs than HD/SSD.
If you experience particular problems it might be a certain model? Or you have a bad HD - board connection?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I make music, photography and email. I and the millions like me, could give a shit about 3Dtv or VR. We don't even have 4K broadcast and hardware is "old" if it's not 8k. Marketing has you all blinded. How about we get great infrastructure so power doesn't go out in a windstorm. How about water doesn't kill our kids. How about you get over yourself Oculus.
don't confuse their mobile business for their desktop one. to a very good approximation nobody uses OS X. iirc its something like 2-3% of the market share.
the things that make apple the bulk of their money, and which they have done successfully are the mobile devices - ipods, iphones and ipads. outside of a few niche areas where they are a standard platform (design type stuff mainly) they are not the first choice.
sadly most people i know with macbooks never boot up OS X - the ones who do are mainly developers who use it because Apple force them to if they want to target the iOS or OS X platforms. the rest buy them too look pretty and have the apple branding because macbooks have some prestige about them - but they nuke them and put windows on them because for anything much beyond web browsing, e-mails and light office work and a few niche tools OS X is hard to use for getting your job done or the other most common uses for home machines beyond web browsing, like games, videos and music.
The GPU market has diversified. My main workhorse is a 27" 2010 iMac with a GPU upgrade to the AMD 6970M 1GB (the stock GPU died from thermal cracks in the solder balls)
This is a very capable machine. A game machine it is not, but it does acceptably well on the games I care about. So we are back to subjective merit.
What matters is that I can perform almost all practical tasks on this 6 year old machine and it doesn't break a sweat. I run simulations of hardware, VM tasks, etc. It runs Knight's tour passes faster than a Dell with a more recent i7 Stepping with far less heat, and fan noise generation. I could drop another $2K and build a comparable game PC and get nothing more than a video processor with only 25% more CPU capability and a GPU that sucks at computation, or complex rendering but excels at spitting out grainy game frames at 120 FPS.
You 'hard core gamers' can get stuffed. So little of the market cares for your preferences that it is a joke. You want to compare a real workhorse to a one trick pony.... go ahead. The actual performance difference is a matter of noise generated by shitty software, not by hardware on either platform.
How about you actually try getting work done on that POS gamer build.... I think you'll find that you can't keep it running as reliably and supplying answers to real problems for you as quickly as a 2010 27" Mac. And if I need more horses... that POS Dell I referred to earlier makes a decent aux processor.... 4 more i7 cores running as a general purpose server, or Windows VM...
I'm all for goading Apple into building better performing hardware, but I want to be clear....the 6 year old hardware I run kicks most of what you masturbate over into the ditch, for practical uses.
Get off my fucking lawn.
PS: I had to cancel a lot of well laid moderations to post this, so double fuck you for making me feel like I had to make a statement here.
My belief is that Unix is a series of standards, particularly those that Unix certification certifies against. Such as, the Unix certification OS X is certified contains POSIX standards that can do things like fork() without exec() just fine, something OS X can't (amusingly the Windows Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications can actually do this fine). Sure, OS X passed it's certification, but I really just think that the certification never fully tested functionality like forking, Posix threading proper, because anyone that has any reasonable experience with it will tell you the OS X implementation is broken. Those are just 'critical' things I think that shouldn't be broken on an 'Unix'.
Here is a video of a large file transaction while OS X does it's classic beach ball thing, this is another application that tries to read the drive at the same time on a HDD. The moment the file operation complete, the other application unblocks. Looks like a blocking I/O operation to me. I can replicate this behavior easily by using large chunks with dd copying large block sizes of /dev/zero and doing a 'time cat' on another file (just did the command just now):
Aron:~ ash$ cat soup.txt > /dev/null
real 1m1.467s
This was the latest and beefiest MBP you could get in 2013, the last model that had a real optical drive, ethernet ports etc. OS X identifies it as a 'MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2012)'. But you know what, I have reproduced the exact same behavior on a mid-2015 model when a friend of mine decided to upgrade his 256GB SSD to a 1TB HDD, so I highly doubt it's an issue restricted to 'old models'.
I have been able to reproduce this on every Mac I've ever handled that had a HDD, going back as far back as Puma. That's a lot of hardware to be bad. Fresh, old installs, it doesn't matter. I had a very large thread on the Apple support forums for a time before it 'disappeared' (I would link it to you otherwise) that had far more detail than I really care to write up and test again. But, with 1TB SSD drives becoming more popular, I guess Apple's solution will be long term, "just use an SSD.", since the issue isn't really noticeable on one.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
My believe is, that running a bash script with out any changes on a system makes it a unix system.
When you want to nitpick about fork versus exec versus both I suggest to take another course in 'portable programming for unix systems in C"
My Mac has a a 'unix like' file system.
My Mac has a standard command set installed like any othe Unix system.
My Mac runs for me just like Sparcs or the Linux boxes I work on. Or AIX for that matter.
It does utterly not run like a windows system.
For everything that is relevant in real live, Mac Os X is Unix. Just like Solaris, AIX or Ultrix. But if you want to nitpick .. go ahead. Old school Unix always needed fork + excec. I have to admit I was not even aware that modern unixes don't need/want that. And: it is irrelevant. Only C programmers doing kernel level programming need to know that. For that Mr. Richy invented macros, defines and ifdefs in C.
I can copy 100ds of GB on my Macs just fine, except for the expected slow down because of other disk access the Mac itself just runs fine. And what exactly is the difference beween a copy of 10GB of data from disk to disk verus a 10GB download? The amount of data written to the target is the same! How should that slow down you machine!?!?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So any operating system that offers 'bash' by default is a unix system? That's honestly a bit ridiculous.
It's not a 'nitpick' it's standardisation that Unix certifications point to is the standard for 'Unix'.
Wasn't something I argued.
I couldn't careless if I had to get the userland from a 3rd party. The problem is the kernel is not following Unix standards. The fact the userland applications have been patched (and yes, some of them have been) for specific nuances in OS X's implementation is ridiculous.
I have no idea how those are working out for you. Can't say I've used Solaris on a Sparc in a decade now and I haven't used AIX at a company since I last ported a bunch of software off it over a decade ago to x86 systems (code compiled and worked properly on the popular BSDs, Linux, Solaris, Windows Services for Unix at the time - Department was having a hard time making OS decisions, so I went the portable route). In short my experience here is not recent any more.
I have no idea how that works out for you either. But I am using still mainstream supported Windows operating systems (8.1, 2012 R2, 10), I'm afraid your description is too vague and as such, it eludes distinctly to know what you mean exactly by what is good or bad about them.
And yet, software LyX (originally released in 1995), despite following the POSIX standards in this matter never needed to make a workaround in Unix and Unix-like platforms until OS X.
There is a reason why Apple (after I reported the issue years ago) decided to break fcntl's F_PREALLOCATE (ported applications appear to work without causing the system to hang!) and then force you use alternatives like posix_fallocate/FSAllocateFork to actually do what you ask it to do (where the issue wasn't actually solved). There is a reason why so many apps in macports, darwinports etc. segfault and while sometimes it was due to violating POSIX standards, more often it wasn't and instead a behaviour that was violating the POSIX standards. I spent a lot of time debugging this crap.
I'm talking about writing blocks that apparently block I/O and you're going on about something that is likely not exhibiting that behaviour. It's not simply just copying/downloading a file, it's to do with writing large blocks to disk that then block other I/O disk operations (which in turn causes those applications to lock up until the request is fulfilled), regardless of how small they are which is very noticeable on HDDs.
Honestly, your response to me comes off as a deflection at this point.
Kernel breakage against the specifications that build up Unix certification for years on end for what is considered 'fundamental' features of Unix is ridiculous, you can't and shouldn't even try to defend that as OS X being Unix under that guise.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The problem is the kernel is not following Unix standards.
No, that is not the problem.
That is your problem.
As long as an OS behaves like Unix for all people who actually use that OS: it is Unix.
If you want to argue from a POSIX C programmer point of view, you should have made that ten posts earlier clear.
Sorry, we hear your screems, but we are only Users! I never ever will program towards an OS on such a low level. For that we have a standard C linrary ... no idea why you don't use it.
Mac OS X is based in FreeBSD and as far as I can tell: this is Unix, too.
POSIX is by no means a definition for being Unix, or Windows NT and laters would ne Unix, too.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No, it a general problem, because writing POSIX compliant code should work properly on anything that has a Unix certification that references a specific POSIX standard for a requirement of compliance.
I'd argue that's Unix-like if it 'behaves like', but "is not Unix".
fork() is fork(). If fork() is broken, it doesn't matter if I am a programmer or a user at that point. If I am using something that expects to meet Unix certifications that include POSIX standards that require this, it's going to be broken.
I'm a user.
fork() is mapped into the GNU standard C library (and many other Unix standard c libraries, including the one provided by installing xcode)... It's not particularly any more low level than using the C library?
By the way, I have Python scripts that use Python's natively provided fork function too. It's not even strictly used by low-level languages only.
The fact I spent enough time debugging the issue to identify the problem wasn't even the C library at fault doesn't make me stop being a user.
No... Mac OS X is based on a Mach micro kernel that has been extensively modified to become a hybrid kernel, there is a BSD subsystem that runs under the kernel to map Mach tasks, security policies and provide POSIX compatible APIs to the userland (this is pretty identical to how the Windows POSIX subsystem works) and then there are some BSD userland utilities that are linked against Apple's libc.
FreeBSD interestingly doesn't have the issues OS X does.
Unless Unix certification that allows you to call your product 'Unix' explicitly mentions which POSIX standards should be implemented, and in this case, the particular referenced POSIX standard mentions fork() behavior.
I respect you angel'o'sphere, but I genuinely do not agree OS X can be called a genuine Unix system if it doesn't meet the certification requirements (even if it holds one by passing a few select tests). I can turn a blind eye to a specific version, or a one off bug. But, I haven't even scratched the surface with issues. I only chose fork() because it's one of the simplest to explain, there are other issues I've seen with pthreads, unix sockets etc. It's a mess, I can call it Unix-like, but certainly not Unix.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
but I genuinely do not agree OS X can be called a genuine Unix system if it doesn't meet the certification requirements
I jumped on the discussion because of the "user experience".
That you look at the topic from a system (low level C programmer) perspective regarding POSIX was not clear from the beginning, and that this is your majour argument I only realized after several posts.
From my point of view a system that behaves "like Unix" ... and that includes OS X and Linux, is Unix. From your point of view obviously not :D
However I understand your standpoint and agree with your reasoning. Your first post regarding this topic was perhaps a bit misleading or I simply did not grasp what you wanted to express.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.