Oculus CEO: We’ll build for Apple if it ever releases a ‘good computer’

The Verge ^ | 2/4/2016 | By Sam Byford

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has poured water on the idea of his Rift virtual reality headset supporting the Mac by saying that Apple doesn't make any computers powerful enough to run it.

"That is up to Apple and if they ever release a good computer we will do it," Luckey tells ShackNews when asked about Mac support. "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs. 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 spec."

Apple's high-end Mac Pro computers come with dual discrete GPUs, but they're designed for professional applications rather than gaming. Advanced VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive require a gaming-focused graphics processor as capable as an Nvidia GTX 970 or above to meet the manufacturers' recommendations.

"If they prioritize higher-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day, we’d love to support Mac," Luckey continued. "But right now, there’s just not a single machine out there that supports it. So even if we can support it on the software side, there's just no audience of people that can run the vast majority of software out there."

Apple CEO Tim Cook has expressed an interest in VR, saying on the company's most recent earnings call that "I don't think it's a niche. It's really cool and has some interesting applications." For the foreseeable future, though, Apple's Mac platform won't be able to play host to the most advanced implementations.

[CodeToad]

Totally agree. C# is a sweet language to use and the debuggers Microsoft produces have been the best since the 1980’s.

Until Xcode 4, released a few years ago, Apple didn’t even have a multiple document interface (MDI). MDI, a 1980’s user interface technique that Apple claims to have invented (they didn’t, but they like to claim they did, as usual for Apple), wasn’t even part of XCode until 2012.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Come down in price? For $1000 you can get a dell XPS8900.

[Swordmaker]

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has poured water on the idea of his Rift virtual reality headset supporting the Mac by saying that Apple doesn't make any computers powerful enough to run it.

Strange, the mobile iPhone 6s graphic processor can move more than double retina screen pixel counts around at 51.2 Frames per second. At the distance one would be looking at in a virtual reality headset, it doesn't take that many pixels to be a retina display. That is far faster than what one would need for virtual reality. It's slower than the MacBook's frame rate with retina screen. Something doesn't compute with these claims. — PING!

Oculus Developer says Apple computers
not powerful enough for VR? BS!
Ping!

The latest Apple/Mac/iOS Pings can be found by searching Keyword "ApplePingList" on FreeRepublic's Search.

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Moving, actually (copying), a computer moves nothing is only the last action in the graphics chain. You need to calculate what the pixels will be. Render all the polygons, fill and shade.

That is what graphics cards do.

[TXnMA]

We are finally in the process of retiring my wife's ca 2002 -- MacBook that I bought, used --- sight unseen -- from another FReeper.

We're moving all her files onto her own partition on my (ca 2005) 17" MacBook Pro.

I'm now on my new 15" Retina MacBook Pro -- CNC machined from three hefty slabs of aluminum. With its solid state drives, I fully expect it to be the last computer I ever buy.

As successor to the 17", we looked at one of the new MacBooks for my wife. Even though it is also machined from slabs of aluminum, it is clearly thinner overall than the Macbook Air -- and since it uses SSD, It will probably outlive her, as well.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Tell us again, how buying crap and junking it after couple of years is a "better value"...

[Swordmaker]

Mac OS pretty much only runs on Macs, a direct correlation of OS to hardware; hence Mac hardware is just over 6% of the market.

No, the last time the Mac was at 6% was in 2011. Last year the worldwide sales of Apple Macs are now 7.6%, and in the US, sales are 14.8% and both are growing faster than the overall PC market while Windows PCs are slipping every quarter, and the worldwide installed base is over 9% and US installed base is approaching 20%.

Gartner's Preliminary Worldwide PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 3Q15 (Thousands of Units)

Gartner's Preliminary U.S. PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 3Q15 (Thousands of Units)

But even Gartner's figure of 5.603 million Macs was wrong. . . because Apple actually sold 5.709 million Macs, 106,000 more (Source—Apple Quarterly Report 4th Fiscal Quarter 2015), which makes the figure ~7.75%.

[TXnMA]

Forgot to mention that that new, all aluminum MacBook sells for $999 at Best Buy...

[Swordmaker]

Sounds like a fragile Apple ecosystem since PC/Windows systems have all kinds of hardware out there that works just fine.

This claim by Apple that nothing PC/Windows works flies in the face of hundreds of millions of users that use them every day without problems.

Enjoy your circle jerk of Strawman arguments about things nobody has said except you Apple Hate Brigade members saying them to each other, back and forth, round and round, congratulating yourselves on your one-up-man-ship on how much you hate Apple. Great Job!

[Swordmaker]

By engineering standards iOS is considered a pig. It is why Apple was sued for claiming so much memory in iOS devices only for the user to have little left after iOS was installed. The lawsuit claimed Apple mislead customers by making memory size claims when the memory was consumed by Apple’s iOS.

HOW MUCH OF AN IDIOT ARE YOU, CODETOAD??? Do you really think you can smear Apple over this? Or Do you believe this lie. I've called you a liar before, and now you prove it in spades, again!

That IDIOTIC LAWSUIT WAS DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE just weeks after the idiots who filed it served it on Apple and the judge got a look at the totally stupid claims, claims which YOU are taking at face value and running with, screaming

"LOOK, LOOK, LOOK, iOS is a PIG!"—CodeToad, dancing and prancing with glee, and lying through his teeth.

The class action lawsuit's complaint was for using industry standard usage of memory listing of capacity, asshat. EVERY SMART PHONE ON THE MARKET USED THE SAME MEMORY DESIGNATION OF MEMORY CAPACITY and STILL DOES!

iOS takes up FAR less memory space on Apple devices than Android on the competition's devices. For example, the iPhone 5S left 13.1 GB of user space available after installing iOS 8.1 and all default apps, but the Google Nexus left only 10.6 GB of user space with Android 5.1 Lollipop and its default apps installed. Yet YOU are screeching about iOS being a "PIG?" In a pig's eye it is.

They later tried to modify their lawsuit because it didn't use the EXACT number of actual DECIMAL bytes on the drives. . . again, not the industry accepted standard, resurrecting an obscure mathematical means of designating capacity and also trying to resurrect a long settled lawsuit over GIGAbytes and GIBIbytes. The judge SANCTIONED the attorneys involved.

[Mark17]

Keep up the good work bro.

[Swordmaker]

I’ve never seen that and I have 30+ years at this. Developer HATE the Mac because of how locked down and brain damaged it is. The dev environment has been nothing but hassles for developers.

What a lie. Macs are not locked down at all. Every Mac is just one click away from a full function command line terminal. . . with the full power of a POSIX compliant TradeMarked UNIX™ capable of running more software than any Windows machine. You just do not know how to use them.

Macs are big hassles for developers, how? Only in your delusional world:

TechCrunch Developers Conference 2015

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

What? Mr. Copy Paste get’s nasty. Too bad you don’t understand the technology, spending too much time at Hillary Fundraisers?

[Swordmaker]

What? Mr. Copy Paste get’s nasty. Too bad you don’t understand the technology, spending too much time at Hillary Fundraisers?

Copy Paste? Where? Exactly what was copy and pasted about a link to an article about the JUDGE DISMISSING WITH PREJUDICE the case CodeToad was chortling about to you? You are both know nothing Apple Hate Brigade asshatters who are totally ignorant of what you've been posting about. I have merely corrected the facts, showing you up for what you both are. Liars. . . just as your claim about me being "Mr. Copy Paste", but on the other hand, if what's copy and pasted happens to show you up to be the liars you are, what's wrong with that? Just as the copy and paste exemplar photo a couple of posts above from the TechCrunch software developer's conference demonstrates CodeToad's lie about developers not choosing Macs.

[Swordmaker]

Moving, actually (copying), a computer moves nothing is only the last action in the graphics chain. You need to calculate what the pixels will be. Render all the polygons, fill and shade.

That is what graphics cards do.

What makes you think there isn't a graphics processor in the iPhone 6s? There is. You do not know what you are talking about. That's exactly what the dedicated graphics processor in the iPhone handles, polygons, shading, filling, etc, very rapidly. Graphic cards and processors are not just limited to desktops and laptop computers, you obviously DON'T know. . . or you wouldn't be making such fatuously idiotic statements as you just did. You just revealed your total ignorance of what the benchmarks are and what they do.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

For sure, but they get hot, that’s the primary challenge. Modern high end graphics processors are nearly super computers in their own right.

haven’t heard the fan on my 5S come on yet.

[Sir_Ed]

He’s speaking of the GPU, not the CPU.

I’ve got as top of the line Mac Pro and its video card is less capable than a lot of PC’s.

It does drive two 30” monitors, though...one of them a 4k Dell monitor.

But speed at games, nah...

Ed

[jimtorr]

From what little I know of gaming code, it seems like most of the game is shifted from the CPU over to the GPU (video card?). My take is that gamers can upgrade the video card easier than the CPU.

[MaxFlint]

Forgot to mention that that new, all aluminum MacBook sells for $999 at Best Buy...

For that money I can buy three Windows surface notebooks.

[TXnMA]

"For that money I can buy three Windows surface notebooks."

And -- ten years from now -- I'll send you an e-mail from this same Mac and ask if any of the three are still working...

[MaxFlint]

And -- ten years from now -- I'll send you an e-mail from this same Mac and ask if any of the three are still working...

I have a desktop that's over ten years old that cost less than 500 bucks and it still works.