Oculus' Palmer Luckey will consider Mac support if Apple 'ever releases a good computer'
The ball is in your court now, Apple.
We spoke to Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey recently during an Xbox press event where we took the opportunity to ask him some questions regarding the future of his company, and his product, the Oculus Rift.
One question we were dying to ask is he sees a future for the Oculus Rift with Apple computers. When asked if there would ever be Mac support for the Rift, Palmer responds by saying “That is up to Apple. If they ever release a good computer, we will do it.”
Palmer continues to clarify what he meant by that blunt statement by saying “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 specs. So if they prioritize higher-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day, we’d love to support Mac. But right now, there’s just not a single machine out there that supports it.”
Check out our full interview with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey below:
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Shacknews
replyDaniel Perez posted a new article, Oculus' Palmer Luckey will consider Mac support if Apple 'ever releases a good computer'
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Nocturnal-lemur-themed.
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Arrrr
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His complete statement is fine, its the headline that's clickbait.
Capable GPUs have a significantly higher TDP than what you can put into a small portable enclosure. 165W for the GTX 970 is no joke.
Apple's entire focus is on reducing enclosure size and improving portability. That tiny logic board in the new Macbook is what'll happen to the Macbook Pro once Intel can get that level of performance into their CPUs at that size.
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If you read his further explanation on the comment in the link, he's just saying that Apple simply doesn't sell a model of computer that *can* meet the Rift's specs on GPU alone (regardless of everything else).
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Holy crow, "the ball is in your court apple"?
I really hope shacknews isn't getting click-desperate. Before I read the explanation part, I still read his line as "when apple releases a good computer **for VR.**"
Of course, once the clickbait title had its effect, we still had to separate his statement into two separate quotes so people would still read the "blunt" part first.
Inciting drama where it didn't even need to exist.-
Well considering Apple is reportedly working on their own VR headset, the ball really is in their court to step up the power.
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BeatsVR
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Good job on the interview Greg, you handled Palmer really well. Man Palmer comes off as being disrespectful to anyone that interviews him, from what I have seen.
"when your buying a phone for $600 your not getting nearly as much stuff" seriously, ok? Does anyone actually believe that? I am really surprised Shack doesn't dog pile him for that comment.-
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for all you know Valve is subsidizing the price so HTC can sell at cost
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They're selling at cost.
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I am a huge Apple fan, but I completely agree that Apple makes computers that do not provide a quality gaming experience. It was a funny quote and definitely worth the headline.
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So your issue is what you read into it, not what he actually said?
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We didn't take it out of context.
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They haven't had much of a relationship with NVIDIA for a few years. Their focus is on battery life and form factor. This leads to them choosing discrete Intel graphics or inexpensive GPUs from AMD.
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The AMD thing is new though. I have the previous rMBP that has Nvidia and it handles many 3D games competently. Not balls out like a properly equipped gaming PC of course but it gets the job done in a pinch.
That said, supposedly Blizzard is working on their Mac games to support Metal so that might be interesting if it pans out.
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High end dGPUs are counter to portability and battery life.
The logic board in the new Macbook is smaller than an iPhone. That's the future of the Macbook Pro. It'll take a couple of years but Intel's laptop i7s will work on logic boards that size, ditto Thunderbolt 3 and all the other fancy stuff coming down the way. Dedicated GPUs are on the way out for them. It'll be on Intel to do better with their IGPs.-
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The GPU might look good on paper, but it's not really that great for actual gaming.
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their customers don't care
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until mac makes their own VR suited setup, that is correct. the under the hood stuff doesn't matter in the least. all that matters is the external aesthetics and the DPI of the monitor. looks sharp on the digital screen, looks sharp on the brushed aluminum... voila. that's all folks care about. that, and port locations.
Mac will monetize this wisely. They are vertically oriented as fuck and won't be using anyone else's.... anything for this. People will happily buy the MacVR-Pro or whatever they call it and it will cost double, amirite? trolololol-
any VR effort will be focused on iOS. OSX will get as much support as necessary to placate existing users. The future is iOS.
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Nah, not really. What they have Ina Mac Pro is plenty for video rendering. No one is doing 3D work on a Mac and that's mostly offline rendering anyway.
Besides, from what I've seen, macs are used by producers almost exclusively. Everyone else is using pcs running either Windows or Linux.
Not to say Macs don't get used for editing, just not in such a dominant way.-
Well I would also think that once you get to the editing phase the heavy lifting has been done. I mean, the $35 Raspberry Pi 1 can pull off 1080p video with 5.1 sound because the SoC was designed for things like the Roku. Flat video has been a solved problem for a while now, seems like.
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Actual editing and subsequent rendering still needs some horsepower to be fast (you wouldn't do that on a Raspberry Pi. What he Pi has is good for decoding one stream, not much more than that) but it's not like 3D stuff.
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Gaming is not a big concern for Mac users.
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Ok like others here I was going to write this guy off as a douche nozzle until I read further.
That said, could he problem be in part that this entire VR thing is just a little ahead of itself? I mean the Rift has taken for-fuck-ever to come out and it's $600 and requires a beefy, fairly-specific machine, and it's considered the cheap option. Vive looks to be more advanced and it's even more expensive. And once you get to HoloLens (which is AR and not VR I know) you get to oh-fuck-you dollars.
Maybe it is just that Apple's focus is in a different direction than what VR needs right now and that might change over time and they can handle it at some point. But maybe VR is a barely-pulling-it-off thing at the moment so this has less to do with a specific vendor and more that their product only works when you have all the right elements in place and on a platform like the PC where you can come up with the right combo of things it's possible but on a platform like Mac where there's a low-double-digit number of combos you can't make it work yet.-
there're reasonable $99 options from Oculus and that's part of why the Rift aimed higher
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What a doucheknob. So I guess a computer is only "good" if it can work with your product.
