Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?
Make a Mac that you can plug a GPU into.
Things are looking fatal for Mac VR developers. Oculus cut Mac support last year but even if it kept it up, Apple doesn’t sell hardware that can come even close to running it. Palmer Luckey but it bluntly.
“You can a buy $6,000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700 and it still doesn’t meet our recommended spec.”
Nothing from Apple’s hardware roadmap suggests that this will change anytime soon. Tim Cook said recently that VR, ‘has some interesting applications,’ but did not get specific. Historically, Mac has never given many fucks about high end graphics. They don’t want to make room for the industry standard card size. A single GTX 980 is thicker than 6 Mac Books stacked on top of each other.
My fear is that Apple is going to try and do it all. I’m willing to bet there is a high stress team in the basement of Apple working on an End to End VR solution but it could be years before it sees the light of day. Meanwhile, the entire VR development community and ecosystem is forming around the PC.
But there is hope…
A couple months ago the computer company Razer announced a new graphic product called Core. It’s essentially a box that holds whatever beast mode GPU you desire.
Core is a big deal. There have been GPU enclosures before but all of them have had some weird proprietary connection. It was recently confirmed that the Razer will support non-Razer laptops. The only requirement is a Thunderbolt 3 connection.
We don’t know enough of the hardware specs but the murmurs are promising. Apple is long overdue for a Mac Book Pro refresh. If it ships with Thunderbolt 3 and irons out driver issues, then this is looking like it could be a real solution.
Time is ticking.
There’s no getting out of this. The high end VR experiences in the pipeline to come out this year are awe inspiring. It’s games but it’s also creative apps and professional applications. They open a new door into human computer interaction and Windows is now, the only way there.
Apple is asleep at the wheel with VR. It may have its own headset in the works or some secret project but the near term developer community matters. If it can’t deliver a computer that meets the basic standards for a VR headset this year, its hard to imagine it ever recovering.
I can’t wait. After 15 years with Mac, I bought a PC earlier this year. Windows isn’t as bad as I remember it but I will sell it in a heartbeat given the opportunity.
Update. Looking grim but not completely hopeless. From the CTO of Oculus.
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