[jballanc]

Does no one remember the Eee PC? The whole "netbook" craze? It was at least 2-3 years that each quarterly earnings call some analyst would ask, like clockwork, why Apple was letting the netbook market get away from them.

Officially, the answer that Apple repeatedly gave was that they "weren't impressed with any of the current offerings" and that they would not "rush to market with a product we're not proud of" (not exact quotes, but probably close enough). The unspoken truth of the matter was that the margins on existing netbooks were razor thin. When Apple finally did introduce the MacBook Air, it was more powerful and with better economics than anything else on the market by far.

The Eee PC was discontinued in 2013. The MacBook Air (and now MacBook) are still going strong today. Of course, this shouldn't be a surprise, Apple did the exact same thing with the MP3 player.

I suspect that something similar is going on with VR (and a whole host of other technologies). Until the first products hit the market and Apple has a sense for how the price/features/demand equation balances out, they'll be more than happy to sit on the sidelines. So no, I don't think there is a skunkworks team fashioning an end-to-end solution. This isn't about Apple not wanting to accommodate third party parts/devices. It's about building something that is good and makes money.

[codybrown]

There's a big difference between Apple making their own VR hardware and shipping a computer with a fast enough GPU to run other VR hardware (or ability to have a fast enough GPU via something like the Razer Core).

The latter would be necessary for Apple in the growing VR ecosystem but it could be great for many other areas that require an intensive GPU. And that's the argument of the piece.

[jballanc]

Apple's target customer doesn't need a graphics card to do anything more demanding than video editing. It's been probably at least 7 years since you could get a Mac with anything like a top-of-the-line graphics card. Are there potential customers that Apple is not grabbing by not having a high-end graphics option? Sure!

But Apple doesn't care...

The thing about Apple is that, unlike almost all of their competitors, they really don't care about a "Mac in every home". They'd much rather target specific slices of the market where they can excel and make a lot of money (think BMW, not Ford).

[dogma1138]

Apple's target customers tarted to switch to PC for video editing because editing 4K> even on an Mac Pro is a nightmare because the GPU is weak as hell.

Rendering also takes considerably longer because the GPU performance is fairly limited.