Oculus Rift wants to support the Mac, but not in the near future

Mac gamers who are keenly awaiting the arrival of support for the Oculus Rift have some rather mixed news this morning: on one hand, support is promised to be coming, but the downside is it won’t be here any time soon.

This news comes courtesy of a TechCrunch interview with Nate Mitchell, who is Head of Rift at Oculus (and a co-founder of the firm). The interviewer spotted Nate’s MacBook Pro in the corner of the room, prompting a question about Mac support.

Mitchell replied that: “It’s something near and dear to my heart, we’re just not there quite yet.”

He added: “We do want to do OS X (macOS) support for Rift, it’s not something that’s currently on the roadmap for – I can even say – the next six months. We will continue to revisit it, the real challenge for us is just how much we invest into that space because it does require a lot of our time and energy to get it right and to deliver a great experience.”

Clearly then, this is something Oculus wants to happen, which is obviously a good thing for Mac owners. However, by the sounds of it, we’re looking at next year rather than 2017 for support to be realized – if indeed it comes to fruition at all (depending on what happens when the issue is ‘revisited’).

GPU grunt

At least we know for sure that macOS isn’t something which is being ignored by Oculus. A year ago, Palmer Luckey said that Mac support will come when Apple puts beefier GPUs in its machines, or as the rather blunt quote that was bandied about went: “If they [Apple] ever release a good computer, we will do it.”

You may have also seen that last month, macOS got its first taste of VR in the form of an app for the Oculus Rift (albeit the developer version of the headset, not the commercial release). Cindori’s VR Desktop app allows the user to experience their Mac desktop as (up to) three giant screens in multi-monitor fashion.

Interestingly, Cindori also said that official HTC Vive support for the Mac is coming in the first half of this year. Fingers crossed that this prediction is on the money.

• We’ve rounded up the best Macs to buy in 2017

March 02, 2017 at 05:20PM
Darren Allan