Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell recently sat down with TechCrunch for an interview discussing the future of the Oculus Rift, where he said that while Mac support is something the company would like to implement, it's not currently in the works.
According to Mitchell, while Mac support is "near-and-dear" to his heart, Oculus is "just not quite there yet." Mac integration is, in fact, so far off that it's not even on the Oculus roadmap for the next six months.
"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," Mitchell tells me. "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."
Early versions of the Oculus Rift did work with some higher-end Mac machines, but during the product's development period, Oculus was forced to drop Mac support. Mac development was put on hold in order to focus on "delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience," on Windows machines with more robust hardware.
Last year, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey made headlines when he said the Oculus Rift wouldn't offer Mac support until Apple releases a "good computer." He said Oculus Rift support was ultimately "up to Apple," and that the company needed to "prioritize higher-end GPUs."
Hardware requirements for the Rift became less stringent in October thanks to software advancements and will now run on any machine equipped with an Nvidia 960 or greater, an Intel i3-6100 or greater, or an AMD FX4350 or greater. With the changes, some Macs, including the latest MacBook Pro, could potentially work with the Rift, but Oculus isn't yet prepared to delve into Mac development.
Starting today, Oculus is dropping the price of the Rift and Touch controllers by $100, dropping the price to $598 for both products, a much more affordable price point. Individually, the Rift is now priced at $499 and the Touch controllers are now priced at $99.
