Oculus Rift won’t be launching on Mac

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Oculus Rift
Rift won't be launching on Mac anytime soon.
Photo: Oculus

Oculus finally revealed the recommend specs for the Rift system scheduled to launch in early 2016. The good news is that minimum hardware specs will only cost you about $800. The bad news is the company has decided to stop developing for the Mac and focus entirely on PC for the launch.

Atman Binstock, Chief Architect at Oculus, wrote on the company’s blog that Rift will require Windows 7 SP1 or newer to run:

“Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.”

It probably won’t even be possible to run Oculus Rift on your MacBook via BootCamp running Windows 7, as the company also specified you’ll need 2 USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI 1.3 video output. Here are the other hardware requirements.

  • NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
  • Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
  • 8GB+ RAM

Oculus estimates it’d currently cost about $800 to build a rig to supoprt Rift, but the company is guaranteeing the recommended spec sheet will stay the same over the lifetime of Rift. However long that is.

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