ok, first things first, alias is owned by sgi, so if they get bought by apple, apple pays sgi, not alias. second, sgi has dropped badly, why, cause of nt, it eventually turned out that you could build the same box sgi was selling but for 10 times less, so sgi stock dropped like hell, the only thing they have left for hardware is their supercomputers, onyx. the people who would like to buy them out for their hardware is sun microsystems. alias, however is doing great, beyond great. maya unlimited sells for 17,000 and more if you have multiple computers, tech supposrt as well costs thousands and you know what, nobody is complaining, they all pay, like my company, with no ill will at alias. now, it was said that if you optimized maya and max and all that on the mac to use the altivec and the g4s power it might be faster, wrong. flat out wrong actually. you'd have to program for vector based math and guess what, 3d doesn't use it much, not in the programming part. maya on the mac lacks tons of features, even the basic multiprocessing, go check alias's website, mac can't use dual processing with maya, not because of hardware, but the os, osx is like a hacked unix, so standard code doesn't work, why bad porting, cause it'd take a while, not to mention a ton of money to get programmers to convert the code and get everything working on a young and untested os. not being mean, just realistic. it wouldn't piss people off if mac went faster, companies would switch and move if it really could. but if you want to test after optimizers are set, well then they have to optimmize for p4s and amds cause maya isn't optimized for those either. max is built around the kernal of nt, you'd have to restructure the whole program, and to do that costs money, and for what? they wouldn't make enough money and it would not go faster. and for the person who said nvidia chips were out on the mac first is dead wrong, apple got in big trouble from nvidia for even trying to claim it, truth is apple claimed they had it before they really did, and had to take it off their site until feb5th, the pc release date, apple didn't have the geforce 4 untill end feb, sure, you could order it in jan, but you wouldn't get it till at lease end feb, early march, preorders don't count ok, if i had a pc, i could have had the geforce 4 in my hands almost a month before any mac user ever could. the second trick apple used was the geforce 4 mx in their boxes, it's actually, and you can look this up, a geforce 3 mx, not 4, the core is a 3 and ramdac is also 3, but they didn't want to realease old hardware so they called it a 4, if you buy a geforce 4 mx retail box, it knocks the pants off the one installed in the apple. so, to finish up, maya on the mac was made for design puposes, they only released the basic maya because it keeps it at a 7,000 dollar price range, high but affordable for design houses. it was never meant to be the full 3d package. hey man, i love maya on my powerbook, and i'd love it to be more optimized, but it's wishful thinking, apple will not buy alias, simple as that.
