SL vs System Requirements

[cykarushb]

Linden Labs has a listed system requirements page for SecondLife, at least for the standard viewers. You can find that here: https://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements/

As a general synopsis of what im going to be talking about in this thread, i have all the hardware to test the overall performance and playability of the "minimum" and "recommended" system requirements that LL has set for the game. This is going to be comprised of 4 sections, the first being the system requirements list and why it is entirely irrelevant and out of date, the second is the performance of minimum, the third will be about recommended hardware, and the last will be a personal opinion on an updated system requirements list. This is only going to be talking about the Windows standard LL viewer. I dont want to go out and buy a bunch of expensive mac hardware and performance is generally going to be the same on Linux but without so much CPU overhead.

The System Requirements List

LL's system requirements page is below:

What this is recommending for the non-tech literate people out there is a minimum of Windows 7 32 bit, "cpu with SSE2 support", 1gb of ram, a 1024x768 resolution screen and a Nvidia GeForce 6600. Windows 7 is obviously getting pretty old now although its still a very capable operating system and i still use it on my main computer. The problem is the "32 bit", 32 bit operating systems have only been around to provide modern functionality to older hardware, originally during the production of Windows Vista Microsoft was actually considering entirely omitting the 32 bit operating system and forcing 64 bit as a standard, but the fear would be that instead of upgrading hardware, nobody would upgrade their OS, which would likely be true. So 32 bit operating systems remained into the age of 64 bit computer hardware, basically just as an option if you had 32 bit hardware or only had 4gb or less of ram and wouldnt need the benefits of 64 bit. Thats the major limitation of 32 bit OS's, this is a bit more extensive to explain so if you want to learn why that is, read this article on it: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2013751/why-cant-32-bit-windows-access-4gb-of-ram.html

The reason why i think this is false and overall in need of an update is because its referencing hardware that pretty much nobody owns anymore, or the hardware just isnt going to be utilized. A fine example of this is the recommended GTX 295, which is a dual-gpu graphics card running in SLI that secondlife wont utilize because SL wont use SLI. The sheer range of hardware here is also kind of strange to all lump into "recommended", such as the 9600 GT which was at one point a midrange card, not incapable of decent performance but far from high end, lumped in with the HD 5970 which is a few years newer and is in an entire different league than the 9600gt.

If you are not a tech savvy person you may not know what they are referencing here but this is something you would have to notify consumers of if it were still maybe 2005? The list of "not compatible" cards are mainly things from the late 90's like the Nvidia Riva TNT2 or just the brands used like S3 which are old PCI diamond multimedia cards from the mid 90's. The "have not been tested" cards include Quadros, which are just workstation versions of regular graphics cards, ive done some work with them on SL and they work fine, its a matter of driver differences. Same goes for FireGL and FireMV, although those are much more outdated lines and some of the cards may not run SL, but not due to their branding, simply because theyre incapable of it at a hardware level.

Also Intel GMA 945 wont run SL, if it manages to start at all from a dependency standpoint its probably going to instantly crash or give you worse performance than what youre about to see.

This page needs to be updated and fixed, because this is just a bunch of irrelevant and outdated information. As i stated above, the end of this will be my personal suggestions on hardware for SL and what the systems requirement page could look like.

So heres our completed system.

The GPU is a 6600, i got a 6600 GT, its essentially the same thing, the card came out in August of 2004, in about 6 days here it will be 14 years old, it has 128mb of video memory. The GT variant is the more powerful version but when it comes down to this, the difference in performance in games of the era wouldve been a matter of 5-8fps, its not going to give us much of an impact. That 128mb of video memory is the major limitation and its going to kill performance.

The ram is just 1gb of 667mhz DDR2.

The CPU was a weird choice, it lists "CPU with SSE2 support, including Intel Pentium 4, Pentium M, Core or Atom, AMD Athlon 64 or later.". That basically means any processor, i had to choose something appropriate that would be representative of a current low end processor. I chose the Pentium E6500k because it sounded fun. Its similar performance wise to a Core2Duo E8400. Its a bog standard LGA 775 dual core, except that it was designed originally for overclocking, which we wont be doing in this thread. It will also work for the recommended testing as it fits the bill. The only reason i went with this and not a Pentium 4 was that i kinda knew from the start that a 775 Pentium 4 and a 6600 GT with 1gb of ram would be so abysmal at this game it would probably lead me to commit sepukku with the cpu heatsink.

Ignore the matrox card, thats there for other purposes and is disabled. Windows 7 32 bit installed smoothly and besides some RAM related performance problems the system otherwise runs pretty smoothly, youtube is extremely laggy over 720p but regular old web browsing was fine. I tested it briefly with 4gb of ram installed and it was just as usable as any other desktop for basic tasks.

But it does not run SL right, it installed just fine and then got hung up on every single step. It seriously took about 40 minutes for the game to install and give me a login screen.

And when you finally get in, youre greeted with the default graphics options it chooses which are a bit weird. I changed these around a bit, i turned pretty much everything to the minimum and turned basic shaders on to offload some of the rendering to the GPU instead of the CPU (ive talked about this in another thread when i tested the Radeon HD 4870x2). That gave me a bit of better performance but it didnt last long. I disabled transparent water, bump mapping and shiny, and lowered non-impostor avatars to 1, disabled particles and reduced every mesh slider to low.

And this is the end result in any place that isnt social island or an empty flat piece of land.

This was taken at NCI Kuula, note the FPS counter in the top right, the high 80's are from the black loading screen, the 0 is what i got. In fact i got less than 0, it took about 20-30 seconds for anything on the screen to change, i did not get through typing that message you see in the chat box because it simply took to long and eventually SL crashed. Nothing loaded correctly, menus wouldnt even open, i moused over the icon for the application and got that little view window of SL and it got stuck there. This caused so much general system lag that i couldnt even close SL, i couldnt open the task manager, i couldnt ALT-F4 my way out of there, it practically hard locked my entire computer other than the mouse and i had to flip the power switch.

My general idea here for minimum is that this is entirely unplayable. It will technically start, it will also technically start and run on hardware older than SL is, so im not sure what to think about this, this should not be considered a minimum because minimum would at least imply playable, stable, maybe not max settings or high res, maybe not 60fps. But whatever accomplishes 30fps at lower settings i think would be considered playable and the minimum. Thats a difficult task for SL because different places will give you different framerates, and due to the CPU heavy nature of the game you might not even get 30fps on mid tier hardware.

But whatever this is, no, this aint even close to playable. This is worse than if it just crashed on startup, because this prolongs your suffering.

 

Coming later today in the reserved post below, the "recommended" system requirements, 64 bit windows 7, same processor, 4gb of ram, gtx 275 and probably a higher resolution.

 

 

 

Edited August 6, 2018 by cykarushb

[cykarushb]

Reserving this section for recommended requirements and updated system requirements suggestions.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 hours ago, cykarushb said:

Reserving this section for recommended requirements and updated system requirements suggestions.

Will you be including suggested minimum network bandwidth/speed?

*Edit* I wonder why they don't recommend SSD? It makes a world of difference.

Edited August 6, 2018 by Love Zhaoying

[cykarushb]

4 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Will you be including suggested minimum network bandwidth/speed?

*Edit* I wonder why they don't recommend SSD? It makes a world of difference.

I would think the network speed requirements are fine as is, I've played on sub 1mbps up/down before, things take a while to load sometimes but once they do the game runs smooth anyway.

An SSD would help but only with load times, which aren't really a necessity, I think I would include it under recommended settings to have one or at least a note to keep the cache on it.

recommended testing is coming later today 

[cykarushb]

Well i was too slow and cant edit that previous post, so heres part 2

Recommended Requirements

Linden Labs recommends essentially the same thing with a preference to a 64 bit operating system, any processor that meets minimum requirements but is over 2ghz in clock speed, and a variety of graphics cards shown above. I decided to go with the GTX 275 since it was the most "midrange" option on the list, with some cards being extremely old and some being either unable to be properly utilized like the GTX 295 or were more difficult to track down. I stuck with Windows 7 32 bit because there really was no reason to use 64 bit when the recommended settings suggest 4gb of ram, i have 8 installed in the system and due to 32 bit limitations 3.8gb will be available.

The secondary reason for sticking with 32 bit is that this kind of project was originally inspired from a discussion on the 32 bit viewer and why it even exists. (definitely not because i lost my USB stick with 64 bit windows 7 on it)

The processor is the same, the rest of the system is overall the same, all thats changed is we've gone from 1gb to 4(8)gb of ram and swaped the 6600GT for a GTX 275. This is what Linden Labs recommends for the game.

As before, the Matrox card is not being utilized. Ignore the GPU temperatures, the card is not being utilized, its just a speccy error.

With the GTX 275 we can now play ABOVE 1024x768 and play in full HD 1080p.

Starting off on Social Island 5 with a bunch of people around, using the settings SL automatically chose for the system configuration, we're getting single digit framerates but its not stuttering. Note that the game suggested Atmospheric shaders and ALM, which it can run without problems even on 896mb of video memory, but its less than ideal for framerate.

Dropping those settings down and tweaking some others allows for a very playable 15fps, and note that this is with a LOT of people around, there were a solid 8-12 people coming in and out of the entrance at SI5. Removing ALM is a bit of a sacrifice here but its a necessity to keep the framerate up, its mainly shadows that kill it. Atmospheric shaders are a requirement for the anti aliasing you see here and it doesnt affect framerate much at all, neither does water reflections or transparent water. With everything but basic Shaders to the minimum the framerate only goes up to around 20, which is definitely just a whole system hardware bottleneck showing.

Overall i would call this very playable, though it shouldnt be the recommended hardware to play SL. This is a system from 2009, it is incredibly outdated. Maybe this wouldve been really great for SL in 2009 but its been 9 years since the Pentium E6500k and GTX 275 were even a thing. You can get drastically better performance for a very low price from modern day low end hardware. A current generation Pentium or i3 paired with a GT 1030 or GTX 1050 would be more than enough to run this game at very high settings and get great performance out of it. I would imagine something like that or the hardware equivalents (GT 1030 = GTX 750 = GTX 650ti = GTX 560ti = GTX 470 and so on...) would be a much better option for "recommended settings". Because i would look at this system with the E6500k and the 275 and call this pretty much the minimum to get an experience that isnt:

-Super laggy

-At a low Framerate

-Stuttery or unstable

-Only runs at lower resolutions

Because anything less than this after a certain point is pretty much unplayable, a GTX 260 will do it for sure, but a GTS 250/240 is going to struggle graphically, an 8800 GTX is going to be on the borderline of even playable and the 6600GT shows that theres a point where you've gone too far back. As well this game is very CPU bound and plain and simple, the E6500k isnt cutting it. Its clearly playable, i would list later Core2 processors as the minimum but a more recent i series processor would give much better performance. 1gb of ram should not be a minimum, yes it starts, no its not playable.

My suggestions for the system requirements page look like so:

The reasoning for each is as such, for the processor any processor with SSE2 wont cut it, Single core pentium 4's will not play SL. It will start, it will not be playable in any way, i have done that testing before with a socket 478 system running a 2.2ghz Pentium 4 from 2002, it clearly ran, it ran unusably bad. Camera lag, generally low framerates, couldnt handle the game at all. So i suggest a minimum of 6000/8000 series Core2duo and Core2quad processors and their AMD equivalents in the x2 and x3 athlons. These processors are kinda the bare minimum to get decent performance out of the game. theyre common in many older systems and theyre still fairly capable today. As ive stated above, the Pentium E6500k im showing you today is about on par with a Core2duo E8400, a very common older dual core processor that many POS and office systems are using. The Celeron J and AM1 athlon 5350 are other baselines for low end SoC systems that many people have, or that they can easily compare to. These processors are as well about at the minimum before you run into serious CPU problems.

The minimum ram goes up to 2gb, theres just no way 1gb is enough, it wont do it. Screen resolution stays the same since it doesnt really matter but 800x600 the UI is extremely cluttered.

The minimum GPUs change to the GTX 200 and 400 series. GTX is specified because as i said the GTS and GT cards probably wont be able to run the game well, if at all. The GTX 260 being the new minimum, the GTX 460 likely being the more common minimum. Very capable cards but for SL's graphics demands theyre about at the point where you can run in 720p or 1080p at around medium settings to get a low but playable FPS. Or low settings in 720p to get about 30fps. The AMD/ATI equivalents are just the nearest performance generations to each, with the HD 5850 being similar to a GTX 470. Intel HD 4000 becomes the oldest integrated graphics to be used as minimum, i believe 3000 is supported by LL but the performance is terrible, HD 4000 will provide a playable albeit not great experience.

Recommended also sees some changes, processors are more specific with Sandy Bridge (second gen) intel i series processors being recommended for users. The single thread performance of the sandy bridge i3/5/7 lineup will provide a great experience for SL and anything newer will only prove to be better. First gen i series can definitely do it, but i wouldnt consider it recommended. Ram stays at 4gb since even the 64 bit viewer doesnt really use more than 2.5gb of ram maxed out. Recommended resolution becomes 720p for minimal UI clutter. The graphics cards change to The nvidia GTX 650ti and higher in the 600 series, and GTX 750 and higher in the 700 series. Cards like the 680, 780, 780ti and newer are omitted since any cards with a bigger number than those listed will play the game at higher settings to get good framerates. A user can look at the 770 and see they have even the midrange GTX 950 or GT 1030 and know their card will perform well with the game, since the 1030 is about on par with a 750. This is designed to make less tech literate users who cant compare hardware well, understand and get a rough idea of what their system will do with SL. 500 series is omitted since it is between the listed minimum and recommended, indicating it will give ok performance. once again the AMD graphics cards are just the nearest performance equivalents, with the higher end 7000 series and midrange R9 series listed. Anything above those or between can be interpreted the same as the nvidia cards.

Note the message "updated drivers required" is gone, because you do not need the newest drivers to just play the game. In fact with this 275 i was using drivers from 2010 with the card because the newest ones didnt support Windows 7 32 bit. Its an unnecessary piece of information to give people, the people who would run into graphical driver problems arent really going to know that they have graphical driver problems and will ask people about it anyway.

 

And that about wraps up my rant. To tl;dr everything thats gone on in this thread:

-The current minimum requirements are unplayable and should not be considered the minimum to play the game

-The system requirements page in general is out of date, full of useless information and needs to be reworked

-The recommended requirements are definitely playable but are considered the minimum in 2018 for this games performance

 

And before someone goes "but this is playable for me and i run weaker hardware, i have XYZ, just because you have better hardware and play this game at higher settings doesnt mean a lower tier is worse overall". Youre wrong, just because im used to my GTX 970 and i5 4570 blasting through SL at max settings in 1440p doesnt mean im looking at the performance of a GTX 275 and pentium from 2009 and going "wow this is trash". It legitimately is trash, in comparison to what other games would consider playable recommended settings, SL's recommended end performance is about the same as most other games minimum end performance.

"SL isnt a game" SL is a game, its also not a game, it depends how you play, in the end it works about the same as any other videogame just with a lot more unoptimized content.

'You need more video ram/video ram needs to be listed" that 275 has 896mb of video memory and i used to run this game on a Quadro FX 4600 with 768mb just fine, it causes texture problems at long distance but its not going to cause framerate problems. I would suggest 1-2gb of video  memory for SL, 4gb+ if you visit a lot of high texture intensive places or play in 1440p/4k resolution.

"you didnt use the 64 bit viewer, the performance is much better" unless SL were to need more than 3.8gb of ram, there was no benefit to the 64 bit viewer here, in fact using the 32 bit viewer and a 32 bit OS probably benefited performance a bit here due to the reduced CPU and memory overhead

 

Please ask questions below, i can test specific hardware or run certain scenarios and settings if you would like to see them. Youre more than welcome to question my personal choices and opinions on the minimum and recommended hardware.

Sidetracking, my "minimum" system for SL would look like this: Core2Quad Q6600, 4gb of DDR2, GTX 550ti, playing in 1080p or 720p. An optiplex 780 with a Q6600 and 4gb of ram would cost you like 50$ tops, a 550ti would be another 50$ tops, and a PSU upgrade if the base system doesnt have a 6 pin would be maybe 40$. In total 140$ maximum for a system that would play SL just fine, not great, but far from bad, and leave a little headroom for upgrades though really it would be a more economical option to spend the money on something like a newer base machine and a temporary GPU before upgrading the GPU. i.e. an Optiplex 790 with an i7 2700 and 8gb of ddr3 for 140$, and then spending another 120-160$ later on a low profile GT 1030 or GTX 1050 to add to the system, which would be a significantly more powerful option for less than 300$.

A recommended system would be basically your very boring i5 + GT 750ti box from a few years back. A haswell i5 such as an i5 4460, 8gb of ddr3 and any GPU above the 750ti would run any sim in SL at higher settings in 1080p with no problems whatsoever. It was a configuration i used for years and im still using something similar today and its easily playing SL maxed out.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

With the end of Windows 7 support looming, I think this deserves another look and a bump since after January no one should be running Windows older than 10.

The minimum requirements are a soup sandwich of junk that's not just slow, it's a mess of incompatible nonsense. First off there's ATI. Seriously? The only people who should be using ATI labeled cards are retro computing masochists. Driver support for the 9000 series ended with Vista. You can't install the latest drivers for any supported OS because they never existed. I'm pretty sure this means is Windows will install the standard VGA or basic video driver and SL won't run at all.

Nvidia support for the 6000 series cards with Windows 8 (no 8.1 drivers), so once Windows 7 support ends, that's it. Current drivers for Windows still getting updates don't exist. SL is effectively incompatible with anything older than the 8000 series on Windows 10.

I am convinced the Mac requirements were drawn up as a joke. Good thing you didn't spend any money on a Mac to test them because the requirements are a bunch of nonsense that doesn't even exist. I expect SL on the Mac will be history when Apple gets around to nerfing OpenGL.

[Alyona Su]

2 hours ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

I expect SL on the Mac will be history when Apple gets around to nerfing OpenGL.

The doom and gloom predictions for anything Mac-related, including Apple itself, have been going for far longer than SL has even existed. Why always the dire predictions, people? As though you know something super-secret that even Apple (or in the case of SL, Linden Lab) does not know.

More of these predictions, please; they are of high entertainment value!

[Lyssa Greymoon]

24 minutes ago, Alyona Su said:

As though you know something super-secret that even Apple (or in the case of SL, Linden Lab) does not know.

Apple depreciating OpenGL isn't a secret, everyone knows about it. Well, almost everyone. 

[Alyona Su]

35 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

Apple depreciating OpenGL isn't a secret, everyone knows about it. Well, almost everyone. 

Yes, it was announced more than a year ago, so how is that doom-and-gloom? It hasn't happened, yet. If you're proclaiming little faith in Linden Lab coming up with a solution, then say what you mean and mean what you say. LOL

[Qie Niangao]

6 hours ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

I think this deserves another look and a bump

Amazing how in the year since this thread started those old requirements came back into fashion and now everybody's buying machines with those ancient configurations.

Imagine if the world worked that way.

I wonder what it takes to update those requirements. Maybe the last time that page was updated there were torches and pitchforks; best not touch it again.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I wonder what it takes to update those requirements.

The password that Unpaid Intern Linden told them was taped to the 9800GT Mac Edition box just before he left.

[Dann Vale]

It would great to know the relative importance of CPU to GPU, RAM speed, etc.  My budget is not tight, but I don't want to throw money at top-level components that won't make that big a difference.  I'd rather look at 30fps with ultra settings on a 1440 screen than high fps with lower graphic settings.

There is a lot of information available about the performance of popular games on various computers and components.  Does anyone know which common games SL behaves most like? 

[Alwin Alcott]

3 hours ago, Dann Vale said:

  Does anyone know which common games SL behaves most like? 

simply ... none. SL isn't build as a common game.

[Qwestor Janus]

4 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

simply ... none. SL isn't build as a common game.

The hardware not an expert on the gameplay. For a comfortable game on ultra settings in the resolution of Full HD on sims with a large number of objects and avatars, 4 gigabytes of RAM is not enough. A minimum of 8 gigabytes is required. But under the same conditions on sims, processors from the "new" minimum system requirements by Cykarushb have not will required and 50% of their full capacity.

[Coffee Pancake]

System ram is not the game changer you think it might be .. there is a min amount, obviously, but then adding more and more wont help.

For windows 10 .. 4GB is sufficient (especially if paired with an SSD) - you wont want to multitask, but it runs fine.

9 hours ago, Dann Vale said:

It would great to know the relative importance of CPU to GPU, RAM speed, etc.  My budget is not tight, but I don't want to throw money at top-level components that won't make that big a difference.  I'd rather look at 30fps with ultra settings on a 1440 screen than high fps with lower graphic settings.

There is a lot of information available about the performance of popular games on various computers and components.  Does anyone know which common games SL behaves most like? 

It doesn't. They don't make them like SL .. on purpose.

CPU speed is the biggest factor. SL does not scale across multiple cores so raw Ghz and IPS matter. Single core benchmarks are your friend.

SL can be very IO bound, so fast ram (usual advice applies  just get 16GB and call it done). Use an nvme for primary disk (and put your SL cache on it)

Any recent GPU will be able to keep up. I would say buy the part you want to play other games with and don't worry about SL. Historically Nvidia tends to mean an easier life with less driver issues something xx60/70/80 .. Straight line CPU speed wont be going up any time soon, so you can get a lower GPU and aim to upgrade it for games as you go .. if you do play other games my advice at the low end would be a non-super 2060rtx, nice long supported life ahead and more than enough grunt to run everything else very well.

 

[Dann Vale]

Thank you for the helpful info and advice, CoffeeDujour.

[cykarushb]

It's interesting that this thread got revived. There's a lot of stuff I should realistically do to update this to 2019 standards and include some more modern hardware.

But I don't play SL much anymore, most of my computer use turned into web browsing and playing Halo 1, so I mainly use my Thinkpad Z61t from 2006 these days.

I guess as a bit of info I could drop in that applies to stuff now more, with Windows 7 going EOL soon I imagine shortly after Linden Labs will stop supporting it. Windows 10 is much more popular as a new gen OS than its previous generations, like how more people stuck to XP when vista came out, it's not the same today, not as many people are staying with 7 or 8.1 and are moving to 10.

But the game really still prefers the same things, good single core performance and a semi modern gpu with a bit of ram. It's not too picky, I've played SL on dozens of different hardware configurations ranging from the super low end to recently testing a render box with a Ryzen 9 3900x and RTX Titan I built for a friend. As far as my personal experience shows, SL isn't too picky but still doesn't utilize most hardware well.

I've still got a lot of hardware sitting around (something like 59 different video cards in my inventory) I could try out.

For the 32 vs 64 bit issue I had with the original testing, it does ring true that it didn't matter much. SL doesn't have any other benefits on 32 vs 64 bit besides more ram if you need it, and running 32 bit really did help performance a lot on the lower end hardware, it uses a lot less ram in particular but can reduce CPU overhead task intensity.

My idea of what should be changed I think is still valid but would need some current gen information put in there, possibly updated to include easier to find hardware, mention of modern laptop hardware since that has changed a lot. 

On 7/31/2019 at 11:33 PM, Dann Vale said:

It would great to know the relative importance of CPU to GPU, RAM speed, etc.  My budget is not tight, but I don't want to throw money at top-level components that won't make that big a difference.  I'd rather look at 30fps with ultra settings on a 1440 screen than high fps with lower graphic settings.

There is a lot of information available about the performance of popular games on various computers and components.  Does anyone know which common games SL behaves most like? 

SL doesn't really perform similarly to any other game on similar hardware. The best comparison I could make is unironically Roblox. User created content can change the requirements drastically, there are roblox games that play smooth on first gen mobile i5's and integrated graphics, and there are games that struggle on current gen i7's and an high end video cards. SL is a similar matter where some places will get smooth frames on toaster tier hardware and some places will struggle on the highest of high end.

A good example is that social island is smooth in 720p general medium settings with no ALM on a Pentium D at 3.4ghz and a 1gb 8800GT with 4gb of ram.

But that machine could barely load any other place in the game, it would leave it a sub 10fps mess.

The biggest factors that change seconds life's performance are raw single core CPU performance and storage speed. Fast processor and fast cache = good time. The game can graphically be handled by older midrange GPUs without issue like a 750ti for most people. Higher resolutions and settings requiring better cards obviously.

Ram speed isn't too important unless you're running integrated graphics or an APU.

On 7/31/2019 at 12:56 PM, Alyona Su said:

The doom and gloom predictions for anything Mac-related, including Apple itself, have been going for far longer than SL has even existed. Why always the dire predictions, people? As though you know something super-secret that even Apple (or in the case of SL, Linden Lab) does not know.

More of these predictions, please; they are of high entertainment value!

I don't see Apple sticking around for much longer in the consumer computer market, they've stuck with their fairly isolated ecosystem for far too long in an age where most stuff is intercompatible without issue, and their machines don't have the specs to do anything demanding anymore because the average person doesn't play demanding games often. The type of people buying a MacBook 5 years ago are not the same market today. They're selling mountains of MacBook airs with HD 620/630/610 but the last few MacBook Pro lines have been massive flops for anything outside of the enterprise market. 

As such, their popularity is declining. People are recognizing that "this has the same specs as [insert generic consumer tier laptop here], so why would I spend 1000$ extra?"

I imagine within the next few years you'll start seeing a lot of games omit or drop Mac OSX compatibility because it's not worth their time to develop for a dwindinling market share, kind of like Linux.

 

[Alyona Su]

8 hours ago, cykarushb said:

I don't see Apple sticking around for much longer in the consumer computer market

You make my point for me.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

14 hours ago, cykarushb said:

I don't see Apple sticking around for much longer in the consumer computer market, they've stuck with their fairly isolated ecosystem for far too long in an age where most stuff is intercompatible without issue, and their machines don't have the specs to do anything demanding anymore because the average person doesn't play demanding games often. The type of people buying a MacBook 5 years ago are not the same market today. They're selling mountains of MacBook airs with HD 620/630/610 but the last few MacBook Pro lines have been massive flops for anything outside of the enterprise market. 

As such, their popularity is declining. People are recognizing that "this has the same specs as [insert generic consumer tier laptop here], so why would I spend 1000$ extra?"

I'm less concerned about people deciding they don't want sexy thin MacBooks with luscious Retina displays than Apple will break OpenGL. The responses from LL I've seen here about the OpenGL depreciation sound a lot like Apple hasn't been updating OpenGL for the last ten years anyway so we're going to hope it keeps working until everyone moves to Sansar and we don't have to worry about Mac support anymore. 

[cykarushb]

8 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

You make my point for me.

The difference these days is the lack of genuine innovation or a push for a large change.

Something like the iPhone was genuinely revolutionary for consumer technology, to this day we all use phones designed in the footprint of the first iPhone.

PowerPC based consumer computers were an apple thing, and they held on for a while but later died out. It was popular enough that ppc variants of software had to be created.

Apple managed to influence in a whole new architecture, the only thing to do the same is ARM which has held on decently as well, but x86 still dominates.

Apple for the last 10 years or so has been just an alternative. They are not a unique product, they have become just a brand and an OS choice. The hardware they use is the same as any other computer. This leaves them unspecialized and without anything special to offer. Their market is people who like the brand and people who like or know the combined Apple ecosystem of software. 

Without the specialization leaving them as just a brand alternative with nothing else special to offer is what is going to likely lead to them either dropping their role in the consumer computer market or having to integrate cross platform compatibility for their consumers to stay relevant. Native windows application support is something that can be done on BSD type operating systems and if Apple wants to continue selling their high end products they're going to need to drop the OS and software exclusivity and become a brand rather than ecosystem, or isolate their hardware to become an alternative ecosystem with benefits over what everyone else has.

Like the currently showcased Mac Pro, it's normal hardware with proprietary connectivity. That isn't competition, that's isolation without benefit. There is no advantage for a consumer to buy the Mac Pro vs an equally specced Dell Precision. Just the same as there is no advantage to buying a MacBook Pro vs a Dell Latitude, Lenovo Thinkpad or HP Elitebook. Their products are now becoming just a more expensive version for the same specs and limiting software library.

As such their market will continue to decrease and as it does they will only see more and more software drop OSX support.

This isn't just "lol I hate Macs" it's that the way consumer computer technology is currently moving is leading to large scale intercompatibilty and the proprietary and isolated options are being left behind.

ie Macs, Microsoft surface and desktop equivalents, higher end chromebooks

[Alyona Su]

1 hour ago, cykarushb said:

~SNIP~

You still make my point for me. I reiterate: it's all the status quo, ho-hum, yawn "doom-and-gloom". When it happens then it happens. You are trying to predict rather than forecast. I could go through each point you make, but it would be a waste of time and effort because I have no desire to attempt changing your mind or anything at all. You will believe what you want to believe and I'm not saying I'm right and I'm not saying you're wrong. What I am saying is your predictions are the same status quo predictions the pundits have been making for decades, which makes your arguments ho-hum boy-cries-wolf again. ~shrugs~

Until what you predict happens, it's all good and hunky-dory. if what you predict happens it happens slowly over time, the market adapts and shifts as necessary. The only real question is whether a company can adapt and shift as fast, if not faster that the market. C'est la vie.

Go ahead, take the last word on it and proclaim how wrong I am and right you are. it's okay, really. You should write for the computer-technology blogs.

[Qie Niangao]

There are a couple differences between now and all those preceding decades.

1. A flock of air travellers are just now arriving at the airport with dangerous MacBook Pros that they can't take with them on their flights. We know from the Samsung Note (exploding version) debacle that this didn't have much effect on market share of the next model. But you never know.
2. Full size computers and laptops are a shrinking market now, overall. Apple certainly has the cash to maintain a presence in the shrinking market, and has some extra-financial incentive to do so inasmuch as developers and content creators (video, music, arts, etc) are loyal to Macs, despite / because of all their quirks. Those customers are worth more than one would expect based on the minimal margins the Mac product line still generates. But you never know.

There are also the tariffs, but nobody can guess what the dotard-in-chief might tweet during his next bout of indigestion, so it's a fool's errand to guess how much it will cost to import anybody's next computer or smartphone or 5G radio components.

[cykarushb]

48 minutes ago, Alyona Su said:

Go ahead, take the last word on it and proclaim how wrong I am and right you are. it's okay, really. You should write for the computer-technology blogs.

You're trying to create a hostile argument where there is no argument to be made, I wrote out a statement and opinion, not an argument.