A VR-worthy Apple iMac may be in the cards

Apple has stepped up its game in keeping a tight lid on its future unveilings, since a few years ago, when full-specs rumors of products like the 2015 MacBook, the Apple Watch and the iMac Retina 5K were already public domain sometimes as early as a full year prior to release.

While the bulk of the latest rumors seem to point to a new MacBook featuring an OLED touch strip replacing the function keys row on the keyboard, whispers of a new iMac come with subtle hints to a VR-ready experience. Macworld UK had the scoop on Tuesday, about a new iMac with graphics powered by an AMD Polaris 10 GPU.

VR-Ready? It won’t be cheap.

Back in March, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has made a statement in regard to Macs not being up to par with his VR headset: “You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn’t match our recommended spec”. Apple’s Tim Cook has shown an interest in VR, and expressed it during an earnings call, commenting on the fact that VR is “...really cool and has some interesting applications...”. That quote was far from being an official endorsement, let alone a plan of building Macs with the advanced graphic capabilities necessary to work with Oculus Rift, with that said, VR is a technology that is not going away, especially after an incubation period that started in the late 1960s. With hardware specs finally reaching the type of performance we’d expect from VR, it would be surprising if Apple didn’t show any sign of wanting to invest into the technology, either by means of dedicated devices, or by enabling existing products, like the Mac, to support Oculus Rift, or similar headsets likely to appear in the future.

By this token, there is a reasonable chance for future Macs to be powered by VR-worthy hardware, with rumors pointing to the iMac, especially due to the fact that no word has yet leaked on the fate of the Mac Pro, which would be the ideal high-end Mac for the task.

In Apple’s defense, the recommended specs for PCs to work with Oculus Rift aren’t on the low-end. To make effective use of the $600 VR headset, the minimum hardware required is at least 8GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GTX 980, three USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, and an Intel Core i5 4590. Funny enough, when running the Oculus Compatibility tool on an AMD-powered PC with the latest 4.7GHz 8-Core AMD FX 9590 CPU, the compatibility checker will still say that the CPU is not up to par, although this might be a simple oversight, as the FX-9590 (Passmark score: 10261) leaves the i5-4590 far back in the dust (Passmark score: 7200).

Intel Core i5 and i7 have been a staple across all Macs, with likely upgrades to Skylake or even Kaby Lake, coming most likely towards the last quarter of 2016. By integrating new AMD Polaris 10 GPUs, Apple could finally raise the specs high enough for the iMac to support Oculus VR.