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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

> The Rift will not run on your laptop, this rule does not change!

IMHO, this is the biggest issue. The computer landscape has shifted towards laptops/mobile and now this device requires a device whose marketshare is shrinking.

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Not so much among PC gamers, from what I've seen. And that's really the market that matters. Not many other segments are still buying high power desktops, but they certainly are.

With a Gen1 release, Oculus is trying to build its "core audience" which will be the PC Gamer. Any serious PC gamer will have built their own custom rig to play games. As long as they can nail this audience, they'll be able to grow from there with more "mass consumer" equipment to target lower capability computers.

This makes me think a better nickname for this revision is Hobbyist Version rather than Consumer Version.

Yes, it feels like a big mistake. An external box containing the necessary graphics hardware should probably be a part of the Oculus package - it seems to be setting itself up for failure by pretending to be a display, rather than a graphics pipeline.

Assuming that box would add 300$ more to the package price, you would be close to sinking four digits when it turns out that VR is more immersion than you like. In that case, a regular GPU upgrade will happily drive your conventional screens, whereas an Oculus box would likely be dead weight causing or at least cause all kinds of compatibility headaches when repurposed for conventional display use.

Lots of their target market already has suitable video cards, and don't want to pay $400 extra for a downgrade. And what would you plug the box into? I've read that there are specs for external PCIe x16 ports and enclosures but I've literally never seen one.

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