Other than the imminent enslavement of the entire human race by the arrival of the iPod, it's actually sort of a slow news day in the Mac world. How do we know? Well, for one thing, as faithful viewer Porsupah points out, WIRED has sunk to running articles about how the Mac OS X incarnation of the high-end 3D application Maya is "doomed" to fail. But even more telling is that we've sunk to telling you about how WIRED has sunk to running articles about how the Mac OS X incarnation of Maya is doomed to fail. (Hey, it's either this, or a detailed account of what we had for dinner last night.)

Maya, you may recall, caused some serious buzz in the Mac community when its Mac OS X port was originally announced; after all, here was a high-end heavy-hitting developer effectively indicating that Apple's new operating system was at least as powerful and reliable as the other platforms it supports: Windows NT, UNIX, and Linux. In other words, Mac OS X finally makes the Mac platform viable for all sorts of "serious" tasks for which Mac OS 9 and earlier are, uh, perhaps not so well-suited. "Mac OS X: It's Not Just For Breakfast Anymore."

But according to WIRED, "no one in the industry can understand why Alias launched this widely acclaimed product... for the Mac's new and unproven OS X." Indeed, the author calls Maya X's chances of survival "ominously grim" and even forecasts the product's death in "summer 2002." Ooooo, harsh. The reasons why, however, strike us as less than bulletproof. For instance, it's all well and good to list about a dozen Mac 3D apps that have met ignominious demises in the past decade and a half, but, um, news flash: none of those apps was written for the preemptively-multitasking, symmetrically-multiprocessing, memory-protected, UNIX-at-its-core Mac OS X, so now that we've got hardware and an OS that's a little more 3D-friendly, where's the comparison?

Then there's that probably-out-of-context quote by Michael Flaminio of Insanely Great Mac (WIRED provided the wrong URL, we notice), in which he states "I can't see Mac consumers lining up to buy and learn Maya." That might qualify as a death knell-- if Maya were a consumer-targeted application. Indeed, any software product meant to appeal to Mom and Pop that just happens to cost $7500 a pop deserves to fail; good thing Maya's a high-end professional application, then. And while even Alias/Wavefront seems potentially confused about that fact (is it really positioning Maya as a "tool for creating 3D for websites," as WIRED claims? Because the company's own web site implies it's useful "whether you produce digital content for movies, television, games, or interactive media"), we always figured that the Mac OS X port of Maya was intended for design studios who would otherwise be buying Maya anyway-- for Windows, UNIX, or Linux. Now they have the option of running it on Macs instead.

But heck, maybe WIRED is right; maybe all those designers really prefer running Windows, UNIX, and Linux. After all, it's not like the Mac is popular in, say, 2D graphic design or anything, right? Well, since this poor doomed product is going to kick the volumetrically-rendered bucket next summer, we urge all Mac users to do their part and order a copy or two today. What's $7500 when it comes to making a stand for platform loyalty? C'mon, they'll make great stocking-stuffers.