I really have to find it interesting reading all the good points made in many comments posted regarding SGI, as well as the differing viewpoints. The main consistency I see both as a former SGI user/reseller/proponent gone PowerMac is that while there are large reasons to compare the two, you have to compare apples to apples (no pun intended) when comparing the two manufacturers. Comparing high-end reality engine powerstations to a Dual 2.5 G5 is comparing two products in different product categories. I recently had a long discussion with a friend of mine from SGI about this that helped put my perspective into a better place.
SGI as a company has several different product lines (despite how technologies from each tend to find ways into the other) from workstations to visualization powerstations to high end servers and node clusters with hot-swappable modules and units. If you look at how SGI has refocused their markets after all the fun stuff from the mid 90s took place, they're still a very prominent and powerful force to be reckoned with. They simply aren't doing a lot of what people got to know them for anymore. One of SGI's big focuses has always been high end visualization and CAD/CAM/CAE, and technologies that cater to governmental/military customers. To say that they have gone out of the supercomputing business because Macs have taken over is just silly, since the two don't even compete in the same market.
SGI Product line offerings are Servers, Visualization System, Storage, and then Workstations. Apple's product line offerings are consumer PCs, Workstations, and Servers. While it is very likely that the SGI 3D Modeling/Rendering Entertainment based workstation is being succeeded by the PowerMac G5 with 3D applications like Alias Maya (formerly SGI's Alias|Wavefront), Lightwave 3D, and Luxology; and video/compositing applications such as Final Cut Pro HD and Shake (recently purchased by Apple), you're still looking at people who run these workstations for things like broadcast and advanced 3D graphics such as Discreet Logic working on SGI and linux only, and Softimage only on Intel hardware via XP and Linux. We're talking about different target markets here in the grand scheme of things.
-Apple is coming from a personal computer arena and working it's way into the professional arena (and doing a dang good job, I might add).
-SGI has been in the proffessional arena for years and has survived as many blunders and messes as such corporations do, and was never meant for the personal computing arena.
-Intel based machines has such a wide variety of are found from the personal to profesional arena thanks to the growth of the original Windows NT 4.0 engine and Linux.
Has Apple gained a lot of marketshare since switching to OS X and with the release of the PowerMac G5? Most certainly. Alias Maya is one of the hottest packages available for 3D modeling and animation out there today and has been ever since it began competing with SoftImage back in the late 90s. Final Cut Pro HD is becoming more and more comparable to programs like Fire and Smoke with Shake being the up and comer for programs like Inferno, Flint, Flame, Combustion, and Lustre.
Does this mean that they have every single benefit of an SGI in competing? Not really. As someone mentioned in a previous comment, the graphics cards that run in SGI systems have some amazingly high end features that you will simply not get in a consumer end or even prosumer graphics card from ATI or nVidia, and have been since the cobalt graphics chipsets from the Indigo2's and O2's all the way through the Octane and up to the Onyx. Does this mean that Apple will never have such support? Not necessarily. Apple is slowly becoming what the SGI workstation was originally in place to do. A high powered unix workstation with multiple professional configurations for 3D, Audio/Video, Visualization, and simulation. SGI has had the foothold on this for quite sometime and the Mac is now capable of catching up. Who knows, they may even succeed SGI in this particular area in the future based on the way things are going.
Does this mean that Apple can compete in the Origin and Altix server market? They're going that directin, but the gap is much wider in that market, and SGI is not their only primary competitor, just as in the 3D workstation market. Apple's X-Serve is powerful and to be admired, but it's not the be all and end all of enterprise server and distributed systems technology. Apple still licenses distributed server technology and network file system technology from people like SGI and Sun, despite a lot of the benefits that OS X brings to the unix server party.
On operating systems, I really have to say that having had to patch so many security holes in IRIX back in my days as an SGI jr. admin, I'm happy with the direction Apple is taking it's OS X unix core, Darwin. A lot of mistakes have been learned from and resolved in this version of Unix, and I'm happy to use it. Especially since it is as mainstream as Windows is with a wide variety of support from developers of hardware and software. Kudos to you-dos, Apple. But thank goodness for SGI, otherwise who knows where graphical unix workstations would have began. Apple isn't the final word on the subject, but with a lot of the power they're manifesting now having been started ages ago with SGI, one has to appreciate their roots to appreciate current technology in this fashion.
Long story short, compare the same type of product when comparing SGI to Apple as "The New SGI", since the lines aren't as grey as many people seem to make them out to be. There are fine lines, and there are vastly different target markets. I personally am an old SGI hound and would love to one day get my hands on an Octane to have sitting on my desk alongside a PowerMac G5 and my Windows PC (which is a bit of a glorified game machine now, sorry Windows). I've always loved SGI and would have switched to Unix entirely (from MS Windows) back then if it had the same mainstream support that Apple's OS X now has. But I still use the two big ones simply because as a closet IT person nowadays, it's good to know multiple platforms. Makes one marketable.
