> I am curious what the world would be like now if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it.
I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference as the low end of the market was driven by gaming and multimedia (i.e. movies on PC screen), and the high end of the graphics market was driven by rendering for expensive video and film production. In short, what you needed to play Fallout (1997 release) at home was an order of magnitude less than you needed to render CGI for Men in Black (1997 release).
> if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers", before OS X came out, would Apple have its same market position now
I believe Apple would have been just as successful as they are today. Software availability (e.g. Adobe and Microsoft Office) and ease of use were very good on Mac, and not so good on workstations like SGI. There was a very small, very demanding market for SGI's workstations (rendering super high quality graphics), and there was a huge market for what Apple supplied (business, print, web graphics, music production, video production). In short the software ecosystem wouldn't have happened. Apple did a great job when OSX came out of making it easy-ish for app developers to port to OSX and allowed users to run their old mac software on their new OSX powered mac.
> Would we all be using SGiPhones?
Probably not. System V unix was very expensive to license (hence Android being Linux based and iOS being based on BSD and Mach) and would have added considerable cost to each mobile device based on licensing at the time. A lot of what made it possible to package up a modern smartphone was open source software + low cost components with ridiculous capability (for their cost). None of this was of interest to SGI where they were focused on high-end equipment with little commodity appeal.
I agree with the software availability, but I'll just note that Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator were ported from classic macos to Irix with a Unix porting toolkit. Adobe Framemaker was also available.
I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference as the low end of the market was driven by gaming and multimedia (i.e. movies on PC screen), and the high end of the graphics market was driven by rendering for expensive video and film production. In short, what you needed to play Fallout (1997 release) at home was an order of magnitude less than you needed to render CGI for Men in Black (1997 release).
> if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers", before OS X came out, would Apple have its same market position now
I believe Apple would have been just as successful as they are today. Software availability (e.g. Adobe and Microsoft Office) and ease of use were very good on Mac, and not so good on workstations like SGI. There was a very small, very demanding market for SGI's workstations (rendering super high quality graphics), and there was a huge market for what Apple supplied (business, print, web graphics, music production, video production). In short the software ecosystem wouldn't have happened. Apple did a great job when OSX came out of making it easy-ish for app developers to port to OSX and allowed users to run their old mac software on their new OSX powered mac.
> Would we all be using SGiPhones?
Probably not. System V unix was very expensive to license (hence Android being Linux based and iOS being based on BSD and Mach) and would have added considerable cost to each mobile device based on licensing at the time. A lot of what made it possible to package up a modern smartphone was open source software + low cost components with ridiculous capability (for their cost). None of this was of interest to SGI where they were focused on high-end equipment with little commodity appeal.