Not that the article is suggesting anything with Apple, but I've been hoping Apple would buy out a 3D app developer for quite a while now. I thought Lightwave might have made sense because they are struggling in terms of overrall market share, so Apple might be able to get it for a steal. Plus, they are completely rewriting LW from the ground up using XCode. Now THAT should be interesting.
But Maya is much more Mac-like. Its community is also more Mac-friendly, and internally Bob Gundu does a lot of the training material on Macs. Plus, Maya already works nicely with Shake and that could be leveraged. Maya (or LW or any 3D) is just begging to be used with Rendezvous and/or XGrid. MAn, that would be sweet. Network rendering in those apps is such a mess right now. But Maya's siblings are way too entrenched in the PC world. Apple could never get away with buying Alias and killing off the PC line like they did with Shake (sort of) and Logic Pro.
All I hope is that the new buyer, should there be one, keeps OS X on the priority list. In spite of some minor issues and the ongoing speed gap, the Maya 5 port is really a joy to use in OS X.
