Well, the issue of Pixar's chosen computing platform has been an ongoing plot thread for ages, now, but things are starting to take a turn for the inevitable. If you've followed the saga of Steve's other company and its desperate search to find a platform with which it can finally settle down with a house and a white picket fence and 2.4 computer-animated kids running around in the yard, you know that a few years back it relied on vast oceans of SGI and Sun UNIX systems to squeeze out its award-winning films, but in 2001 made a hefty switch to Linux workstations on the desktop-- which was itself a case of changing horses in mid-stream, since the studio was reportedly already in the process of switching to Windows NT. (Pause here for the involuntary shudder.) Talk about looking for love in all the wrong places...

Now it's two years later, and apparently even the infamous "render farms" have been redecorated; out went the Sun systems and in came the Linux servers, much to the chagrin of Macfolk who couldn't figure out why Xserves weren't in the picture. However, Pixar finally seems to be warming up to the idea of getting a little cozier with Mac OS X; MacRumors cites "a number of independent reports" that claim that while the render farms will stick with Linux for the time being (not terribly surprising, since Pixar just shelled out $1.8 million for its new servers less than six months ago), the advent of the Power Mac G5 may finally push Macs onto Pixarian desktops to run "internal applications and previsualization software."

So it looks to us like Pixar was just waiting for the G5 before it took the plunge-- and with G5-based Xserves obviously in the cards in the not-too-distant future, is it so out of the question that the company might call in Steve's employee discount to redo the server farms yet again? After all, Pixar is porting RenderMan to Mac OS X, and demonstrated a beta at SIGGRAPH last week. And since the 2.0 GHz G5 outperforms the 2.8 GHz Xeons in Pixar's "new" Intel servers (witness the nifty photo in this MacRumors forum post), what's $2 million for a stack of Xserves to a company that lives or dies by rendering speed? Heck, Finding Nemo alone has brought in over $313 million so far; surely by the time G5 Xserves hit the market, it'll be time to splurge a little.

In the meantime, the switch at the desktop level seems to be a lock; Pixar is already looking for a Mac OS X Migration Contractor. If you meet the required qualifications and Emeryville isn't too far out of your way, maybe you should consider applying. We've been assured that being a green spherical monster with one giant eye isn't actually a prerequisite for the position (although we bet it couldn't hurt).