Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#121

Post by longislandguido » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 8:57 PM UTC

selectodude wrote: post #76

TheDong wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And back in the "Microsoft has a monopoly on IE6" ruling's days, I did not use Windows or Internet Explorer, and I was not prevented from doing anything because of that. Netscape Navigator on Linux worked fine. Sure, I occasionally hit sites that were broken and only worked in IE, but I also right now frequently hit apps that are "macOS only" (like when Claude Cowork released, or a ton of other YC company's apps). Mi…

Microsoft was found guilty of using their market power to do product bundling, which is illegal. The fact that they had dominance in the market is not what they got popped for, nor is it illegal.

Let me know how I can unbundle Safari from macOS or iOS.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#122

Post by chongli » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

longislandguido wrote: post #121

selectodude wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft was found guilty of using their market power to do product bundling, which is illegal. The fact that they had dominance in the market is not what they got popped for, nor is it illegal.

Let me know how I can unbundle Safari from macOS or iOS. Go ahead, I'll wait.

It's possible on the Mac, but it's not easy. Apple uses an immutable system volume on macOS, so you can't just delete the Safari app like you would a user-installed app. To actually delete Safari you need to disable System Integrity Protection and reboot.

There are plenty of Linux distributions that use immutable root volumes. They protect the user in a huge number of ways by preventing the system from getting hosed (either by accident or by malicious unauthorized users / malware). Apple made the decision to do this for their users, and it has prevented a HUGE amount of tech support calls, as well as led to millions of happy users with trouble-free computers.

It also hasn't stopped users from installing Chrome and/or Firefox on their Macs, and millions of ordinary users have.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#123

Post by serf » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #81

whalesalad wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is re gpu for compute not graphics.

Still undesirable latency for a lot of compute use cases, like image or video editing; it’s really only negligible for LLMs. Since that’s definitely a big enough use case all on its own, I wonder if such a product should really just double down on LLMs.

remote GPU compute payloads have been around a lot longer than LLMs, they're just few and far between.

folding@home and other such asynchronous "get this packet of work done and get back to me' style of operations rarely care much about latency.

Remote transcoding efforts can usually adjust whatever buffer needed to cover huge latency gaps , a lot of sim and render suites can do remote work regardless of machine to machine latency..

I just sort of figure the industry will trend more async when latency becomes a bigger issue than compute. Won't work in some places, but I think we tend to avoid thinking that way right now due to a lack of real need to do so; but latency is one of those numbers that trends down slowly.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#124

Post by manmal » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #37

manmal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn’t the Mac Mini the weak link in that scenario?

It has way more unified memory than your typical dGPU.

Yes obviously. That VRAM is also slower and has weak compute attached. Loading to the external GPU will slow things down too much.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#125

Post by manmal » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

GeekyBear wrote: post #39

manmal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what, 14GB/s? The GPU‘s VRAM can do 100x that.

A discrete consumer GPU card doesn't have enough fast RAM to run a very large model that hasn't been quanitized to hell. That's why all the projects streaming models into the GPU from an SSD popped up recently.

Yes. There’s just no way to get above 1t/s that way with a large model.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#126

Post by serf » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 9:22 PM UTC

jasomill wrote: post #119

Fnoord wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost twice the price and simply more accurate info regarding price and features. Brand is TH3P4G3. Egpu.io has decent eGPU comparisons. I wouldn't want all that dust in my GPU fans, prefer that near my case fans. I also don't like it given I got cats and want to store/box hw. I do use the eGPU in the fuse box. If I had a larger house, I'd use a server rack. I was recently in the market for an eGPU but for a differe…

I've been using a Sonnet eGPU box with Nvidia GPUs (1070/3070) on an Intel NUC for about 5 years, and it works great. One nice thing about the Sonnet eGPU boxes is that they use standard SFX PSUs that are inexpensive to replace if they fail. For LTO, I'm cheap, and iSCSI over a dedicated 2.5 Gbps Ethernet link is fast enough for my aging FC LTO-5 drives and spinning rust backup disks.

I used Sonnet egpu box on a similarly equipped Dell XPS and it had so many little issues that it sold me off of eGPUs over Thunderbolt entirely.

Sleep broke across all OSs, if sleep didn't break the GPU wouldn't get powered on with the laptop. If one side lost power during an outage (the gpu side, the laptop has a battery..) it would require an elaborate voodoo ritual of cycling both of them on and off until they 'caught' each other. It would cause the rest of the USB ports on the laptop to reset and drop comms with peripherals once or twice a week, necessitating a rain-dance restart.

when Oculink first started showing up I gave up all together and just said "fuck it i'll try it again in a few years.".

It worked fine when it worked fine, but the patches in between were not worth my time.

I blame Dell and their thunderbolt controllers entirely for the issue, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth that I would have a really tough time buying the newest Sonnet box to try it out. Now I have a desktop machine and don't fall into that market.

I ended up throwing that card (an rtx 3xxx) into a dell rackmount and have been happy with that card ever since.

to your point though: the non proprietary PSU was a nice feature, but in reality the expansion card for PCI->Thunderbolt or whichever interface you're using can be bought on alibaba for like 20-30 bucks and the PSU is worth another 30-40 bucks , a generic white-label 650w. I think if I did it over i'd just do that and make an enclosure, but the Sonnet boxes aren't too bad a value by the numbers.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#127

Post by detourdog » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 9:22 PM UTC

SvenL wrote: post #115

hilsdev wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t say it is obvious. Apple does not have the monopoly of ARM based PCs. Labeling it as a monopoly of M chips is not fair or accurate when comparing to MS on Intel. It’s also probably relevant that MS was not selling PCs or their own hardware. They had a monopoly on a market where you effectively had to use their software to use the hardware you bought from a different company. Because Apple is selling their…

Well “had to use” is a strong phrase here. Linux was already around and you could have used it too with your hardware. I think you can always bend an argument to fit your point.

The PC manufacturers had to pay MS for a license no matter what operating system was installed.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#128

Post by Forgeties79 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #107

qoez wrote: post #36

Idk why this doesn't link to the original source instead of this proxy source: https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/2039213719155310736

Isn't X usually the original source these days?

It’s often a secondary/tertiary source unless you’re looking for official statements.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#129

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 9:27 PM UTC

TheDong wrote: post #64

aljgz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the logic for downvotes. We vote with our wallets. When I could not update the Ram on my personal Dell machine I asked for a Frame.work in my new job. As my Intel based FW at work had thermal throttling problems, for my next personal purchase I got an AMD one. As Ubuntu had shady practices, I installed Fedora, as Gnome forced UX choices I did not want, I used KDE. As I wanted my machine to be even…

"We vote with our wallet, so don't complain" is a bad take in my opinion. Like, for phones, I want a phone which runs Linux, has NFC support, and also has iMessage so my friend who only communicates with blue-bubbles and will never message a green-bubble will still talk to me. I also want it to have regulatory approval in the country I live in so I can legally use it to make calls. Because apple has closed the iMessa…

> Like, for phones, I want a phone which runs Linux, has NFC support, and also has iMessage so my friend who only communicates with blue-bubbles and will never message a green-bubble will still talk to me. I also want it to have regulatory approval in the country I live in so I can legally use it to make calls.

I actually agree with you, but I also suggest getting better friends.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#130

Post by bigyabai » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #34

bigyabai wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple was the only one stopping themselves from getting back in. It's not like the Mac is a trillion-dollar market segment to begin with.

Almost everyone including myself had MacBook Pros at my last place of work. If Apple was in the high-end server market, I see no reason why the company I was working for would not be running macOS on Apple hardware as servers, instead of the fleet of Linux based servers they had.

Why wait? You can go run macOS as a server right now. It will take you a few hours to get Docker working, and disable mdworker_shared() and turn off SIP, and then install a package manager/XCode utilities, and finally configure macOS to run as a headless UNIX box, but it's attainable.

Despite how easy Apple makes it, nobody is really using Macs as a server in production. Apple[0] is not using them as a server in production. They would need a radically different strategy to replace Linux, because their efforts on macOS still haven't replaced Windows.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...