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

#91

Post by bigyabai » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

realusername wrote: post #46

bigyabai wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet Explorer Mobile is a YouTube client. You're describing a client-server disagreement when the user is talking about an entirely client-based conflict.

Google deployed custom code to actively block the clients so it went beyond just a disagreement

That's normal behavior when your server is being reverse-engineered or abused. Video bandwidth is not free.

Apple's decision is not constrained by server logic or ballooning costs, it is entirely a client-based policy to not sign CUDA drivers.

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

#92

Post by afavour » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #90

mulderc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in any market they are in.

Courts have already ruled it does in the iOS app store market. You can disagree of course but then you'd be disagreeing with legal experts who know more about anti-trust law than you do.

But Apple’s share of the desktop/laptop market is very different than their share of the mobile one.

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

#93

Post by afavour » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:58 PM UTC

MrArthegor wrote: post #88

A good technical project, but honestly useless in like 90% of scenarios. You want to use an NVidia GPU for LLM ? just buy a basic PC on second hand (the GPU is the primary cost anyway), you want to use Mac for good amount of VRAM ? Buy a Mac. With this proposed solution you have an half-backed system, the GPU is limited by the Thunderbolt port and you don’t have access to all of NVidia tool and library, and on other…

Chicken/egg. NVidia tooling is lacking surely in part because the hardware wasn’t usable on macOS until now. Now that it’s usable that might change.

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

#94

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #92

satvikpendem wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Courts have already ruled it does in the iOS app store market. You can disagree of course but then you'd be disagreeing with legal experts who know more about anti-trust law than you do.

But Apple’s share of the desktop/laptop market is very different than their share of the mobile one.

Yes, however the parent's claim was that Apple does not have a monopoly in any market they're in which is legally demonstrably false.

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

#95

Post by MrArthegor » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC

dd_xplore wrote: post #53

Why does Apple need to make the drivers in a walled garden? Atleast they should support major device categories with official drivers.

Macs and PCs are fundamentally different. Their architectures have always been distinct though the Intel Mac era has somewhat blurred the line.

Modern Mac is Macintosh descendants and by contrast PC is IBM PC descendants (their real name is technically PC-clone but because IBM PC don’t exist anymore the clone part have been scrapped).

And with Apple silicon Mac the two is again very different, for example Mac don’t use NVMe, they use just nand (their controller part is integrated in the SoC) and they don’t use UEFI or BIOS, but a combination of Boot ROM, LLB and iBoot

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

#96

Post by hilsdev » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #90

mulderc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in any market they are in.

Courts have already ruled it does in the iOS app store market. You can disagree of course but then you'd be disagreeing with legal experts who know more about anti-trust law than you do.

Credentialism to prevent discussion of political and government entities is incredibly dangerous

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

#97

Post by gsnedders » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 8:03 PM UTC

mlfreeman wrote: post #55

I followed the instructions link and read the scripts...although the TinyGPU app is not in source form on GitHub, this looks to me like the GPU is passed into the Linux VM underneath to use the real driver and then somehow passed back out to the Mac (which might be what the TinyGrad team actually got approved). Or I could have totally misunderstood the role of Docker in this.

https://docs.tinygrad.org/tinygpu/ are their docs, and https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/tree/4d36366717aa9f1735... is the actual (user space) driver.

My read of everything is that they are using Docker for NVIDIA GPUs for the sake of "how do you compile code to target the GPU"; for AMD they're just compiling their own LLVM with the appropriate target on macOS.

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

#98

Post by GeekyBear » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #91

realusername wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google deployed custom code to actively block the clients so it went beyond just a disagreement

That's normal behavior when your server is being reverse-engineered or abused. Video bandwidth is not free. Apple's decision is not constrained by server logic or ballooning costs, it is entirely a client-based policy to not sign CUDA drivers.

> That's normal behavior when your server is being reverse-engineered or abused. Video bandwidth is not free.

Microsoft rewrote their Windows Phone native client to pass through Google's ads. Google still blocked it.

Was it normal behavior when Google blocked Amazon Fire devices from connecting to YouTube with a web browser during the Google/Amazon corporate spat?

To be fair, Google did back down almost immediately when the tech press picked up on it.

Not allowing a native client for your monopoly market share video service on Amazon devices while also blocking Amazon's web browser on those devices is making things a bit too obvious.

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

#99

Post by mrpippy » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 8:09 PM UTC

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #21

I don't know how Apple has evaded regulatory scrutiny for their refusal to sign Nvidia's eGPU drivers since 2018.

Evidence that NVIDIA has even been trying? My understanding is that Apple didn’t allow 3rd parties to write graphics drivers past 10.13, but they could’ve done a non-graphics driver like this.

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

#100

Post by sroussey » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 8:12 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.

You just described Apple.