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ovao

Apple has a pretty decent summary of the feature in this support article: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544

Seems to be limited to AMD GPUs at this time.

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And limited to Macbook Pro. Damn, I was hoping they would include support for Macbooks.

Macbooks don't have a TB3 port

Which is a shame. This is the only reason my wife still uses old 11" Mac Air. She has an Apple Thunderbolt screen which she doesn't want to replace and is unusable on the Macbook. Pros are just too big for her, so she keeps on using the old Air.

The current MacBook similar size bigger screen, but wow is the dongle life a horror.

It's not only a horror, it's idiotic and completely avoidable.

Some people say it's an upgrade, but I don't see why they couldn't upgrade and keep the other ports around, since people need those daily.

For sure I've used my 89-euro dongle a lot more than I've used the USB-C port (which is never), until I got sane again after 8 years of getting overcharged by Apple and switched to Microsoft hardware running Xfce Linux (which are both wonderful).

What dongle is €89!?

The one I bought with the laptops so that I could use my external monitor and plug my cell phone.

This one is $69 and has USB C, HDMI, and USB A: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c-digital-a.... Does it not fit your needs?

Add a typical European VAT and the price is similar.

€89 is around $110. Is VAT really 60%?

https://www.apple.com/de/shop/product/MJ1K2ZM/A/usb%E2%80%91...

Here it is. Right from the mother-ship.

I guess I meant that was an equivalent price for electronics.

Around 20% is normal. The USD has slipped further than I thought compared to the Euro, and prices are usually a bit higher here. There are various explanations:

* Higher staff wages

* Government-mandated warranty

* Willingness to pay more

The same product is €79 in Germany: https://www.apple.com/de/shop/product/MJ1K2ZM/A/usb%E2%80%91... (or ~87€ in Denmark!)

Jeeze, I regularly see these things left in conference rooms at my work. I could make a killing in the German resale market.

Presumably, reselling these would require you to apply VAT to your products…

You don't pay VAT twice. If anything on the margin.

Of course, if VAT is 60% like you seem to think... That would be a lot! ;-)

Why does it matter, and why is it so important to you? Does it change anything?

It was the only adapter I could buy at Juice in Florence, Italy (where I bought the laptop) that had HDMI at the time.

The laptop was EUR 1799 ($2,150), the dongle was EUR 89.

After 2-3 months the keyboard started failing. It was replaced by Apple--along with the battery which they found out was faulty, and it started failing again (missed keystrokes, registering twice) after a short while. They replace it _again_, then after 3 days the logic board dies, taking all data with it. Apple replaced it, I sold that piece of shit of a laptop for EUR 1,000, and the guy called me after 2-3 days that the logic board died again and Juice (no Apple Store in his area) would give him a new one.

That was my about 5th and last Apple laptop.

I read lots of reports of these things happening to lots of people, but not getting a lot of attention anywhere for some reason, despite the fact that those things cost $2000 and you should absolutely be able to type for more than 2-3 months without replacing the keyboard.

When the third failure/warranty claim happens, you have a right to refuse the repair, return the item and ask for the money back (the same amount that is on the bill). So by selling to the third party, you took the loss.

In Europe..? I wasn't aware of that. I mentioned returning it to Apple and they said the could give you a new one at the most, but only after multiple repairs for the same problem failed.

Yes, in Europe. It happened to my brother, but with Asus (so they didn't try to talk him out of it). After third warranty claim, he took the money and got an Thinkpad.

See my other post. They were bullshitting you (happens too often, sadly). Was this Apple themselves or a third-party seller?

And even the "third try" rule is the most lenient case for the seller here. Firstly, For mass produced devices (not with BTO models!) you generally have the right to demand a new replacement instead of waiting weeks for the repair. And the "three tries" is actually only an upper limit (and AFAIK only explicitly stated in a few countries) - if you agree to a repair you can demand a reasonable deadline, which trumps any number of tries. So, no, you don't have to accept "repair->2 weeks->failed->another 2 weeks".

(All this under the assumption this happens in the first 6 months, when the law assumes a fault at the time of sale as a default and consumer rights are strongest)

is there an online resource with this type of "good to know EU pro consumer workflows" explained somewhere but easy to digest ?

> Why does it matter, and why is it so important to you? Does it change anything?

Yes. Your original point was something along the lines of you being overcharged by Apple because you now had to buy an expensive dongle. I showed that the expensive dongle you were talking about wasn’t actually as expensive as it seemed, which weakens your argument somewhat.

Regarding the keyboard on your laptop, I’ve heard plenty of anecdotes of the it just stop working on people, so I’ll concede that it probably has some sort of inherent issue there. You seem to be unlucky with an extreme case of this.

This is all you got from my comment..?

> Your original point was something along the lines of you being overcharged by Apple because you now had to buy an expensive dongle. I showed that the expensive dongle you were talking about wasn’t actually as expensive as it seemed, which weakens your argument somewhat.

The next version of the MacBook will likely support Thunderbolt. Current Intel chipsets require a rather large (and power-hungry) chip for Thunderbolt (MBPs actually have two of them!), but it'll be integrated soon; they'll get it for 'free'.

It also works on 2017 iMacs and iMac Pro. ie. Macs with Thunderbolt 3.

Not exactly, here are the specifics:

eGPUs are supported on MacBook Pro notebooks released in 2016 and later1, iMac computers introduced in 2017 and later, and iMac Pro.

And iMac + iMac Pro.

Any idea why this is limited to AMD GPUs?

macOS doesn't currently have Nvidia drivers from this generation (from what I remember). It supports a handful of mobile cards and no more, which is the extent to which Nvidia has been implemented in Apple computers as of late.

Meanwhile, the past few generations of graphics gear in Apple computers has been a pretty wide range of AMD stuff. Vega, Polaris, FirePro have all been represented in the last 5 or so years. All they had to do was modify the driver to be able to read from the TB3 PCIe device rather than just an internal one.

... but Nvidia has their own drivers for even the most recent graphics cards that work perfectly fine. Writing this from a OSX setup with a GTX1080.

I take it this is a hackintosh? Are you able to use it ok without signing into any iCloud services, or have you found a way around that?

AFAIK you were already able to use external GPUs via 3rd party thunderbolt enclosures, it just wasn't officially supported.

iCloud works perfectly fine on Hackintoshes.

I logged into one on Sierra. Every iCloud service I use got locked down over the next 20 minutes and it wasn’t fun getting them back. Turns out I’m rather locked into the Apple ecosystem. Somehow Apple detect hardware configuration and check it on login. The mess it left wasn’t pretty.

Perfectly? The latest drivers lag like crazy

This is unfortunately a known issue, at least in the community if not by nVidia. The current workaround is to patch an earlier known-good driver version to work on whatever release of High Sierra you're on. I'm currently running 387.10.10.10.25.106 on 10.13.3 without lag.

https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/nvidia-update

Interesting that some people have no lags. I have also used that script, but stutters are still present.

The drivers were great for a GTX 650Ti in 10.8 and 10.9. They worked fine for games like Borderlands 2 and Arkham Asylum.

The drivers are terrible for a GTX 1060 in 10.12. After running for a while, even basic desktop operations bog down to the point of being unusable. I haven't tried 10.13 yet.

I might be still using Sierra after hearing about all the issues with High Sierra. I don't want to spend a few days configuring my Hackintosh again!

I can confirm that Sierra and Capitan do have Nvidia drivers for Pascal series.

Are you sure? I have a gtx 970 working on the maxwell drivers on el cap but no luck on pascal.

Apple hasn't released a product with an NVIDIA GPU for years. Also, driver support for NVIDIA GPUs on MacOS is not very good compared to AMD GPU driver support on MacOS.

Nvidia driver support is fine, generally speaking. It's just Apple choose not to bundle drivers OOTB in the OS, but it's a trivial install from Nvidia's website. You can drop a brand new 1080ti into an old Mac Pro today and it will work great. Hackintosh users have also taken advantage of this for ages.

In fact Nvidia cards are the only ones that are recommended for hackintoshes for OOB compatibility [1]. IME on Mac OS 10.12 getting a Nvidia GTX 1060 to behave properly has been much easier than a AMD RX 480.

[1] https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/march/2018/#Graphics_....

That's definitely not true since at least summer last year (release date of WhateverGreen [1]). The drivers for Nvidia cards are currently pretty bad and are only getting worse (they used to work acceptably ok on Sierra). For example, Pascal based Nvidia GPUs on High Sierra often get something like 50% performance compared to Windows and they also cause the system to stutter. There are also many other problems with using them. For instance, you cannot update the system (even small updates) until Nvidia releases new drivers which sometimes takes few days.

While with AMD, the drivers for RX460/470/480/560/570/580/Vega are already built-in and you only need to correctly inject them. You just need to use one kext (kind of a driver in Mac) called WhateverGreen (to be fully correct you also need Lilu, but you almost always have it anyway on your Hackintosh). It works without issues and is generally preferred among Hackintosh community.

Another thing is that tonymacx builds are generally bad if you want a stable and easy to build Hackintosh (at least as easy as it can get). They are being sponsored and their choice of hardware is strongly biased.

[1] https://github.com/vit9696/WhateverGreen

I hadn't heard that criticism of tonymacx86 before. Could I ask which site (or sites) you recommend as less biased / more straightforward builds than tonymacx?

Wow I had no idea that tool existed. Getting hardware acceleration working was the main reason I replaced my R9-390x with a GTX1070.

Because AMD GPUs are the only discrete GPUs Apple supports on current models?

Because years ago NVIDIA screwed up the thermal solution in their laptop chips so they’d get so hot they’d unsolder themselves inside MacBook Pros, and then gave someone important at Apple the middle finger instead of helping to deal with the issue. Ever since then Apple does not use NVIDIA GPUs.

I would love to hear more details about this.

This was pretty well publicized circa 2008 when the events took place.

2012 and 2013 15" Macbook Pros used NVidia. I think Apple likes to alternate every generation or two, if only to keep their options open.

Or maybe 2012. It’s been a while.

2010 MBP does, for sure. I need to disable that one, and use the Intel GPU instead. Using the Nvidia GPU causes random reboots.

The fiasco was widely called "Bad Bumps" due to the issue being related to the solder used for the bumps on the underside of their chips.

It was a huge deal affecting major computer vendors like Apple, Dell, HP etc at the time, with failure rates on laptops with these chips being ridiculously high. I've also long wondered if this played a part in whatever reason Apple have for avoiding Nvidia GPUs for so long.

> https://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/11/why-nvidias-chips-are-de...

> http://www.tomshardware.com/news/NVIDIA-GPU-Chipset-Graphics...

Not usually a huge fan of theinquirer's tabloid style, but they did a pretty good job reporting on the issue back then.

> https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1047022/apple-note...

Apple has used Nvidia gpus many times since then. Whatever the reasons for Apple's vendor-hopping for GPUs, this isn't it.

Apple have used nVidia stuff a few times since the 8000 series solder screw ups.

2010, 2012, 2013 + 2014 MacBook Pro’s to name a few instances

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