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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> Apple fully controls drivers for Mac OS.

How so? Can you just not write graphics drivers for macOS?

It's more nuanced than that. Nvidia can write the drivers but releasing them without the blessing of Apple blows away any chance of them getting that sweet GPU contract back.

Nvidia doesn't have much of a real world application outside of GPUs in enclosures to keep the drivers alive. The reason to keep drivers ready is the potential for a very large contract from Apple.

Does NVIDIA actually have a contract with Apple? I was under the impression that Apple silently tolerated them, and that they just released drivers on their website for eGPUs.

Word on the street is that Nvidia didn't get much value ($) out of working with Apple, so perhaps both parties aren't super interested.

Same story with Nvidia and gaming consoles - last few gens of consoles have not used Nvidia chips and Nvidia doesn't see it as a big loss. The margins must be too low.

Nvidia seems to aim for higher margin products these days with scientific computing/data center/deep learning/hardcore gaming.

>Nvidia seems to aim for higher margin products these days with scientific computing/data center/deep learning/hardcore gaming.

Which is a problem. No (Real) Games on Mac, No Deep Learning/ Scientific Computing on Mac.

Mac is now left with Programming, and Video / Graphics Editing.

May be Apple's strategy for Mac is to milk it for as long as possible. They don't see it as a platform for growth ( Despite having plenty of room ).

It seems to me like Apple has been on the road to slowly abandoning the Mac for quite some time. Newer Macbooks are unpopular, updates to OS X have problems, and on the whole, the platform just doesn't get much love from Apple. They want us all on iOS.

I'll be moving to Linux instead.

I think only apple ally is Adobe. If you want to do pro design or video you need adobe. Adobe will never release on Linux so if you dont want to use privacy killing cloud os like windows 10 then you are left with mac.

Hackintosh is way many people are taking for those reasons.

The “newer MacBooks” are unpopular is just a meme in the tech bubble. While Apple will stop reporting unit sells next quarter, they just posted last quarters numbers. There is no indication that they are “unpopular”.

Maybe they still sell, but I know of nobody who is enthusiastic about them. People used to love them.

Why should we pay more credence to the anecdotal “people you know” instead of the reported sales volumes?

That is Sales Volume, but its 100M Active Devices, is way slower than what most predicted. Apple took more than 2 years to add 10M Active Devices, on a ~40+M Unit sold during that time, that means 30M are either replacement or, there are quite a high churn rate to Mac. It is possibly the only reason why Apple suddenly come up with iMac Pro, new MacBook Retina etc. It wasn't the sales that matters, it was user leaving its platform. By previous trend and growth at a nearly consistent 20M unit per year, Mac should have at least 120M Active Devices by now, if not more.

Why does Apple care about active users for the Mac and not sales volume?

Active users for iOS devices makes sense. Apple gets recurring revenue from iOS users. Hardly anyone uses the Mac App Store or buys iCloud storage just for the Mac and OS upgrades are free.

You will need a user base for Software Distribution. Will you design your software for a 10M or 100M Mac user. If you are changing to a Services product that only oriented around your products, the more user the better.

It depends on the software...

I wouldn't care about the overall number of users, just the number of users in the market that I'm targeting. The creative market didn't abandon Apple when the overall Mac market was in dire straights because the market they cared about still had a lot of Mac users.

From what I can see, the consumer market for software is basically dead. Is anyone making serious money on non game personal computer software besides Adobe and Microsoft?

The smaller Mac only software companies are going by the "thousand true fans" strategy. Stay small and get a small loyal customer base.

It's a little funny how stable the desktop ecosystem has been for 10 (or maybe 30?) years.

Mac gaming still sucks, EE/ME/Enterprise engineers use windows. Web devs and Artists use macs. Academics and scientists use Linux.

These ecosystems are so stable now that I don't see it changing.

Granted, it could change, but they would have to really try... And Apple has shown decreasing vision for the Mac platform over time.

> Mac is now left with Programming, and Video / Graphics Editing.

You forgot Audio, which is HUGE on the Mac.

Is Apple still pissed about defective Nvidia 8600M GT laptop GPUs?

“Same story with Nvidia and gaming consoles - last few gens of consoles have not used Nvidia chips and Nvidia doesn't see it as a big loss. The margins must be too low.“

The Nintendo Switch uses a NVIDIA Tegra, and NVIDIA put a decent amount of work into selling it - the NVIDIA Shield TV console is basically a tech demo for the thing after all.

I find that to be an unsubstantiated excuse. There is nothing stopping Nvidia from writing its own driver for macOS.

> Can you just not write graphics drivers for macOS?

So this is seriously what you suggest owners of an older MBP (official Apple hardware, just over 4 years old) to do?

Since both Apple's drivers and NVidia's drivers are completely closed source, I'd say it's hardly possible to write a working driver (w/ hardware acceleration) for it.

I’m quoting an NVIDIA engineer here; I’m asking why they can’t write their own driver instead of waiting for Apple. (Though, I’m sure that people in the Hackintosh community would not shy away from stepping up if asked…)

Since it's hardware sold by Apple I would assume that Apple figures that out with NVIDIA and collaborates. Apparently I'm wrong and Apple just doesn't give a crap as long as they can sell new products.

For a hobby computer it can be interesting to write your own driver. For a professional laptop not so much :)

You can write them but you'll need to get them signed by Apple to be able to deploy them in a sensible way. As to whether Apple will sign drivers to run MacOS on non-Apple hardware remains to be seen.

Again, is this something specific for graphics drivers? Because I can write a driver today, sign it with my developer certificate, and distribute it to others without Apple’s approval; if I have blanket preapproval my users can install it without disabling SIP as well.

A standard developer certificate won’t help you for drivers (except for drivers that purely run in user space, such as FUSE filesystems).

Anything that is a kext (kernel extension) requires a special kernel signing developer certificate so macOS will allow users to install it without disabling SIP. Apple is extremely conservative in handing out those kext certificates, and even if they grant you one, they will impose super harsh restrictions on what you can do with them.

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