What are some common hold-ups you know of? I don't program but have still used GNU/Linux on my main machine for over a decade now. It can browse the web, play games, listen to music, watch TV and movies, you can draw, you can edit video, you can stream to Twitch.
Office 365 (I think this mostly applies to overly complex Excel spreadsheets with lots of macros? There are also a bunch of people here who say LibreOffice has bad UI, or that they (somehow?) have documents that are complex enough that LibreOffice can't display them properly. Openoffice is somewhat better on those fronts, but neither are good enough if it's for actual work).
Adobe works on Mac, games with anti-cheat are a thin class of applications and they’re not productivity, Office 365 is on everything I thought (iPad, Mac, web).
Back in the day I accidentally deleted all my stuff because I had it all in a special dir of this user in suse Linux. When I deleted the user, yast deleted everything.
Fortunately I was using ReiserFS at the time and something about its murderous tree data structure made it trivial to undelete.
Reiser_fsck found ALL my stuff, mostly with full dir tree structure in tact and put it all in lost+found
The only Question is is it worth suffering hip and x86? I suspect a lot of folks might like a machine that mimics their GB300 But costs less than a dgx.
Also I heard the tensor core instructions on the dgx are gimped and you’re better off with a rtx pro x000. Is that the same with these machines?
They didn't say that Mediatek made the cpu sores. Grace is NVidia's own cpu arm cores. I bet that Mediatek made other parts of SoC necessary for a notebook
Well, MediaTek actually said they made most of the SoC in fact. But the actual CPU cores themselves are all but certainly off-the-shelf Cortex parts, since MediaTek doesn't have a custom core design at all afaik.
NVIDIA hasn't done custom CPU cores for anything they've yet branded "Grace". The original Grace data center CPU (paired with the Hopper data center GPU) used ARM Neoverse V2 cores. The "GB10" chip shipped in DGX Spark and announced here for RTX Spark uses Cortex X925 and Cortex A725 CPU cores.
Physically, NVIDIA did the GPU chiplet and Mediatek did the other chiplet that has the CPU, DRAM controller, and IO.
GB300 is nominally "available" in desktop form factor workstations priced around $100k. That's a few orders of magnitude away from the ordinary desktop PC market that consumers participate in.
Yeah this is why it’s important to get something with similar programmability for less money. I don’t need the power of a gb300 just to do experiments with tma or “tcgen05” instructions
Nothing about the quest has ever worked well, I suspect if this were ever deployed it would actually save lives by getting in the way of actual warfare.
I have every version of the Quest that has been sold, and it became VERY clear, around the time the Quest Pro came out (and John Carmack left not so peacefully [1]), that nobody at meta actually uses any of these daily. And, all their QA testing obviously starts with a device reboot, clearing all the since-quest-2 bugs that exist when you put the thing on your face after letting it sit a day.
I also had several of them (2, 3, pro). Same experience. I worked in the org for a time myself too. You are right that the qa is terrible. Those people don’t even bother addressing feedback from internal posts.
The latest update makes it harder than ever to use. Like, it looks better, I see that. But whoever designed the new UI clearly doesn’t actually use one. For example, the battery level isn’t in the home screen UI anymore. You have to go into settings to see it. Battery only last a couple hours so it’s pretty critical to keep on top of.
Beautiful. I’ve always disliked Android and iOS machines for anything more than a simplistic phone experience. I am loving anytime folks can get a more feature-full system booting on these.
Been hearing this for over a decade, except back then it was eGPU in Intel Macs which were closer to other PCs if anything. Even if this didn't require so much DIY and if Thunderbolt could do PCIe speeds, most people don't want to add drama when they can just use a PC with regular PCIe slots and native compatibility with Nvidia. The native way already has enough edge cases without adding an unusual setup.
What would be native enough here? What if they got Asahi working with NV gpus for rendering and running cuda kernels? Would eGPU on asahi be sufficient or do you really only see pcie worthwhile?
Some of us mainly want more gpu options on a high performance consumer arm machine (for Linux).
Thunderbolt still doesn't provide the full PCIe bandwidth, but even if it did, I'd want PCIe itself. I don't trust the encapsulated version over Thunderbolt to work the same.
Virtualized Linux would be ok though. That's what datacenters already do with their GPUs, albeit on x86 not ARM. Doesn't need to be Asahi, cause that's unlikely to completely work.
The only thing Apple silicon has going for it is power use and that gap is getting closed. I can't really see any reason why I would switch to Mac, it just seems like you pay a lot more for a closed expensive environment that fights you at every step.
I'll never pay anyone for a developer licence or fee either. They can sponsor me to port my software to their platform.
Is it? I recently paid $999 for a pre-build intel mini-pc system thats best case in line in perf with a M2 from four years ago. That seems roughly the same as what I'd paid for an equivalent mac mini in the past, and I thought prices for custom builds were going up quite a bit too?
Just built a workstation with an older Threadripper Pro. It has 128 PCIE lanes, for 7 16-lane PCIE slots. An egpu has 4. I have one GPU, at x16, and I can add more.
Most people don't need that, but most people don't need an eGPU either. The number of gamers who would switch to Macbook+eGPU is negligible. It's just not compelling. For LLMs, hanging a 5090 off the thunderbolt port makes prompt processing fast, but I will be surprised if the M6 doesn't come with silicon just for that, as its the current gap. M5 is quite adequate for token generation for the price, given the RAM quantity and bandwidth. An M6 that accelerates TTFT would make an eGPU irrelevant.
For gaming, the threadripper gets at least +50FPS for windows vs linux, and some games just freeze for periods of time on linux with things like dynamic frame generation. I have an SSD for windows just for gaming.
> The number of gamers who would switch to Macbook+eGPU is negligible. It's just not compelling.
This. eGPUs fade in and out of relevance every few years, and even back in the Intel Macbook days there were people advocating for eGPU gaming with Bootcamp. It was a terrible solution, there is every reason to avoid macOS with a dGPU when you have something like Linux or even Windows as an alternative.
FWIW, I am partial to eGPUs not for laptop gaming but for space. I want to write cuda kernels at home but I dont want a big tower. I have a Minisforum mini-pc the size of an M4 Mac Mini attached to one of those egpu enclosures and the whole setup was pretty easy and sits on my desk nicely.
Yeah the desire makes sense. The Macs are very nice hardware. You can get a mobo/case that's not much larger than the GPU itself, but it's still clunky. It's just, unfortunately eGPUs are unlikely to become more than a curiosity.
I am definitely enjoying mine, but I've found for what I do some of the hosted kernel writing tools are easier to deal with. I actually had to do a ton of work arounds for my tb5 egpu on Linux recently for it to not drop off the pci bus every ~48 hours.
I assume your reasons are different to mine so for your reasons it might very well be true. But for my reasons definitely not as long as Apple Silicon can't run Linux somewhat decently natively - and even then, it's still an Apple..
Man, Apple fans are still proving the stereotype to be accurate after 20 years.
Ignoring the fact that the Mac OS gets in your way every time you try to do something that Apple doesn't like, with no guarantee that an update won't break anything existing, ignoring the fact that Macs are non repairable, non upgradable, ignoring the fact that they don't support multiple displays flawlessly, I hope you realize that egpu support natively is NEVER coming to Macs, because why the fuck would they enable it when they can just charge you full price for a desktop computer? Apple is built on the sole image that Apple users have money, so buying another Mac Mini or Mac Pro in addition to your laptop is what you are supposed to do.
Android is way ahead of Mac with Android Desktop mode and Samsung Dex, to the point where you don't even need to own a laptop anymore. Ive been using my S24/S25 with lapdock for over 3 years now as a laptop, and it works flawlessly. Apple can easily do this with iPhone, but they won't because that means one less macbook purchase.
> Man, Apple fans are still proving the stereotype to be accurate after 20 years.
Who is this straw man you're flogging?
> Ignoring the fact that the Mac OS gets in your way every time you try to do something that Apple doesn't like, with no guarantee that an update won't break anything existing, ignoring the fact that Macs are non repairable, non upgradable, ignoring the fact that they don't support multiple displays flawlessly,
Lot to unpack there, most of it does not matter to most normies. When I bought my current mini-pc to drive my egpu I didn't focus on any of this stuff. Just about all I looked for was something that can drive a gpu over TB4/5 and has good perf/watt in a small form factor.
> I hope you realize that egpu support natively is NEVER coming to Macs, because why the fuck would they enable it when they can just charge you full price for a desktop computer?
Sounds like you are more hopeful they wont than I am that they will. They've already enabled RDMA over TB5 for ML applications, and they've left their boot loader open enough for the asahi community to reverse engineer tons of functionality.
I do think eventually there will be some form of GPGPU programing popularized on the mac that isn't Metal (gross).
> Apple is built on the sole image that Apple users have money, so buying another Mac Mini or Mac Pro in addition to your laptop is what you are supposed to do.
I think you have a very specific use case in mind, chiefly gaming. There's a lot more eGPUs offer, and it has nothing to do with turning your normie laptop into a sick gaming rig.
> Android is way ahead of Mac with Android Desktop mode and Samsung Dex, to the point where you don't even need to own a laptop anymore. Ive been using my S24/S25 with lapdock for over 3 years now as a laptop, and it works flawlessly. Apple can easily do this with iPhone, but they won't because that means one less macbook purchase.
I fail to see how Android is relevant in this context at all? For one, the arm64 hardware would have to exceed the single thread and perf per watt of an M5 and secondly you'd actually need tools and applications worth using for desktop use.
I am seeing some of the newer AMD 370/395 and Intel Ultra 7/9 socs as being much more of a serious alternative to the M4/5 here. In fact my current eGPU setup is an Ultra 9 mini-pc with an egpu, its just a shame im still on x86.
Mac will appear to give some leeway to fake being dev friendly, but they are not. There is a reason why still Asahi is in its state - lack of any real documentation from Apple. If Apple was dev friendly, they would just bring those people on board and give them the documentation and have them develop a fully working linux for free. But Apple fundamentally DGAF about linux users.
RDMA over Thunderbolt is going to be used only with Mac devices. Apple has a history of keeping things within their own ecosystem. You gotta be insane to think that they are going to just magically allow you to plug in a graphics card and it will work natively.
The point of bringing up Android is because that is what being dev friendly. Samsung or Google have nothing to really gain to enable the desktop mode. But they do it anyway because it increases the usability of their devices. Ask yourself again, if Apple already runs arm on all of its devices, why not enable a desktop mode for the iPhone? Its EXACTLY for the reason to squeeze more money from consumer. Its why they do the thing they do with app store, that why they own all the advertising streams on their devices.
So if you wanna stay deluded about what Apple does, be my guest. Just don't be surprised when nothing turns out like you hoped.
It's a little unclear why you are discussing desktop mode on phones in all this? Seems really irrelevant when the thread is about NV gpus on arm desktops.
When it comes to Apple hardware, they're offering pretty good performance per watt and the machine form factors they are offering with the level of perf they have is where I really start to care (small compact footprint with good perf, runs any kind of unix/unix-like system).
You may well be right, and we may not see productized eGPUs in mass on Apples platforms, but I am liable to go grab a GB10 over some PC tower at that point.
As far as the software stack and OS, its also kind of irrelevant (to me anyways). If the hardware is good and the OS has decent performance for builds and jobs I am going to use it to do my work. The rest of it is just fashion as far as I can tell.
>The rest of it is just fashion as far as I can tell.
EXACTLY.
Apple is a fashion company. They don't care about improving usability of any of their devices. The most important thing is to them is selling a lifestyle.
This is why eGPU will never happen - having an external gpu is too nerdy for a lifestyle of an apple user. Same thing of having a phone plugged into a monitor and keyboard. Thats why all their products are separate. You are meant to buy a iphone for phone things, and iPad for the plane, a Macbook for work and a Mac Pro for any serious compute. Them trying to offer a cheaper solution like eGPU dilutes the lifestyle image.
> Apple is a fashion company. They don't care about improving usability of any of their devices. The most important thing is to them is selling a lifestyle.
I don’t think you read what I said, or you are intentionally being dense. My point is that users and the industry have largely moved on from the modular pc box concept. Those who cling to it do it out of a sense of identity.
> They don't care about improving usability of any of their devices.
Do you have any metrics to back that up? As far as I can see they’ve built what is a pretty good platform that still supports native applications for normal people on hardware that is improving ~.5-1.5x every year. Even if I ran Linux 100% of the time I’d likely go with their (used) hardware.
> having an external gpu is too nerdy for a lifestyle of an apple user
I used to think this, but then when they brought arm64 to laptops they brought macOS not iOS. They did that because the Mac IS for nerds be it for video editing, publishing, software development, Unix it sysadmin stuff etc. Even the last time they brought egpu to the Mac the first time, it was for something as niche as the whole vr wave. I could see them doing it for ml compute in the future. I doubt they will bring graphics along but wouldn’t
Be surprised if there’s more developments like the tinygrad driver (which was literally signed by Apple, so it already discounts your absurd claim).
> Same thing of having a phone plugged into a monitor and keyboard. Thats why all their products are separate.
Again, what are you on about with phones? Phones don’t matter.
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