Apple silicon Macs now support eGPUs, but not in the way you were expecting

Finally?

According to new reports, Apple has just signed drivers allowing for NVIDIA eGPUs to work on their Apple Silicon Macs for TinyCorp, an AI company. Previously, Apple locked down their Apple silicon Macs to not work with any other GPUs, even on their $7,000+ Mac Pro, which was recently discontinued, that had real PCIe slots that a GPU could have been put into. This angered users, as it removed a lot of the choice from their purchase decision-making. Apple's reasoning, in part, was that the GPU was already integrated so closely on the SoC's die of the Apple silicon chips, that using a dedicated GPU was not needed because of the latency decrease. Plus, adding a GPU, especially through Thunderbolt, while fast, is not as fast as the direct connection on the chip between the CPU and GPU in Apple silicon.

However, that is all changing now, as Apple has signed drivers for NVIDIA eGPUs for Apple silicon. TinyCorp has said that Apple has approved their software to not need to change system privacy and protection settings to do it, which is still a big step. It is not a full driver release, but it is starting to open up the possibilities.

Despite this, the only allowed use case for these GPUs is for AI LLM acceleration. This is certainly helpful, as Macs have been hugely popular for AI workloads, but it is a punch in the gut to everyone else. The expandability on nearly every other device with a Thunderbolt port that an eGPU has to offer, with more displays and better graphics, is great, and it is annoying that Apple will allow them (proving it is possible), but not for anything related to actual graphics processing.

This is still a huge step either way, as it could also allow for prices to possibly go down, as the demand shifts around more, and more options are available for AI acceleration on macOS. Hopefully someday, this can transform into actual eGPUs for Apple silicon Macs with proper graphics and Metal support.

Apple's new eGPU support is great and helps to accelerate AI greatly, but it is still annoying that they cannot be used for displays or other GPU functions other than AI. We will have to wait and see what Apple does soon.