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.
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.
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 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”.
“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.
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.
> 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.
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.