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by smoldesu 1109 days ago
I think Apple is afraid of the AI people switching to CUDA and neglecting Apple's own accelerators. Whatever the case is, it's entirely petty - Nvidia still ships FreeBSD drivers and would probably gladly pick up Apple support again (at least for CUDA drivers).

If it was as simple as "Nvidia was an unreliable hardware partner", they wouldn't go out of their way to arbitrarily limit the drivers you can run.
3 comments
evilduck 1109 days ago
Apple’s icy relationship with Nvidia started right around when CUDA came into existence and before Metal ever existed. Nvidia created tensions between Apple and Intel and later handed Apple the headache of a class action lawsuit by knowingly shipping faulty GPUs.

I think Apple Silicon and Metal vs CUDA might have been a strategic reason for not repairing that relationship but that came years later.

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andrekandre 1109 days ago 

  > knowingly shipping faulty GPUs.
wow, how did i miss this...

https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...

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throw0101b 1109 days ago
> […] Nvidia still ships FreeBSD drivers and would probably gladly pick up Apple support again (at least for CUDA drivers).

Heck, Nvidia still ships Solaris drivers:

* https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/

I guess now that they have the infrastructure for these more niches OSes, it's not too hard to just keep going (especially if the kernel APIs are relatively stable).

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threeseed 1109 days ago
Apple doesn't arbitrarily limit the drivers you can run.

And up until now there hasn't been a Mac Nvidia could even sell graphics cards for.

Even now Mac Pro users will be such a tiny segment it's probably not worth the effort.

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ssijak 1109 days ago
you can connect external graphic cards via thunderbolt and external casings
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