[brcmthrowaway]

I still believe the lack of NVIDIA GPU support in the Mac Pro will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech.

Anyway, the Mac Pro is dead now. There's only so much sales audio and video professionals can provide.

[runjake]

There was some bad history between Apple and Nvidia. Perhaps with a new generation of leadership at Apple things might change.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1hmgmuf/apples_hi...

[mercutio2]

I wasn't in the room when it happened, but this is very different than the story told internally about why Apple became allergic to Nvidia.

Arguably more petty. SJ has been dead for almost 15 year now, I imagine the C-suite might get over it at some point.

[burnte]

> I imagine the C-suite might get over it at some point.

Not at Apple. They have a looooooong institutional memory that's passed down. They're still pissed at Gizmodo. I'm shocked they made a deal with Intel. I think if it hadn't been for the global political uncertainty right now they would not have signed that fab deal with Intel.

[kalleboo]

> Arguably more petty

I can believe it. IIRC Jobs also snubbed ATI once after they leaked the GPUs going in the next PowerMac model.

[runjake]

Do tell. Or at least provide hints?

[firecall]

Maybe with Tim and Jensen going on holiday together in China, the relationship might be healed somewhat.

Things have moved on since the days where GPUs in Macs were a priority.

But then the AI race has changed things. So who knows - maybe we will one day see official eGPU support from Apple and new drivers from nVidia. Wouldn't put on money on it though....

[Aurornis]

> I still believe the lack of NVIDIA GPU support in the Mac Pro will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech.

I don’t know about that. Apple supported some full size GPUs in past product lines and the number of users was very small. Granted, LLMs change that demand but the audience for Mac Pro buyers who would use a full-size GPU that is impossible to obtain is almost nothing compared to their laptop sales.

[bigyabai]

The audience for Mac Pro buyers is almost nothing, full stop. It failed to find a niche, and now Apple is getting rid of it: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/26/apple-discontinues-mac-...

Part of the reason the new Mac Pro failed to find an audience can definitely be blamed on macOS' hostility to third party hardware. Who knows what Apple would be worth if they beat Nvidia's Grace CPU to the datacenter market. It was certainly their opportunity.

[pjmlp]

Yes, because they already moved on to workstations powered by either Windows or Red-Hat Linux/Ubuntu.

The only ones left were people like John Siracusa that still hoped to the very last minute, that Apple would change their mind.

[brcmthrowaway]

True, they could do any number of things. But a datacenter play would appear quite random to investors and their core audience. Broadcom + Nvidia however...

[trollbridge]

Apple seems to be content to sell shovels in the AI gold rush.

Admittedly… what’s on my desk? A MacBook M4 Air, a Mac Studio, and there’s an x86 iMac in the corner.

What goes in the travel bag? A MacBook Pro or the Air.

Every time I look at buying something else the math doesn’t add up.

The 5090 sits in a commodity PC chassis. It’s not like I need a model running on my own computer.

[pjmlp]

The missed opportunity is like with server market, now giving the workstation market to Windows and Linux.

It isn't only audio and video.

[jbverschoor]

I guess that little problem with the Nvidia chips overheating in the MacBook Pro didn’t give Apple a lot of confidence

[bigyabai]

The Mac Pro isn't a Macbook Pro. It has socketed PCI slots and should be able to support the user's hardware in macOS' software, regardless of how Apple feels.

[xp84]

Seriously, the decades-long grudge against Nvidia that we always hear about seems like the most ridiculous and immature business move. I expect that kind of thing from an individual, you know, “I NEVER fly American Airlines!!!” but in business, such a permanent ban on one of the two players in a market, the leader no less. I don’t get it.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that much now because they’ve literally exited all the businesses where an external GPU is going to matter. But sticking with AMD all that time out of spite is just wild.

[Melatonic]

Audio and Video professionals jumped ship around the time Apple canned all the pro software