They said eGPU

It depends how you define the market. In the 2001 microsoft case [0], the courts ruled Microsoft had a monopoly over the "Intel-based personal computer market".

Apple has a monopoly over the "M-chip" personal computer market. They have a monopoly over the iOS market with the app store. They have a monopoly over the driver market on macOS.

Like, Microsoft was found guilty of exploiting its monopoly for installing IE by default while still allowing other browser engines. On iOS, apple bundles safari by default and doesn't allow other browser engines.

If we apply the same standard that found MS a monopoly in the past, then Apple is obviously a monopoly, so at the very least I think it's fair to say that reasonable people can disagree about whether Apple is a monopoly or not.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Internet Explorer Mobile is a YouTube client. You're describing a client-server disagreement when the user is talking about an entirely client-based conflict.

Unfortunately, Apple still won't release iMessage for Android or Linux (unlike every other messenger platform, like whatsapp, telegram, wechat, microsoft teams, etc, which are all cross-platform).

Because of that, you need an apple device around to be able to deal with iMessage users.

I don't understand the logic for downvotes. We vote with our wallets. When I could not update the Ram on my personal Dell machine I asked for a Frame.work in my new job. As my Intel based FW at work had thermal throttling problems, for my next personal purchase I got an AMD one. As Ubuntu had shady practices, I installed Fedora, as Gnome forced UX choices I did not want, I used KDE. As I wanted my machine to be even more stable I use an immutable spin.

The machine I'm using now represents my choices and matches what matters to me, and works closer than perfectly than all my machines in the past

And yes, I have worked with macs, and no, the UX and the entire tyranny in the Apple ecosystem was not something I could live with.

Those $100 ones don't come with a cage. If you do want a cage, you'll end up with $180 in total, with zero warranty.

Article mentions: "Apple finally approved our driver for both AMD and NVIDIA"

Does not mention Intel (GPUs). Select AMD GPUs work on macOS, but...

Macs (both Intel and ARM) support TB, but eGPU only work on Intel Macs, and basically only with AMD.

Good news is for medium end gaming choices are solid, and CUDA works on AMD these days.

> But how will a GPU with small-ish but fast VRAM and great compute, augment a Mac with large but slow VRAM and weak compute?

It would work just like a discrete GPU when doing CPU+GPU inference: you'd run a few shared layers on the discrete GPU and place the rest in unified memory. You'd want to minimize CPU/GPU transfers even more than usual, since a Thunderbolt connection only gives you equivalent throughput to PCIe 4.0 x4.

My Mini is actually the smallest model so it actually has "small but slow VRAM" (haha!) so the reason I want the GPU for are the smaller Gemmas or Qwens. Realistically, I'll probably run on an RTX 6000 Pro but this might be fun for home.

We've seen many recent projects to stream models direct from SSD to a discrete GPU's limited VRAM on PCs.

How big a bottleneck is Thunderbolt 5 compared to an SSD? Is the 120 Gbps mode only available when linked to a monitor?

The term eGPU gives it away, but is inaccurate.

Something like eNPU or eTPU seems more appropriate here.

I think you missed a zero, TB5 does 80GB/s.

Apple was the only one stopping themselves from getting back in. It's not like the Mac is a trillion-dollar market segment to begin with.

USD starts sounding more and more like meaningless tokens. Billion here, trillion there. I still have 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars somewhere.