You mean the 0.1 percent (if even that high) of "customers" who haven't bought a Mac Pro in 10 years and need an eGPU to keep the machine relevant? That crowd? Yeah, I'll bet Apple stays up late at night trying to figure out ways to keep that bunch happy ...
The reality is that Apple has no actual reason or incentive to support eGPUs in obsolete Mac models, and frankly given the current craze for high-end video cards needed for sucking up the planet's resources for crypto-mining, I'll be a bit relieved if this dropping of support is permanent.
As some others said above, if it's a matter of choices (and it always is) I'd prefer they focus on native support for a wider variety of cards in TB3 than spending those resources on people trying to forestall the long-overdue hardware update for their decade old slab-side's now-unsupported versions of Thunderbolt. To me, this sounds far more like a job for "the community" of those who actually need it (or third-party vendors who cater to that specialized market) to develop.
Mostly it is the third party application developers that need to pull their finger out for APFS support. Even Paragon's incredible utility Hard Disk Manager that can even back up a cloned and bootable Boot Camp is still struggling with APFS. I'd buy the excuse that developers are waiting for APFS's development to finalize if it were not for Carbon Copy Cloner's ability to be bang unto date with even the latest betas as we went along. Kudos to Mike Bombich.
That's because Apple has pulled another Apple and hasn't released any developer documentation for APFS, whilst HFS+ was entirely documented. Paragon's Hard Disk Manager does low-level manipulations with the filesystem, similarly to Coriolis's iPartition and iDefrag. They can't just assume how Apple's implemented certain things, since false assumptions may mean critical user data could be lost. Mike Bombich's software does no low-level manipulation of the storage device or its filesystem, simply copying every file verbatim. It actually uses rsync to do all the work, he just makes a GUI.
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The reality is that Apple has no actual reason or incentive to support eGPUs in obsolete Mac models, and frankly given the current craze for high-end video cards needed for sucking up the planet's resources for crypto-mining, I'll be a bit relieved if this dropping of support is permanent.
As some others said above, if it's a matter of choices (and it always is) I'd prefer they focus on native support for a wider variety of cards in TB3 than spending those resources on people trying to forestall the long-overdue hardware update for their decade old slab-side's now-unsupported versions of Thunderbolt. To me, this sounds far more like a job for "the community" of those who actually need it (or third-party vendors who cater to that specialized market) to develop.
That's because Apple has pulled another Apple and hasn't released any developer documentation for APFS, whilst HFS+ was entirely documented. Paragon's Hard Disk Manager does low-level manipulations with the filesystem, similarly to Coriolis's iPartition and iDefrag. They can't just assume how Apple's implemented certain things, since false assumptions may mean critical user data could be lost. Mike Bombich's software does no low-level manipulation of the storage device or its filesystem, simply copying every file verbatim. It actually uses rsync to do all the work, he just makes a GUI.