InspiredCode

lowededwookie said:
Didn’t Apple already open up the iMessage protocols but the industry didn’t care?
The EU are idiots of the highest levels.

Android users have such an inferior experience even with RCS. Opening up Messages (before even considering E2EE implications) isn’t going to fix that when the apps themselves suck on Android.

Absolutely. AR is one of those things that Apple needs to do to get ahead for some future day or risk falling behind. It is existential for a tech company and may eventually cause a minor shake up in the industry. Just as book publishers had to embrace eBooks a bit before it was a great experience, AR will will have a similar curve.

cgWerks said:

thadec said:
… So, there never has been any reason for Apple Silicon Macs not supporting discrete graphics via M.2, PCIE or Thunderbolt other than Apple simply not wanting to. Which was the same reason why Apple locked Nvidia out of the Mac ecosystem and had people stuck with AMD GPU options only: purely because they wanted to. My guess is that Apple believed that they were capable of creating integrated GPUs that were comparable with Nvidia Ampere and AMD Radeon Pro, especially in the workloads that most Mac Pro buyers use them for. Maybe they are, but the issue may be that it isn't cost-effective to do so for a Mac Pro line that will sell less than a million units a year.

Exactly! And, if this is to be, this pretty much solves Apple’s gaping GPU hole. People who need a fairly good level of GPU performance might be fine ‘out of the box’ and people who need more, could add it. I just hope the eGPU aspect is the case, so it isn’t limited to the Mac Pro.

keithw said:
Absolutely 100% accurate! They simply "don't want to."  If my old iMac Pro can get top-notch graphics performance across a TB3 interface, there is simply no reason they couldn't do the same thing with ASi, whether through TB3 or a PCIe bus.

Yes,. for some things the bus matters, but for the most part, the bus isn’t saturated with normal app to GPU communication. TB3/4 has been mostly fine, and TB5 is on the way, right?

USB4v2 is on its way. That will be 2-3 times as fast as TB3/USB4 depending on if it is in an asymmetric mode. It all depends on the workload, but the bus isn’t the bottleneck for key professional workloads. The main thing is real-time rendering works a lot different on the SOC (assuming non-Apple IP) so Metal apps like games probably won’t be optimized for those GPUs, so this mixed use would be better for compute (raytracing, postproduction rendering, scientific work). It might work to some extent on unoptimized apps, but might be a mixed bag. At a minimum I think upscaling tech probably won’t work at all, so the GPUs will need to work a lot harder. Hopefully any GPU support will also support Thunderbolt, but Apple doesn’t necessarily need to allow that.

The SOC is good enough for most users- even high end users, but Apple will definitely create some kind of GPU expansion. 3D artists, postproduction, and scientific workloads need this expansion and although the details are unclear, there is no way Apple is going to leave these users out. This is much more critical then RAM expansion. They have users in these fields in-house precisely to give feedback to engineering.