cocoaken

Why do the European Union care how many users in Europe Apple has? Shouldn't they only care about how many users are in the European Union (which is a subset of Europe), i.e. the territory they have jurisdiction over?

The European Digital Services Act is about to be fully enforced, and as part of the law, Apple has been forced to disclose how many users it has in Europe for the first time in five years.

As part of its mandatory reporting for the European Union Digital Services Act (DSA), Apple has been forced to publish discrete user numbers for online services. The values only apply to Europe.

cy_starkman said:

oseame said:

MacPro said:

wizard69 said:

Interesting board!   I can see Apple charging $1500 for this card.   

LOL. Good one.  However, if they did why wouldn't you just buy from AMD?

Because the stock model won't come with Mac firmware and as a result you won't have a boot screen unless you flash the card or you keep the card that comes with the Mac Pro and use it when you need boot options. Also, I don't think you can use FileVault without a card running Mac firmware.

why do you think Apple keeps boot options on the video card? 

They don't but if you alt-boot (into the "which device do you want to boot from" or "enter your firmware password" screens) you can't see what you're doing (it is literally a black screen) if your GPU doesn't have Mac firmware on it. Hence as Oseame said, you need to either flash a (PC) GPU to have Mac Firmware on it, or you need the original Mac GPU that came with your Mac so you can swap it in whenever you need to access the boot screens. The problem with the first approach (flashing) is it's not trivial / you can easily brick your card if you don't know what you're doing. The problem with the latter is that the original card that came with your Mac may no longer be able to boot the current OS.

For instance the last of the cheesegrater Mac Pros (2012) came with cards that aren't Metal compatible. So if you added a PC (non-flashed) GPU, which was Metal compatible, then your Mac suddenly had an adrenaline boost in day to day usage. However if you then tried to install a newer macOS that as one of the system requirements required a Metal-compatible card, you can't: it runs the installer (once downloaded), reboots into the .dmg of the installer, finds no Metal compatible card with Mac firmware on it (to show you the installer wizard), bails, and boots back into whatever OS you came from beforehand. So in that particular situation, only a Metal compatible card that was either a "Mac" version (£££) or a PC version that had been flashed with Mac firmware, would get you to that later macOS.