News Apple’s M1-Based Macs Do Not Support External Graphics Cards

[Admin]

Apple reportedly stops supporting external GPUs on the latest Macs.

Apple’s M1-Based Macs Do Not Support External Graphics Cards : Read more

 

[mo_osk]

I wonder what will happen to other external hardware such as sound card... People that rely on macOs for their work process should really start to wonder what will happen to their workflow.

 

[gggplaya]

I wonder what will happen to other external hardware such as sound card... People that rely on macOs for their work process should really start to wonder what will happen to their workflow.

Sound cards aren't super high bandwidth like a GPU, so it'll probably be just fine on USB. Now, the problem is with drivers for ARM. That'll be Apple's biggest hurdle in terms of adoption. It the same problem people had when Windows switched from 32bit to 64bit. If the manufacturer of the 3rd party product didn't provide a 64bit driver, you basically had to dump it in the trash.

 

[sizzling]

It the same problem people had when Windows switched from 32bit to 64bit. If the manufacturer of the 3rd party product didn't provide a 64bit driver, you basically had to dump it in the trash.

That’s probably part of Apple’s business case for doing this. Force users to buy new devices. Apple have shown little regard for backwards compatibility for anything in the past.

 

[gggplaya]

That’s probably part of Apple’s business case for doing this. Force users to buy new devices. Apple have shown little regard for backwards compatibility for anything in the past.

Many people have said this, but when I dive deeper into it, I've found actual technical reasons for loss of software updates.

Like when iOS switched from 32bit to 64bit sometimes around the iphone5 to iphone 6. People lost all iOS updates and were understandably upset. But the fact was their cpu's didn't have 64bit instruction sets. So they technically couldn't upgrade, period. It just wasn't possible.

Then more recently, I had to upgrade my friends iMAC with a Kepler GPU because Apple's latest OS's from High Sierra onward use a newer but significantly more low-level and efficient METAL graphics API. Which is why Mac's before 2012 could not be upgraded. Their GPU's didn't support the instructions needed to use Metal. Metal also unifies the graphics api between TvOS, iOS and MacOS. So there are technical reasons for dropping support for old hardware.

 

[MikeMK2]

Sound cards aren't super high bandwidth like a GPU, so it'll probably be just fine on USB. Now, the problem is with drivers for ARM. That'll be Apple's biggest hurdle in terms of adoption. It the same problem people had when Windows switched from 32bit to 64bit. If the manufacturer of the 3rd party product didn't provide a 64bit driver, you basically had to dump it in the trash.

Not a problem for sound card as they almost always use Apple plug and play low latency audio driver.
The problem right now is driver for capture cards.