If Apple goes with a smaller Mac Pro design again, they can make a rack for that with some slots for storage and PCIe cards and Apple wouldn't have to make one. They made rack solutions for the cylinder Mac Pro: For a company like Apple, a few thousand units is nothing but it can mean the difference between these companies being able to stay in business or not. These are the kind of businesses that depend on PCIe support in the Mac. JAddition: A new rumor suggests that Apple might build additional graphics processing capability into external displays, and this might also be an alternative method to essentially add an eGPU to Apple Silicon Macs. To cover $1.9m payroll, they'd need to sell just over 3,000 units. If they make a 30% margin on a $2100 sale, they make $630.
Sonnet is a small company, it says here 26 employees: There will likely be 100 million Intel Macs in use for a few years from now. While new buyers will continue to buy M1 Macs and grow that userbase by around 30 million every year, those Intel Macs get sold on. There are over 100 million Intel Macs in use and under 30 million M1 Macs. The only way an eGPU will be economical again is if conditions change enough that GPUs can flood the market and lower prices considerably. I feel like future Apple Silicon will be capable of enough GPU performance that adding an eGPU will not add enough performance for the staggering additional price, especially considering the bandwidth limit of Thunderbolt 3/4. That is why, even though I use an eGPU today, I will not be heartbroken if Apple Silicon never supports it.
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The Sonnet combo of the lower-end Breakaway Box plus 6900 XT is $2100 retail. Because while the technology would exist to beat it in an eGPU, the total cost of the eGPU enclosure plus fast enough graphics card would be punitive. If the next gen Apple Silicon M1x or whatever comes with a GPU that perform in the range of 50-60% of the GPU performance of an RX 6900XT, most users will not find it worth it to get an eGPU. But here’s the kicker…while the RX 6900 XT being pushed by Sonnet for use in the article benchmarks 3 to 4 times faster than my RX580, it’s retailing for ten times the price! The popular Radeon RX580, while outdated now, still meets my needs and cost me less than $200. I am currently still using an eGPU with my Intel 13” MacBook Pro (integrated graphics only of course) while I wait for the better-than-M1 Macs to come out, and I am sure glad I bought when I did (2018).
What is more true is that the total market of Windows and existing Intel Macs is still quite large.īut the cost/benefit calculation of an eGPU has completely gone underwater since the pandemic-driven chip shortage causing GPU prices to skyrocket. I’d like to think that the Apple Silicon eGPU restriction is temporary, or maybe confined to the M1. Unless Sonnet knows something the rest of us don't… :smiley: Odd that anyone would be releasing hardware that only works with Intel Macs at this point.