M4, M4 Extreme, and eGPU

by Rian

eGPU, the popular Thunderbolt solution for underpowered laptops, seems to be sitting on the back burner for Apple. Considering MacBooks did open the way with much of the eGPU devices and support in the early days, it does make me wonder if the Californian company is seriously considering to make Apple Silicon chips to compete against dGPUs. Despite their outrageous price range, —flagship graphics card can easily account for one-third, if not half of the laptop’s price tag— there is always a demand. And I believe Mac Mini, with its affordable price and scalability, has shown that there is still a market left for workstation for graphics-intensive job.

Currently, all Apple Silicon Macs do not support any of the discrete graphics card available on the market. Even the Mac Pro, with its PCIE connectors inside the cheese grater box, is not capable of accepting dGPU. This comes at a certain disadvantage, mostly due to lack of higher tier chips (i.e. more cores) on Apple Silicon lines. M series chips are known for doubling the number of the cores; generally speaking, doubling base model becomes a Pro, two Pros become Max, and so on. But Apple stopped at Ultra, and the rumored ‘Extreme’ didn’t happen. For all the spaces inside the giant cheese grater chassis, Apple is essentially putting the same SoC as Mac Studio. The only use case for a Mac Pro is for reliability against thermal throttling* and niche cases with PCIE slots.

*Though, I haven’t heard Mac Studio suffering from thermal throttling under heavy load.

Unless Apple is planning to remove the Pro lines entirely, I don’t see why the classic desktop lines should bear the name of “Mac Pro”. Dropping the Pro lines would be against current Apple’s line up strategy, (e.g. iPhone Pro, iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, and so on) but there is no reason for the company to hold on to a classic design if it doesn’t have any merit to survive the market. The only scenario I’ve read had a big asterisk attached to it, saying, while it would be beneficial to have PCIE cards, there are already alternative Thunderbolt solutions available in the market.

There was a great and short analysis of what new Macs are becoming —Apple is no longer interested in lift-time upgradeability. All the fuss for expandability and modular designs died out as soon as Apple Silicon outshined the traditional x86. And I can see why it worked. It’s easier now than ever to simply buy a new Mac and “upgrade” by doing the trade-in of an older machine, or simply selling it off as used machine. It really becomes the question of what will you do with the old Intel machines, the ones that need ‘caretakers’ in the eyes of the new ARM era.