Apple would switch back to Nvidia in 2012 MacBook Pros.Ģ013 marked a substantial shift away from Nvidia. Tried to use an AMD chipset in the MacBook Pros in 2011 and ended up in yet another class action lawsuit over faulty GPUs. This was the dividing moment by most accounts.īy this point, multiple publications reported a frosty air between Nvidia and Apple, although the high-end MacBook Pros would continue to use Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia saw Apple as a smaller player and refused to extend support costs beyond an unknown amount of money (it only handed out $10,000,000 to Dell after it threatend to pull from Nvidia), putting another twist in the Apple relationship. This still landed Apple in a class action lawsuit. The problem came down to the soldering that held the a chip it's printed circuit board cracked under thermal stress. GPUs were failing at a steady clip (not just for Apple), and Apple had to extend its warranties for consumers in 2009 ( ending in 2012) and issued a software update in 2009 trying to mitigate the GPU issues. Apple had 2, the MacBook Pro using the GeForce 8600M GT. HP at the time said it had 24 models of laptops affected, and Dell had 15. Meanwhile, in 2008 Nvidia was hit with a securities lawsuit around knowingly shipping faulty GPUs and trying to mitigate the problem through firmware, burning $196 million for replacements. This wasn't the only issue Apple was having with its relationship with Nvidia. Apple continued to use Nvidia GPUs, but sadly, its lower-end offerings were constrained to Intel's supremely mediocre integrated GPUs. Nvidia tried to court Apple into its legal saga but ultimately failed, leaving Nvidia feeling spurned. Neither company was endeared to Apple, as the squabble had many industry people speculating that Apple may look into AMD processors, even though AMD had very few competitive offerings in the laptop space. Predictably, Intel then filed suit against Nvidia, throwing Apple's plans into disarray. Nvidia pulling a fast one on Intel put Apple in the center of its own controversial strategy. Intel was much more central to Apple as a business partner, and Intel enjoyed Apple in its company roster.

At the time, Intel's integrated GPUs were pretty bad and could not support OpenCL, thus limiting the amount of offloading to the GPU that Apple could reliably bank with the OS. It'd allowed Apple to stop using the underwhelming Intel integrated GPUs and unify them to mirror the desktops. The advantage was that Apple was going to be able to simplify its GPU strategy. Apple was the first PC maker to adopt Nvidia's new chipset. Then in 2008, Nvidia produced Nehalem-based chipsets that bypassed the Intel Northbridge (Memory controller) and South Bridge (I/0 controller) chipset. In 2004, Intel and NVIDIA joined forces for a patent licensing agreement for Intel CPUs with integrated memory controllers, the MCP79 and the MCP89. To understand this, we have to jump back to 2004. Apple pulled into a legal battle that was primarily between Nvidia and Intel.

The year 2008 is when the relationship with NVidia changed during a flurry of events. As important as Apple was during this time frame, it wasn't the goliath it is today. Still, Apple continued to offer plenty of Nvidia options. In 2004, 30-Inch Apple's Cinema Display release was delayed by Nvidia's GeForce 8600 Ultra yields, not producing the cards in a timely enough fashion for Apple's liking. The first Mac to ship with an Nvidia chipset was the Nvidia GeForce 2 MX, with the G4 Digital Audio in 2001, and Apple would also at the same time ship the PowerMacs with an option GeForce 3 GPU. I don't have any particular insider info, but what I do have is the power of hind-sight. Over the years wrote a few popular guides on using Nvidia GPUs on the Mac and wrote a lot about Mac GPUs as part of my monstrous The Definitive Classic Mac Pro (2006-2012) Upgrade Guide. It was a crazy leap of faith as I read some guy who claimed to have done it on (once a powerhouse of a website for power users) and then reported back the steps I used to flash the card to the community. It's a particular topic that interests me as it dates back to when I bought my first Nvidia GPU in 2001, a VisionTek GeForce 3, and used DOS with nvflash.exe to load the Mac Firmware onto the GPU. I've tried to piece together the narrative as told by many news reports over the years, much of it I read as it was happening. It's Apple's management doesn't want Nvidia support in macOS, and that's a bad sign for the Mac Pro is a great first stop, but it's a bit dated and self-referential. Still, I have to give them credit as they've followed the Apple/Nvidia saga better than any other publication. The video version differs slightly as it includes more personal ancedotes and asides.Īppleinsider isn't my favorite source for Apple news as it's too evangelical, generally portraying Apple as the protagonist in its reporting.

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