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Normally it wouldn’t. But Steve Jobs very publicly threw a camera at someone who crossed him. He had a reputation for long held grudges that fundamentally fract

Normally it wouldn’t. But Steve Jobs very publicly threw a camera at someone who crossed him. He had a reputation for long held grudges that fundamentally fractured business relationships (eg IIRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms for early announcing something, and similar reaction to integrating ZFS being announced early). Guy was an asshole, but he was an extraordinarily powerful asshole.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
In hindsight I wish I said he was an incredibly effective asshole. Lots of powerful people are assholes. It’s not often they continue to hold much power as a corpse.
- digisign 5y ago
  Still ten minutes to edit the post.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Meh, I’d rather walk my pup and eat dinner. If people are curious they’ll find it
astrange 5y ago
Nvidia is difficult to work with because they're as prideful (or more) as Apple. ZFS is hard to license commercially because it means having to negotiate with Oracle, who are evil. Well, and there were those desoldering GPUs.
- jen20 5y ago
  At the time it meant working with Sun not Oracle. Further, it didn’t need licensing - DTrace, under the same CDDL license - ships with macOS to this day.
  - chungy 5y ago
    Even further than that, Sun owned ZFS and was not bound to the license they gave to everyone else. If Apple demanded that ZFS on Mac OS X were a proprietary component, Sun might've actually gone with it.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Sun had, by then, mostly given up on the workstation market. They had everything to gain from making Unix mainstream, even if it was OSX instead of Solaris, and pretty much nothing to lose.
  - 4ad 5y ago
    FWIW the beta-quality implementation of ZFS in macOS was removed only after Oracle bought Sun. Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived. Also Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were known to be best buddies.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      > Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived. I think Larry Ellison discovered, much to his dissatisfaction, open source products and their forks, are incredibly hard to kill. I'd love to have seen his face when he realized that he wouldn't be able to kill MySQL.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Yeah Nvidia is a pain in the ass. But they weren’t banned from Apple platforms for that, as I understand it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- swills 5y ago
  I had a laptop with one of those GPUs. Apple replaced the motherboard. With the same exact thing. It's like if your defective Takata air bag was replaced with... a defective Takata air bag.
eigen 5y ago
> IRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms for early announcing something may also be the major issues with their chipset. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203254 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203254
- chronogram 5y ago
  Apple used Nvidia chips for years after the 8600M GT. I think their last use of Nvidia chips was the Kepler generation. Which meant that because a MBP came with a Nvidia 650 or something, you could put a Titan in a Mac Pro which was nice!
  - giobox 5y ago
    Nvidia still offered the "unofficial" official driver for a long time that let you run unsupported GPUs in Mac Pros or Hackintoshes for quite a while. I ran a couple of Maxwell generation NVidia parts this way, even though macOS out of the box didn't support them, Keppler wasn't the last that worked. The only downside back then was when a new macOS release hit, you would have to wait for Nvidia to release the updated third party driver. IIRC there was one major OS ten release I was stuck waiting a few months before the driver landed. This extended the lifespan of a lot of Mac Pros greatly!
- smoldesu 5y ago
  It was a lot of he-says she-says with those chips, but as far as I understood it, it mostly came down to Apple using cheap solder. When the Nvidia chips inevitably started to heat up, it caused the solder to come loose which caused the notorious graphics issues. IIRC, there were even reports of people reviving dead or malfunctioning logic boards by doing ye olde "oven trick", which pretty much confirmed that it was an assembly issue, not a manufacturing one.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    "Soldergate" impacted all vendors that shipped nVIDIA chipsets back at the time, and the cause was not "cheap" solder - rather, the back-then relatively new lead-free solder that was mandated by the European Union's RoHS directive in ~2005-2006. The manufacturers didn't have much experience with the stuff back then and chose a solder formulation that didn't hold up well to repetitive thermal stress.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

In hindsight I wish I said he was an incredibly effective asshole. Lots of powerful people are assholes. It’s not often they continue to hold much power as a corpse.

digisign 5y ago
Still ten minutes to edit the post.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Meh, I’d rather walk my pup and eat dinner. If people are curious they’ll find it

astrange 5y ago

Nvidia is difficult to work with because they're as prideful (or more) as Apple. ZFS is hard to license commercially because it means having to negotiate with Oracle, who are evil. Well, and there were those desoldering GPUs.

jen20 5y ago
At the time it meant working with Sun not Oracle. Further, it didn’t need licensing - DTrace, under the same CDDL license - ships with macOS to this day.
- chungy 5y ago
  Even further than that, Sun owned ZFS and was not bound to the license they gave to everyone else. If Apple demanded that ZFS on Mac OS X were a proprietary component, Sun might've actually gone with it.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Sun had, by then, mostly given up on the workstation market. They had everything to gain from making Unix mainstream, even if it was OSX instead of Solaris, and pretty much nothing to lose.
- 4ad 5y ago
  FWIW the beta-quality implementation of ZFS in macOS was removed only after Oracle bought Sun. Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived. Also Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were known to be best buddies.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived. I think Larry Ellison discovered, much to his dissatisfaction, open source products and their forks, are incredibly hard to kill. I'd love to have seen his face when he realized that he wouldn't be able to kill MySQL.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
Yeah Nvidia is a pain in the ass. But they weren’t banned from Apple platforms for that, as I understand it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
swills 5y ago
I had a laptop with one of those GPUs. Apple replaced the motherboard. With the same exact thing. It's like if your defective Takata air bag was replaced with... a defective Takata air bag.

eigen 5y ago

> IRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms for early announcing something may also be the major issues with their chipset. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203254 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203254

chronogram 5y ago
Apple used Nvidia chips for years after the 8600M GT. I think their last use of Nvidia chips was the Kepler generation. Which meant that because a MBP came with a Nvidia 650 or something, you could put a Titan in a Mac Pro which was nice!
- giobox 5y ago
  Nvidia still offered the "unofficial" official driver for a long time that let you run unsupported GPUs in Mac Pros or Hackintoshes for quite a while. I ran a couple of Maxwell generation NVidia parts this way, even though macOS out of the box didn't support them, Keppler wasn't the last that worked. The only downside back then was when a new macOS release hit, you would have to wait for Nvidia to release the updated third party driver. IIRC there was one major OS ten release I was stuck waiting a few months before the driver landed. This extended the lifespan of a lot of Mac Pros greatly!
smoldesu 5y ago
It was a lot of he-says she-says with those chips, but as far as I understood it, it mostly came down to Apple using cheap solder. When the Nvidia chips inevitably started to heat up, it caused the solder to come loose which caused the notorious graphics issues. IIRC, there were even reports of people reviving dead or malfunctioning logic boards by doing ye olde "oven trick", which pretty much confirmed that it was an assembly issue, not a manufacturing one.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  "Soldergate" impacted all vendors that shipped nVIDIA chipsets back at the time, and the cause was not "cheap" solder - rather, the back-then relatively new lead-free solder that was mandated by the European Union's RoHS directive in ~2005-2006. The manufacturers didn't have much experience with the stuff back then and chose a solder formulation that didn't hold up well to repetitive thermal stress.