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> IRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms for early announcing something may also be the major issues with their chipset. https://support.app

by 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.
  - noisem4ker 5y ago
    See also the Xbox 360 RRoD plague from the same period.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- giobox 5y ago
  The "bumps" (industry term for solder left on bottom of chip to attach to a board/circuit) in question are specified by the GPU chip vendor, not Apple. This is why every single NVidia customer during this period was affected, not just Apple. NVidia ended up making several large compensation payments to several big vendors such as HP too etc. Its amazing how quickly people have forgotten what a big a deal this was, it was terrible for much of the laptop industry for a year or two. It was after "Bumpgate" as tech media termed it at the time that Apple's relationship with Nvidia ended too, coincidence or not. > https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understands-bumpgate/ https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understan... As for it being "he-says she-says with those chips", I can't agree. There was an entire settled class action lawsuit at the time directly blaming NVidia for all affected Dell, HP and Apple computers. I've had to raid web.archive.org, but you can still find the details: https://web.archive.org/web/20101011074425/http://www.nvidiasettlement.com/pdfs/NVF_NOT.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20101011074425/http://www.nvidia...
masklinn 5y ago
Nah Apple has had plenty of hardware issues over the years. However Jobs was a master presenter and showman, and extremely anal about getting L&F just right (go check the calculator story, or recounting of his preparation for keynotes — you can also see how things broke down as soon as they started bringing in third parties, or after Jobs’ death). Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up. [0] I expect detrimentally so at times, Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised — at least under Jobs; go check the history of the iPhone for flagrant examples of that where you’d just see colleagues disappear into unknown voids and HIG went full SCP
- amelius 5y ago
  > Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised Oh, I have been told that Apple could only build such great products because of the tight integration that would never be possible if Apple was split into e.g. a hardware and software company.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    Apple only feels compartmentalised if (a) you're a low level engineer and (b) you're working on a secretive project. Otherwise it's a normal big tech company. But the team responsible for writing all of the Forth firmware code very much worked closely with the hardware teams as you would expect.
- threeseed 5y ago
  > Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up. I sat across from a Graphic Designer at Apple who accidentally published some of the iPods marketing assets to the website a few days before the launch. It was discovered soon after by a rumour site and there was a flurry of meetings to fix it. The designer was never fired or reprimanded. And he never received a screaming phone call from Steve Jobs. I am not privy to vendor negotiations but would be really surprised if Apple was making multi-billion decisions based solely on a vendor leaking something. Especially back then when Apple wasn't out of its recovery.

by eigen 5y ago

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.
- noisem4ker 5y ago
  See also the Xbox 360 RRoD plague from the same period.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
giobox 5y ago
The "bumps" (industry term for solder left on bottom of chip to attach to a board/circuit) in question are specified by the GPU chip vendor, not Apple. This is why every single NVidia customer during this period was affected, not just Apple. NVidia ended up making several large compensation payments to several big vendors such as HP too etc. Its amazing how quickly people have forgotten what a big a deal this was, it was terrible for much of the laptop industry for a year or two. It was after "Bumpgate" as tech media termed it at the time that Apple's relationship with Nvidia ended too, coincidence or not. > https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understands-bumpgate/ https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understan... As for it being "he-says she-says with those chips", I can't agree. There was an entire settled class action lawsuit at the time directly blaming NVidia for all affected Dell, HP and Apple computers. I've had to raid web.archive.org, but you can still find the details: https://web.archive.org/web/20101011074425/http://www.nvidiasettlement.com/pdfs/NVF_NOT.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20101011074425/http://www.nvidia...

masklinn 5y ago

Nah Apple has had plenty of hardware issues over the years. However Jobs was a master presenter and showman, and extremely anal about getting L&F just right (go check the calculator story, or recounting of his preparation for keynotes — you can also see how things broke down as soon as they started bringing in third parties, or after Jobs’ death). Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up. [0] I expect detrimentally so at times, Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised — at least under Jobs; go check the history of the iPhone for flagrant examples of that where you’d just see colleagues disappear into unknown voids and HIG went full SCP

amelius 5y ago
> Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised Oh, I have been told that Apple could only build such great products because of the tight integration that would never be possible if Apple was split into e.g. a hardware and software company.
- threeseed 5y ago
  Apple only feels compartmentalised if (a) you're a low level engineer and (b) you're working on a secretive project. Otherwise it's a normal big tech company. But the team responsible for writing all of the Forth firmware code very much worked closely with the hardware teams as you would expect.
threeseed 5y ago
> Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up. I sat across from a Graphic Designer at Apple who accidentally published some of the iPods marketing assets to the website a few days before the launch. It was discovered soon after by a rumour site and there was a flurry of meetings to fix it. The designer was never fired or reprimanded. And he never received a screaming phone call from Steve Jobs. I am not privy to vendor negotiations but would be really surprised if Apple was making multi-billion decisions based solely on a vendor leaking something. Especially back then when Apple wasn't out of its recovery.