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I don't know how Apple has evaded regulatory scrutiny for their refusal to sign Nvidia's eGPU drivers since 2018.
by bangonkeyboard 6mo ago
I don't know how Apple has evaded regulatory scrutiny for their refusal to sign Nvidia's eGPU drivers since 2018.
- GeekyBear 6mo agoThe same way Google evaded regulatory scrutiny for refusing to allow a YouTube client for Windows Phone?
- bigyabai 6mo agoInternet Explorer Mobile is a YouTube client. You're describing a client-server disagreement when the user is talking about an entirely client-based conflict.
- realusername 6mo agoGoogle deployed custom code to actively block the clients so it went beyond just a disagreement
- bigyabai 6mo agoThat's normal behavior when your server is being reverse-engineered or abused. Video bandwidth is not free. Apple's decision is not constrained by server logic or ballooning costs, it is entirely a client-based policy to not sign CUDA drivers.
- GeekyBear 6mo ago> That's normal behavior when your server is being reverse-engineered or abused. Video bandwidth is not free. Microsoft rewrote their Windows Phone native client to pass through Google's ads. Google still blocked it. Was it normal behavior when Google blocked Amazon Fire devices from connecting to YouTube with a web browser during the Google/Amazon corporate spat? To be fair, Google did back down almost immediately when the tech press picked up on it. Not allowing a native client for your monopoly market share video service on Amazon devices while also blocking Amazon's web browser on those devices is making things a bit too obvious.
- bigyabai 6mo agoAgain - servers are always offered at-will. If the service provider wants to boot you out, their TOS usually won't give you the right to renegotiate service. Clients are not offered at-will, they either work or they don't. Nvidia ships AArch64 UNIX drivers, Apple is the one that neglects their UNIX clients.
- GeekyBear 6mo agoUsing your monopoly market share video service as a weapon against companies offering platforms that compete with your own is textbook antitrust behavior. Google used YouTube as a weapon against both Windows Phone and devices running Amazon's Fire fork of Android.
- bigyabai 6mo ago> monopoly market share video service A "monopoly" "service"? What have they monopolized, laziness? It's not the App Store, you can go replace it with DailyMotion at your earliest convenience. You're still retreading why your original comment was not at all relevant to the critique being made. We have precedent for prosecuting monopolistic behavior in America, but it doesn't encompass services even when they're mandatory to use the client. It does have a precedent for arbitrarily preventing competitors from shipping a runtime that competes with the default OS, incidentally.
- GeekyBear 6mo agoWhen your product has a monopoly market share, you don't get to use it as a weapon against competitors in other markets, even if you claim there is some imaginary exception to antitrust law involving servers.
- bigyabai 6mo agoYou don't get to demand that the server support your endpoint, period. There is no precedent for that ever happening in US antitrust law, because it's not anticompetitive. If you think otherwise, make your case to Google's lawyers instead of spinning hypothetical case law.
- realusername 6mo agoThere hasn't been any abuse in this story as far as I know, it's not like mass downloads of videos happened with their client.
- bigyabai 6mo agoThat's besides the point, you don't own the server. You cannot expect the server to work forever, or demand a right to access it. You do own the client though. In the example upstream, the failure to support macOS clients can't be blamed on Nvidia because they already wrote AArch64 UNIX support.
- GeekyBear 6mo agoYou cannot use a monopoly market share product like YouTube as a weapon against companies who compete with you in other areas. This is as basic as antitrust law gets.
- realusername 6mo agoWhen you have a monopoly like YouTube, yes you can expect to have an access to the platform if it prevents competition. It's textbook antitrust laws.
- bigyabai 6mo agoYou're going to need to cite legal precedent for that. I could not go sue HBO for monopolizing Game of Thrones and refusing to stream it in 8K to my Linux PC. There are no damages.
- realusername 6mo agoGoogle is above the law in the US, there's a reason why the CEO sits at the presidential inauguration. It's not about laws but power. And your example is pretty poor, HBO doesn't have a 10th of the power of YouTube.
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- MBCook 6mo agoThe government doesn’t care? They’re a minority of the market? The vast majority of their computers didn’t have slots to put Nvidia GPUs in, and now none of them do?
- hgoel 6mo agoThey said eGPU
- the_arun 6mo agoYeh external GPU
- frollogaston 6mo agoeGPUs are kind of a joke. People would be way more likely to use dedicated GPUs with Macs if they had PCIe slots.
- 15155 6mo agoWhat exactly is the difference between an internal PCIe slot and Oculink or Thunderbolt from an electrical and functional perspective?
- wpm 6mo agoAn internal PCIe slot can be had in up to 16x 5.0, whereas Thunderbolt 5 maxes out at 4x of 4.0. Plus you have another Thunderbolt controller in between the CPU and the hardware, and it takes more energy to push that many bits 1m over a cable vs a few dozen cm over traces. Also Thunderbolt is trivially disconnected, which in many critical workflows is not a positive, but an opportunity for ill-timed interruptions. Plus I don't have to buy a fucking dongle/dock for a real goddamn slot, make room for external power supplies, etc.
- MBCook 6mo agoThe last Mac with good PCIe slots was the 2019-2023 Mac Pro. So that’s almost a decade ago, and sold poorly. It never got a real refresh. Before that was the pre-trash can Mac Pro in 2006-2012. So that was canceled most of a decade before the 2019 model. High bandwidth PCIe hasn’t been a thing in Apple world for most of 15 years.
- mulderc 6mo agoApple doesn’t have a monopoly in any market they are in.
- TheDong 6mo agoIt depends how you define the market. In the 2001 microsoft case [0], the courts ruled Microsoft had a monopoly over the "Intel-based personal computer market". Apple has a monopoly over the "M-chip" personal computer market. They have a monopoly over the iOS market with the app store. They have a monopoly over the driver market on macOS. Like, Microsoft was found guilty of exploiting its monopoly for installing IE by default while still allowing other browser engines. On iOS, apple bundles safari by default and doesn't allow other browser engines. If we apply the same standard that found MS a monopoly in the past, then Apple is obviously a monopoly, so at the very least I think it's fair to say that reasonable people can disagree about whether Apple is a monopoly or not. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
- raw_anon_1111 6mo agoThat’s not how monopoly definitions work. That makes about as much sense as saying Nintendo has a monopoly on Nintendo consoles or Ford has a monopoly on Mustangs
- Underphil 6mo agoI don't think any of what you're describing are legal "monopolies". I don't have a single Apple product in my life but I'm fairly sure there's nothing I'm prevented from doing because of that.
- TheDong 6mo agoAnd back in the "Microsoft has a monopoly on IE6" ruling's days, I did not use Windows or Internet Explorer, and I was not prevented from doing anything because of that. Netscape Navigator on Linux worked fine. Sure, I occasionally hit sites that were broken and only worked in IE, but I also right now frequently hit apps that are "macOS only" (like when Claude Cowork released, or a ton of other YC company's apps). Microsoft was found guilty, so clearly the bar is not what you're trying to claim.
- jtbayly 6mo agoIsn't all you have to do disable SIP?
- frollogaston 6mo agoYeah I'm pretty sure Nvidia just doesn't care to make Mac drivers. For years there was no SIP, Apple sold the Mac Pro which could take Nvidia GPUs, but you basically couldn't use Nvidia because of how bad and outdated the drivers were. I had a GTX 650 in my Mac Pro for a while, it was borderline unusable.
- mrpippy 6mo agoEvidence that NVIDIA has even been trying? My understanding is that Apple didn’t allow 3rd parties to write graphics drivers past 10.13, but they could’ve done a non-graphics driver like this.
- trueno 6mo agoi emailed jen sen huang at the very tail end of the maxwell era and p much begged for maxwell support on macos. i didnt expect a reply, especially since i guessed his email based on some "how to find ceo emails" google search result. he actually did reply weeks later and said "i didnt realize people wanted this, my team has added them. go check now". pretty sure that was the last time nvidia drivers came to macos. there's a lot of assumptions made with this topic, particularly the assumption that apple is blocking them. at least in my experience the opposite was true, nvidia just flat out wasn't making them. however i don't doubt the truth lies somewhere in between: nvidia and apple have a pretty much nonexistant relationship now. i dont know whats required here but i also don't doubt apple makes this experience suck butt for any interested parties.
- pjmlp 6mo agoThey aren't a monopoly, hence why.