Apple Turns Its Back on Customers and Nvidia with MacOS Mojave | Hacker News Reader

Apple Turns Its Back on Customers and Nvidia with MacOS Mojave

forbes.com

20 pointsingve22 comments

I’m confused as to why they are breaking something/have broken something that not only worked in the previous version, but also seems to be a big push from them on a technology front.

Yeah I dunno. It’s like Apple has beef with Nvidia or they are just riding out a contract with AMD until Apple gets their own GPU’s in the macs. Seriously annoying.

Apple has broken the DisplayLink drivers for me at least twice between OS upgrades. This forced me to tear down my whole dock / desk, and wait months for a new driver. I don't know what is so special about OSX and their graphics drivers that they require such drastic driver changes.

Don't upgrade immediately? Older macOS releases receive security updates for three years, so you have time!

Is there some special access nvidia needs for a graphics driver? because i've definitely seen mojave compatible kexts working.

Apple is gating the process.

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1042520/driver/-whe...

This is a somewhat cryptic statement that I'm not inclined to take at face value.

I find it very unlikely that decided "After signing nVidia's drivers for years—and signing tons of other weird, niche hardware drivers for years—we have arbitrarily decided to not sign any Mojave-compatible nVidia drivers."

(Also, if this did happen, I don't think it would be out of the question for nVidia to just release unsigned drivers. They're pretty easy to install in macOS, at least compared to Windows, and the type of user who is installing third party graphics cards likely knows how to partially disable SIP.)

The lack of drivers is almost certainly related to Mojave's use of Metal 2 for UI rendering.

Keep in mind, nVidia did not add Pascal support to these drivers until six months after the GTX 1080 launched. Maxwell support was similarly slow. I imagine Apple is not being particularly helpful, but it's also clear that Mac support is a very, very low priority for nVidia.

In order for a kext to work while System Integrity Protection is turned on, it needs to be signed by Apple.

Other than that... no. Which is why I'm inclined to blame nVidia, particularly given their history with Mac driver releases.

I have a Mid 2014 MBP with a GeForce GT 750M currently running Sierra, and I'm so glad I saw this before I "upgraded" to Mojave! Despite my system claiming that it supports Metal, there are numerous reports of people with systems just like mine whose computers have effectively been ruined (slowed to an inoperable crawl) by Mojave.

My late 2013 with the same GPU is still going strong but it's going to need replacing at some point. I'll have to move off Apple at that point as Nvidia (CUDA) is a must for me.

Honestly, Mojave has been nothing but trouble for me, which is a shame because for some reason, it had the feeling of a release that would be particularly strong, and I was initially excited to upgrade.

Aside from performance issues (admittedly minor in my case), the tcc dialogues "X wants access to control Y" are such a freaking pain that I'm almost happy that the lack of nVidia drivers forced me to downgrade back to High Sierra.

I have a Mid 2014 MBP with a GeForce GT 750M, and am running macOS Mojave without problems.

Why not a fan of either company Apple or Nvidia. AMD has cards that work. I am sure they like this which is good. Nvidia does not need more help.

While yes it's pretty anti-user what Apple is doing just more reason why I don't like Apple. It's also to be expected from Apple.

Huh, and just when I was thinking about going back to OSX on my 2013 15" macbook pro. Maybe living with the cruddy linux support for the nvidia GPU is the way to go?

> Maybe living with the cruddy linux support for the nvidia GPU is the way to go?

What is cruddy linux support in your opinion?

I only know of a couple of things in regards to NVidia Drivers for Linux that I would classify as "cruddy":

1. Proprietary (this is probably the biggest one for most)

2. Not always up-to-date for latest released cards

There may be a third one of performance being a bit lacking compared to the Windows version of the drivers, but I am not really sure if that's really the case, or only the case in instances of games, or what.

There may be other issues I am unaware of, but I've never had any real problem with NVidia drivers under Linux. They work, and they seem to work well for me. Installation is pretty painless (provided you don't much around with your system much - I had to recently re-image my system because my long-in-the-tooth-and-overly-hacked Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system was so modded outside the repo; the worst was a very hacked upgrade to C++ 11 that I did without any documenting in order to be able to complete the exercises for Udacity's Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree...

In that edge case, no upgrade was possible, because things just wouldn't compile properly. I ended up trying to upgrade the NVidia driver, and things got really b0rked - so bad that re-imaging was the only option. But that was completely my fault (and thankfully, I had built my system to put /home on a different partition on a separate drive - so migration was fairly painless).

The upside to NVidia drivers, though, is CUDA - so if you're into ML/AI stuff (especially like Tensorflow and similar) - it's almost required...

I'm always curious about this as well. On Ubuntu 16 at least installation is just selecting an option in the software manager. After that it just works.

Not that this is a huge concern for a lot of people, but if you like Secure Boot, you can't use NVIDIA proprietary drivers in Linux.

If you're not using a 3rd party GPU (ie, your GPU came with your Mac), this does not affect you at all! These were third party drivers provided by nVidia for third party cards.

I assume that Nvidia and Apple are fighting about something behind the scenes.

Does anyone have a list of limitations of unsigned code on macOS?

- can not be driver mode

anything else?

Literally zero limitations as long as System Integrity Protection turned off! :D

Within wall gardens you are the sharecropper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com