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Comment by teleforce | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbolt 5 (TB 5) is pretty handy, you can have a very thin and lightweight laptop, then can get access to external GPU or eGPU via TB 5 if needed [1]. Now you can have your cake (lightweight laptop) and eat it too (potent GPU).

[1] Asus just announced the world’s first Thunderbolt 5 eGPU:

https://www.theverge.com/24336135/asus-thunderbolt-5-externa...

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Except that you're stuck with macOS, so there aren't any drivers for NVIDIA, AMD or Intel GPUs.

and that no one is developing games for MacOS.

(1) That’s obviously not actually true.

(2) “No one” is developing games for Linux either, but the Steam Deck works great. Why? Wine, which you can run on macOS too.

Ah, yes, you got me. You identified that other market that also no one cares about.

Valve supports games on MacOS

Apple Silicon does not work with eGPU.

eGPU has a ton of issues on MacOS - I've used it for years, but now on Silicon its prob much worse - but let me give a shout out to the amazing (somewhat new) High Performance screen sharing mode added in Sonoma.

When I connect to my Mac Studio via Macbook I can select that mode, then change the Displays setting to Dynamic Resolution and then my 'thin client':

- Is fullscreen using the entire 16:10 Macbook screen

- Gets 60 fps low latency performance (including on actual games)

- Transfers audio, I can attend meetings in this mode

- Blanks the host Mac Studio screen

All things that were impossible via VNC - RDP is much better but this new High Performance Screen Share is even more powerful.

The thin lightweight laptop that remotes into a loaded machine has always been my idea of high mobility instead of suffering a laptop running everything locally. This works via LTE as well with some firewall setup.

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