There's Allegedly a "Quiet Hostility" Between Apple and Nvidia

AlphaAtlas

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A report from Apple Insider last week suggests that Apple and Nvidia aren't on the best terms. As it points out, the companies have a long history going back to the early 2000s, but the trouble started in 2004 when Nvidia failed to produce the GeForce 6800 Ultra Apple needed. Following some other controversies and lawsuits, an Apple insider told Apple Insider that negotiations between Apple and Nvidia were "extremely bitter" in 2009. Now, a decade later, the publication's insider sources claim that those relations are still sour. The developers say that Nvidia driver support on Macs is basically non-existent because there's a "quiet hostility" between the companies, and that someone at Apple doesn't want that to change.

"It's not like we have any real work to do on it, Nvidia has great engineers," said one developer in a sentiment echoed by nearly all of the Apple staff we spoke with. "It's not like Metal 2 can't be moved to Nvidia with great performance. Somebody just doesn't want it there." For sure, somebody at Apple in the upper echelons doesn't want Nvidia support going forward right now. But, even off the record, nobody seemed to have any idea who it is. The impression we got is that it was some kind of passed-down knowledge with the origin of the policy lost to the mists of time, or an unwritten rule like so many in baseball.
 
lol. Well bump gate (~2009) was a disaster for apple and nvidia and nvidia did try to push their patent licensing onto apple back in 2013. And more recently there was GPP which doesn't affect apple but shows nvidia still treats other companies poorly. Do you really blame apple, microsoft, and sony for all using nvidia at one time and then never looking back?

Well I guess to be fair Microsoft and Sony do still use nvidia in some products, just not game consoles.
 
This makes for interesting news and there are certainly reasons for Apple to be bitter, but I think the real reason is that Apple wants to move everything to their own ARM chips.

Pushing performance on X86 doesn't line up with their current goals and would make it harder to make their ARM move look good. Keeping x86 on autopilot with marginal to no performance improvements gives the ARM team a better chance to catch up.
 
Apple likes to be jerks about things. Good. Anything to see that platform finally die and become just a cell phone maker.
 
I think Apple are dying again, and this time the fall will be even greater, so it make sense to not be too dependent on such a company.
Pretty much all die hard fans of that company in my family have now changed to something else as Apple seem to have become serious uncool.
 
It's too bad, Apple, for a long time, has been style over function, because when it comes to things like user privacy they are the only ones that seem to get it. Everything else about Apple though I have problems with: Price/performance (Though that has gotten better recently), Walled garden software distribution - Closed platforms, and Minimal hardware user upgrade support. To me apple hasn't been able to put together the right offer for me as a computer user since early early Macs, and the problem back them was still variety of software and limited support for aftermarket hardware. I'm mostly a gamer when it comes to considerations for purchasing a computer, and Apple has tried to chase away the thought of gaming on their platform as long as I can remember. I wonder what would have happened if they had supported gaming in a meaningful way.
 
And thanks to this quiet hostility, my 2010 Mac Pro will likely be the last Mac on my desktop.

I'll still buy iPhones, but I'll milk them for all they are worth (using regular 6's now). I'll buy a new Macbook whenever my company is doing well and I can slide it thru the expense report process. iPads are my soft spot though.. I'll refresh that as often as I can.. at least every couple years. There's nothing that I use more. Oh and the watch.. yeah I'm all in there. I never thought I'd rely on it so much, but it allows me to leave the phone at home even though I'm on call all the time.
 
Well it won’t last much longer with external GPU support. Nvidia drivers should begin appearing again.
 
I don't think they see egpu's as much market yet, but they are giving it more effort to see how it pans out. I'm positive bumpgate is not forgotten. That was expensive in PR and in $$. And lastly Apple is really serious about the thin and light aspect of their products. And Nvidia, imo, lies too often about the real heat output and power consumption of their products. I beiieve many notebook vendors have been burned by this but don't dare say a word openly. Apple, however, probably has decided that the advantages of the Nvidia platform are not worth the pains. And while I can see some folks arguments about the x86 to ARM switch, I suspect they are finding out that's not such a great performer as it was believed to be. And I'd take a good bet that with their long product cycles they see Intel as a more friendly GPU vendor in the future. Even Intel is more friendly with AMD than Nvidia. We shall see how it pans out.
 
Not exactly surprising. Nvidia seems to always try and get one over on any companies they do business with. They must leave a sour taste. MS and Sony went full AMD after their console GPU woes.

Nintendo on the other hand went the other way. I wonder how they’re liking dealing with Nvidia for the Switch hardware.
 
I think Apple are dying again, and this time the fall will be even greater, so it make sense to not be too dependent on such a company.
Pretty much all die hard fans of that company in my family have now changed to something else as Apple seem to have become serious uncool.

Thing is apple is a fearsome hardware designer. Their cpu design ability is knocking on the door of Intel, Amd or IBM and they make... The best? Mobile gpu around (I think) there's real staying power with chops like that. On the cpu front alone they're head and shoulders above Samsung, which given the resources the latter is throwing at these things is no small achievement.
 
Not exactly surprising. Nvidia seems to always try and get one over on any companies they do business with. They must leave a sour taste. MS and Sony went full AMD after their console GPU woes.

Nintendo on the other hand went the other way. I wonder how they’re liking dealing with Nvidia for the Switch hardware.

The back door seems to be working out well for them. I bet Nintendo is thrilled about that. So much so they are talking about getting out of hardware entirely.
 
Are we supposed to feel bad for Nvidia or apple? Both are companies that have recently proven (and have a long history of) being more than willing to screw their customers over until it becomes too publicity negative.

Their engineers will go elsewhere, the companies could dissolve tomorrow. The world will not be less for it.
 
I feel like Apple just tends to be hostile and dickish in general. Nvidia deserves it though. Patent trolls, silencing the media, lock-ins, lock-outs, market manipulations. I can't think of a company that is more deserving of hostility.

Sure...let's hold grudges for 10 years. That's real mature.

Probably just following th elead of their founder, Steve Jobs, the biggest immature dick of all time, which is quite an accomplishment, considering there are people like Linus Torvalds on this planet.
 
Apple were bitten by nvidia hardware failures one too many times. I remember all the MacBook Pro failures between 2008-2011 models. I think it was the 8 series parts around 2008 and the mid 2010 330 boards that all eventually died. Probably cost Apple a lot in RMA and the green team gpus began disappearing from macs shortly after that. I think Apple only allowed / tolerated driver support because nvidia was so good about providing said drivers.

Apple has been actively locking down their hardware for years: soldered memory, soldered SSDs, moving toward some future Apple produced CPU... dropping nvidia support isn’t surprising. I would be more surprised if they don’t push their own GPU design in the future and drop AMD too
 
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Apple likes to be jerks about things. Good. Anything to see that platform finally die and become just a cell phone maker.
Will never happen, Mac's are used in a lot of businesses where graphics/video/publishing are involved.
 
An imperial directive, whose origin and purpose is lost to the mists of time? Sounds like another flower guard to me:

 
Apple is quietly trying to impose their own GPU and CPU's...Who's surprised??? Tho in the long run, it will only bite themselves in the ass, but hey.. Will more allow them to charge exuberant amounts of money ontop of their system for subpar performance due to it being an all apple product.
 
Sure...let's hold grudges for 10 years. That's real mature.

Lol, I've been holding a grudge against Apple for 35 years! When I was a kid Apple won a school contract (beating out Commodore, which I loved) and I've been boycotting Apple products ever since. How's that for mature? hahaha
 
I'm skeptical that this is the case as much anymore. What graphics cards are they using !?!?

None of what I stated require high end graphics cards. The tools on the mac are just better. Where I work we have a highly automated workflow system based entirely on macs (for the production process) and the development started in 1995 and continues to evolve to this day.
 
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The majority of postings I've seen on this thread revolve around stating Apple's obvious jerk moves whether pre or post Jobs. I've spent most of my life stating the same. Let's be honest, though, is NVidia on good terms with anyone these days? Another point, it's probably in all our best interests that two of the most anti-consumer rights companies in the world don't like each other.
 
Sure...let's hold grudges for 10 years. That's real mature.

NVIDIA want CUDA, Apple hate CUDA and want OpenCL which AMD are superior at. Its been a long battle and it didnt help with the GPU failure fiasco that NVIDIA never owned up to and Apple had to run an extended recall on Macbook Pros.

Its a moot point anyway as Apple wont need Intel or NVIDIA in another year or 2 and can go it alone.
 
They must leave a sour taste. MS and Sony went full AMD after their console GPU woes.
I'm sure it had nothing to do with AMD giving their chips away at breakeven, something Nvidia didn't need to do given their market position and power of their chips.

Name of the game for console BOM is every penny pinched and every component sourced for least possible cost. AMD is nothing more than a line item on a list of component suppliers to MS and Sony, where the consoles are concerned. Since PS4/Xbox SDK is abstracted from the hardware, the oft repeated "AMD chip in the consoles will magically make PC games perform better with AMD cards" has never amounted to anything, no tangible benefit beyond minor PR value in small tech circles like this.
 
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Apple and Nvidia both are like my upstairs neighbors: They spend a whole lot of time screwing each other and everyone else they can get their hand on, I just wish they'd be quite about it and quite waking me up with all the noise.
 
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