It’s seems like they went all in on AMD a few years ago, so I assume they have a bunch of long term agreements that lower the price?
It’s more irksome to me that they don’t have a high spec non-pro desktop.
Eg I want high end consumer desktop GPUs, not high end mobile GPUs (afaict that’s essentially what iMacs use). But my alternative appears to be “pro” GPUs with their absurd - for a consumer at least - markups and Xeons, which no one really wants ;)
eGPUs have been supported for a couple years now. Grab a Mac Mini, an eGPU, max out the RAM, add an external hard drive or two, boom, your ‘pro consumer’ Mac for about $2k.
Sure, and that must be frustrating to an extent. My 2018 MacBook Pro’s GPU does well enough for my purposes with my HTC Vive, so I guess I’m not in the market.
I'm close to going dedicated windows/ubuntu computer with an nvidia card for ML & gaming and a mac mini hooked into a KVM on the same screen. But not having allowed nvidia drivers in 10.14+ is a disappointment.
I’m currently running a VM with a GPU passed through and moonlight on my Mac for gaming. It’s really nice, my old MPB isn’t doing any real work so it easily lasts for hours if on battery, and the VM doesn’t eat up all the resources on my server so I’m free to do whatever I want to with everything else.
My only real issue is I occasionally get slowdowns while playing which causes things to stutter. This is most like partly to blame on using WiFi for the Mac and partly to blame on using only a single port NIC for the server.
It’s more irksome to me that they don’t have a high spec non-pro desktop.
Eg I want high end consumer desktop GPUs, not high end mobile GPUs (afaict that’s essentially what iMacs use). But my alternative appears to be “pro” GPUs with their absurd - for a consumer at least - markups and Xeons, which no one really wants ;)