It’s perplexing that this flagship feature of macOS 10.13.4 feels so incomplete. Sure, we’ve come a long way since enthusiasts were hacking it together with help from online forums, but more work needs to be done to ensure a consistent experience. We wouldn’t advise going out and buying an enclosure just yet, but we nevertheless see reasons in the performance gains to be hopeful that we could recommend it at some point in the future.
It seems strange to me that switching GPUs – even external ones – is such an arduous process. It seems this process is more seemless on Windows. On macOS it seems each and every applications needs to be modified to add support for it, whereas on Windows, the operating system itself takes care of it.
From a non-technical standpoint, I guess it could be viewed a commercially driven self preservation move.
if you support all PCI-X cards in a eGPU enclosure and give it free reign over all applications without limitations, it will potentially cannibalise your higher system sales.
Why buy a rMBP with the middle of the road AMD GPU when you can buy basic, with same CPU, and bolt a top end GPU on?
It’s a niche (i.e supporting requirements of at least 90 Hz refresh rates and a couple of more USB ports and HDMI outputs for VR) that Apple doesn’t want to miss out.
It’s hardly at the state of being “comercial ready”.
Apple went “all in” with Thunderbolt on the Mac Pro, and here we are, again, still, left in the cold since the Pro is only TB2, and not 3.
And, naturally, the Pro folks are basically stuck until at least 2019 for an alternative, no doubt going in with all the confidence of support that they bought in to with the last one.
Even if TB2 can not do it as well as TB3, it should at least, officially, be possible, because it was apparently decided to not be adequate in the beginning.
Has always been my experience with Macs. Hardly surprising yet another thing is needlessly complicated and “just doesn’t work” there.
The “just doesn’t work” theme has always been a problem since the beginning of Job’s Second Coming.
Increasingly, “just can’t repair” is becoming a common theme with Apple products:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-NU7yOSElE
Enjoy your crapple!