goMac said: ...

But this may be Nvidia making a point to Apple more than some grand alliance. Again, it’s extremely unlikely that a new Mac Pro would use the same boot screen standard as the 5,1. To me this is Nvidia keeping the pro Mac user scene churned up so they can continue trying to leverage Apple.



Polaris and Vega, combined with Mojave and Apple's blessing of those cards, are threatening to completely push them off the Mac. Click to expand...

If the Mac Pro community is all they have left, and they loose that, well then they have no leverage left with Apple. Click to expand...

Not just "scene churned up". Remember that Mojave is the end of the line for OpenGL and OpenCL. Nvidia has their proprietary CUDA realm to protect. Nvidia will have to get fully on board with Metal 2 (and follow ons) but these new GTX card bring in a whole another chunk of proprietary infrastructure.Apple nudging people toward their "official Mojave card" list means incrementally less people on proprietary GPU stack. ( yes there are hacks to enable what is not on the official list, but some folks will move with the list. )Tactically Apple could be making a blunder here. In the move off OpenGL/CL Apple is shifting people to look into revising their code. For some aspects developers will have Metal (Apple) versus CUDA (Nvidia) and no open standards option. That "churn" is primarily being driven by Apple. They have injected an inflection point for development for a number of software code bases.I don't think that is all they have left but it is the subset community which is the deepest into the CUDA tarpit. It is in Nvidia's best interest to keep entrenched customers just as deeply in that state as they are now. As stated above, GTX is an opportunity to pull them even deeper into lock-in. That they can either stay on 5,1 or move (Win/Linux) basically lets them bite down even harder on the bait.It would be kind of goofy to try to leverage Apple though. Nvidia could present themselves as an option (dependable component supplier ... it is also helpful in retention for Apple also. ). Playing some "deal with us or else" card with Apple is more the dubious. Even if Nvidia doesn't get into the next Mac Pro as a standard option if they can get into the empty slot of that Macs have access to that is a win. ( new Mac Pro with an empty standard slot and/or external PCI-e card enclosures (boxy eGPUs ) empty slots . ) There are multiple vectors here that simply just the Mac Pro path.