Apple says yes to eGPU on Mac: a small revolution for AI, not for gaming

Apple Silicon Macs now accept external graphics cards. Apple has officially approved TinyGPU, a driver developed by TinyCorp, which allows connecting AMD and NVIDIA GPUs via Thunderbolt or USB4. The announcement was made on April 1st by TinyCorp on X. Important note: the driver is only for artificial intelligence. No way to launch a game or accelerate video encoding.

If you have a Thunderbolt or USB4 eGPU and a Mac, today is the day you've been waiting for! Apple finally approved our driver for both AMD and NVIDIA. It's so easy to install now that even a Qwen could do it, then it can run that Qwen… pic.twitter.com/daUsyBHh1W

— the tiny corp (@__tinygrad__) April 1, 2026

What TinyGPU changes for Mac users

Since the switch to Apple Silicon in 2020, Macs no longer supported eGPU. Apple had abandoned the feature without replacing it. To use TinyGPU, hackers had to disable SIP system protection to force the recognition of an external card. With the official driver approval, this tinkering is no longer necessary.

TinyGPU supports AMD cards starting from the RDNA 3 generation (Radeon RX 7000 and onwards). On the NVIDIA side, compatibility starts from the Ampere generation (GeForce RTX 3000 and onwards). The driver works on macOS 12.1 Monterey or later. It installs via the TinyGPU app, built with Apple's DriverKit.

Early tests show Qwen 3.5 27B running at 18.5 tokens per second on a Mac Mini equipped with an external Radeon RX 7900 XTX. TinyCorp estimates they can triple this speed with upcoming optimizations. A user even managed to run a model on a modest GeForce RTX 5050 connected via USB4.

Read also: Memory shortage at Apple – some Macs could become unavailable

The timing is no accident

On March 26, 2026, Apple confirmed the definitive end of the Mac Pro line. The product page redirects to the Mac homepage. No successor is planned. The machine had not been updated since 2023. It was priced at 8,299€ with an M2 Ultra chip, now surpassed by the M3 Ultra in the Mac Studio.

The Mac Pro was the last Mac to offer PCIe slots for expansion cards. Its disappearance left AI professionals without a modular solution from Apple. TinyGPU unexpectedly fills this gap. A 699€ Mac Mini coupled with an eGPU case becomes a functional AI workstation.

In parallel with the development of this driver, TinyCorp is developing an open-source competitor to NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem and selling its own AI workstations. The goal? To facilitate AI that runs locally without relying on OpenAI, Anthropic, and such. On the software side, this feat is also made possible by open models like Qwen 3 or Gemma 4. The approval of its driver by Apple legitimizes an approach that Cupertino has long ignored. Apple closes the door on the Mac Pro but opens it for eGPU. On the condition: that your ambitions remain on the AI side, not gaming.

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