A possibility has been raised that Apple silicon Macs could be used with external graphics cards (eGPUs).

On April 6 (local time), major foreign media outlets including online site Gigazine reported that Tiny Corp, known for its high-performance PC "tinybox", developed an eGPU driver for Mac and that the driver was approved by Apple.

The driver mainly connects an eGPU dock through USB4 and Thunderbolt ports and allows Macs to recognise and use Nvidia or AMD graphics cards installed in the dock. Tiny Corp said this would make it possible to use external GPUs even on Apple silicon-based Macs. It also said running AI models is supported by using its machine learning framework tinygrad.

Mac support for eGPUs had been limited to Intel-based devices. Apple officially supported eGPUs in macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 in 2018, but external GPU use was effectively blocked after it transitioned to Apple silicon starting with the M1 chip.

Tiny Corp also disclosed the support requirements it presented. The operating system needs macOS Monterey 12.1 or later. Supported graphics cards include Nvidia's Ampere architecture (GeForce RTX 30 series or later) and AMD's RDNA 3-based cards (Radeon RX 7000 series or later).

An actual run was also confirmed. Tiny Corp said it connected a Radeon RX 7900 XTX to a Mac mini and ran the large language model Qwen 3.5 27B, recording a processing speed of 18.5 tokens per second. It also disclosed a case in which it operated a Mac mini based on an M4 chip connected to a GeForce RTX 5050.

In the industry, some assessments say the attempt could serve as an opportunity to broaden the potential use of external GPUs, which had been restricted in the Apple silicon ecosystem. Still, it appears further verification will be needed on stability in actual user environments and whether the scope of official support will expand.

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 a Qwen could do it, then it can run that Qwen... pic.twitter.com/daUsyBHh1W