Jul 13, 2018 - The big change for the 2018 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro is the addition of. To get 256GB of storage you essentially pay £200/$200. The processor on the flag-ship model is faster, and the graphics card better.

Right now the external GPU market is a bit of a mess, full of hacks, incompatibilities, half-adhered-to standards, and artificial limitations from the likes of Apple. The folks over at eGPU.io are to make sense of it all (), and they've just had a surprisingly great result with the latest Nvidia drivers, a GTX 1080 Ti, and a 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro.

This is, of course, courtesy of that Nvidia just released, which bring the Pascal 10XX series of cards to macOS for the first time. Of course, you can't actually put a 1080 Ti, unless you're building a hackintosh, so an external GPU enclosure is your best chance of accessing this power from within macOS. In tests, running inside an AkiTiO Node or Mantiz Venus enclosure, eGPU.io found the 1080 Ti put in benchmark scores ranging from double to four times the speed of a MacBook Pro relying on stock internal Radeon Pro 460 graphics. Speeds were boosted further when the external GPU was used with an external display, instead of routing the video signal back into the MacBook. Apple's recent 15-inch MacBook Pro has an advantage over many laptops with Thunderbolt 3, because the connector is basically hooked up directly to the CPU, instead of being routed through the PCH (which handles a bunch of other I/O like networking, storage, and other USB ports).

Really, the new Nvidia driver support is just gravy on top, because the 1080 Ti didn't outstrip the last-generation 980 Ti by much in tests — which points to remaining bottlenecks in the setup. An external GPU is still an expensive way to improve your workflow: a quality enclosure is around $500, and then a card like the 1080 Ti goes for around $700. Also, macOS support for external GPUs is improving, but it's still not plug-and-play.

You might be better off doing your work on a Windows desktop, or trying your luck with with a hackintosh, but if a souped-up MacBook Pro is truly what you need, it does seem like the age of the eGPU has arrived.

Standards are a tricky thing. The Apple blade connection of its first generation of SSD devices was an mSATA interface which is part of the M.2 standard. They were a custom part and oddly shaped so none of the mSATA M.2 SSD's available at the time would fit. The PCIe generation devices also comply as well to the M.2 standard (again loosely). The fact no one uses the version of the connector Apple has decided to use is also to prevent people like us to try plugging in just anything in.

This is an offshoot of the legal battle Apple was having with Samsung. Download wd my passport software. No one wanted to appear to be crossing boundaries.

This then gets into the SSD's firmware and the licensing of it. Apple is still the only source of its custom firmware which is designed to work with their systems. But, lets get back to the connector. The PCIe interface is a set standard and when it was intergraded into the M.2 standard the signal definitions are the same only the pin assignments were altered to fit the smaller format. The PCI standard allows up to 32 lanes the current M.2 standard only up to 4 lanes.

Now getting back to the SSD firmware this is were Apples magic comes in. At the time Apple was ahead of the curve when it comes with SSD interface speed. This is were their skilled firmware programers sweated it out making still one of the best implementations. The Fusion Drive is an off shoot of this work. While you may think any firmware on any SSD would work that is far from the case.