Mac users have long been able to attach external storage to their computers, but it's been a hot minute since anyone with a piece of Apple gear had been able to upgrade their own hardware with additional RAM, internal storage or, gods forbid, a new graphics card. While it's not the Framework-laptop-avec-Apple-Silicon beast that I have fever dreams about, the news that Apple is allowing folks to use external GPUs with their more recent computers and desktops is heartening.
We'll soon be able to plug an eGPU into our Apple Silicon Macs, thanks to the Apple's official support of the hardware and its approval of the drivers to do it with from a company called Tiny Corp (a company owned by hacker extrodinare, George Hotz). It's worth noting that it's always been possible to get an eGPU working with your M-series Mac. But the amount of tinkering required to do so has, until now, made it an near-unobtainable pain-in-the-ass. Now, so long as you have an eGPU and an M-series Mac with Thunderbolt/USB4 ports, you're in business.
I'm just gonna put it out there that Apple might not be thrilled about the new capabilities that Hotz has given to users of its hardware:
On March 31, 2026, Apple officially approved George Hotz's Tiny Corp TinyGPU driver extension, allowing Apple Silicon Mac users to run external Nvidia and AMD GPUs over Thunderbolt/USB4 for the first time since 2020. The approval—through Apple's DriverKit framework—requires no jailbreaking or security compromises and marks a significant policy reversal for a company known for tight ecosystem control. This isn't a gift from Apple; it's AI compute demands forcing the walled garden to crack.
Unfortunately for gamers, TinyCorp has designed their drivers with folks looking to buff out their artificial intelligence workloads in mind. Users will be able to rock an eGPU to improve the performance of local Large Language Models hosted on their hardware. There'll be more horsepower for sorting out tricksy data processing and smoothing out workflows. Word around the campfire is that the current dirvers lack the ability to accelerate direct video output through the eGPU attached to a host machine. This likely means that using an eGPU to game—something Windows PC users have long enjoyed—may be unobtainable for Cupertino's acolytes, at least for the time being.
