Using External GPU to Avoid Buying a Lame Duck MacBook Pro in 2020

I decided a few months ago that I will invest most of my creative sharing experiments on YouTube via multiple channels. I created a lifestyle vloggimg channels with a few friends and got a 5K views in about a month from my target audience.

Encouraged with the small but measured success, I decided to create a more channels in tech space that are more in my wheelhouse of experience and expertise. That’s when I ran into two major issues with my 2015 MacBook Pro.

Imternal 1TB stove was near full and the built in 2GB AMD low-performance GPU was choking with 4K-5K videos that I wanted to edit with Final Cut Pro.

I had looked into using proxies as a workaround but really wanted to beef up my video editing with a real GPU.

Knowing Apple is about to abandon Intel processors in the next few years, I didn’t want to get stuck with a lame duck MBP running an Intel CPU.

So I researched my options and got myself a few components for about $1K and assembled an external GPU unit!

Since I am using an older 2015 MBP with quad core Intel i7 processor that only has thunderbolt 2 ports, I had to use a few open source scripts to “trick” the macOS into supporting the external GPU (eGPU).

This process would be daunting for most average Apple user but not for a guy who started using Linux with 21 floppy…