> I think by the late 2000’s, though, their discreet gpus on laptops were problematic because they got so hot they detached from the motherboards or fried themselves.
That was indeed around ~2008-2010 - the issue was not that the chips fried themselves or got too hot. The issue was the switch to lead-free solder [1]... thermal cycling led to the BGA balls cracking apart as the lead-free solder formulation could not keep up with the mechanical stress. It hit the entire NVIDIA lineup at the time, it was just orders of magnitude more apparent in laptops, as these typically underwent a lot more and a lot more rapid thermal cycles than desktop GPUs.
> Iirc this snafu was what soured relations between apple and nvidia.
There have been multiple issues [2]. The above-mentioned "bumpgate", patent fights regarding the iPhone, and then finally that Apple likes to do a lot of the driver and firmware development for their stuff themselves - without that deep, holistic understanding on everything Apple would stand no chance at having the kind of power efficiency and freedom from nasty bugs that they have compared to most of the Windows laptops.
That was indeed around ~2008-2010 - the issue was not that the chips fried themselves or got too hot. The issue was the switch to lead-free solder [1]... thermal cycling led to the BGA balls cracking apart as the lead-free solder formulation could not keep up with the mechanical stress. It hit the entire NVIDIA lineup at the time, it was just orders of magnitude more apparent in laptops, as these typically underwent a lot more and a lot more rapid thermal cycles than desktop GPUs.
> Iirc this snafu was what soured relations between apple and nvidia.
There have been multiple issues [2]. The above-mentioned "bumpgate", patent fights regarding the iPhone, and then finally that Apple likes to do a lot of the driver and firmware development for their stuff themselves - without that deep, holistic understanding on everything Apple would stand no chance at having the kind of power efficiency and freedom from nasty bugs that they have compared to most of the Windows laptops.
[1] https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understan...
[2] https://www.pcbuildersclub.com/2019/01/zwischen-apple-und-nv...