WiCi One promises a Wi-Fi 7 Nvidia GPU for Macs, though Apple still supports eGPUs only on Intel MacsWiCi One promises a Wi-Fi 7 Nvidia GPU for Macs, though Apple still supports eGPUs only on Intel Macs

WiCi has opened early orders for the WiCi One, a box holding an Nvidia graphics card that lends its power to a Mac or PC over Wi-Fi 7 rather than a cable.

The WiCi One is a complete small computer. The base model pairs an Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB of GDDR7 memory with an Intel Core 3 100U processor and 1TB of storage. The upper model has an RTX 5090 with 32GB, an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H and 4TB, AppleInsider and TechRadar report. Its radio is Wi-Fi 7 with four streams over a 320MHz channel.

Prices are WiCi's US figures as reported by AppleInsider on 6 October. Shipping is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026, Camera Jabber reports.

How would a Mac use it?

WiCi offers three modes, according to Camera Jabber. A driver mode presents the box as a virtual local GPU on macOS, Windows and Linux, so apps such as Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Blender can use it unchanged. An SDK mode offers Python, JavaScript and Swift libraries. An API mode exposes an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for AI tools such as Ollama and LM Studio. WiCi claims about 420 FP16 teraflops for the RTX 5090 model, against roughly 70 for an M5 Max Mac Studio, AppleInsider reports.

Apple's own support page on external graphics still says an eGPU requires a Mac with an Intel processor, and says nothing about Apple silicon. The only sanctioned route so far came in April, when Apple approved Tiny Corp's drivers for Nvidia and AMD cards on Apple silicon Macs over Thunderbolt or USB4, heise reported, for AI compute through tinygrad only, with no display output.

Our take

The name says eGPU, but for a Mac this is better understood as a networked AI box. Apple offers no supported way for a third-party GPU to draw a Mac's desktop on Apple silicon, and nothing we have read shows WiCi's macOS driver doing so. The SDK and the API mode, by contrast, need nothing from Apple at all: an app or a model runner sends work over the network and gets results back. That is the use APPDOOK expects to work first, and the one worth paying for if anything is.

Bandwidth is the honest limit. TechRadar works out that WiCi's four-stream radio reaches about 11.5 gigabits per second at best, against 64 for a Thunderbolt 5 link to a conventional enclosure, and WiCi's own tests sat the box about 50 centimetres from the laptop. Large language models that live in the box's memory suffer little from that. Games and video timelines, which move large amounts of data every frame, are where the claims will be tested.

The price comparison WiCi invites is with the Mac Studio, and it is fair as far as it goes. The M5 Max Mac Studio reviews found its fast SSD the story, and its unified memory is what lets it hold large models at all. A $1,999 box with 16GB of graphics memory holds smaller ones, faster. Until AppleInsider's promised review or anyone else's measures it with a Mac, this is a set of manufacturer claims, and we would treat them as that.