It could happen, but from Apple's own announcements it seems like they were worried that the Mac was increasingly marginalized as a platform for AR/VR development, which Tim Cook constantly tells us (for AR at least...) is something he's super excited about for the future of computing. Not arguing this is the sole reason, but it definitely seems like a feature to cover high end edge cases like this for the time being.
Much of Apple's own discussions on the eGPU feature at WWDC/the marketing blurb for their own eGPU devkit refer to VR a lot too. Apple added VR support to Final Cut Pro at roughly the same time as well.
> And they seem to generally "dislike" putting discrete GPUs in laptops, going all the way back to the Titanium G4 days.
Not so sure I'd agree with this - every single Titanium PowerBook model ever made had a discrete GPU. Even the iBooks had dedicated GPUs. It wasn't until the adoption of Intel processors that integrated GPUs was even an option for Apple really.
Much of Apple's own discussions on the eGPU feature at WWDC/the marketing blurb for their own eGPU devkit refer to VR a lot too. Apple added VR support to Final Cut Pro at roughly the same time as well.
> And they seem to generally "dislike" putting discrete GPUs in laptops, going all the way back to the Titanium G4 days.
Not so sure I'd agree with this - every single Titanium PowerBook model ever made had a discrete GPU. Even the iBooks had dedicated GPUs. It wasn't until the adoption of Intel processors that integrated GPUs was even an option for Apple really.