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I wonder if BYOE (bring your own electricity) also plays a part in their long term vision? Data centres are expensive in terms of hardware, staffing and energy.

I wonder if BYOE (bring your own electricity) also plays a part in their long term vision? Data centres are expensive in terms of hardware, staffing and energy. Externalising this cost to customers saves money, but also helps to paint a green(washing) narrative. It's more meaningful to more people to say they've cut their energy consumption by x than to say they have a better server obselesence strategy, for example.

dyauspitr 2y ago
Why would it be green washing? Aren’t their data centers and commercial operations run completely on renewable energy?
- ironmagma 2y ago
  If you offload data processing to the end user, then your data center uses less energy on paper. The washing part is that work is still being done and spending energy, just outside of the data center.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    Which honestly is still good for the environment to have the work distributed across the entire electricity grid. That work needs to be done anyways and Apple is doing it in the cleanest way possible. What’s an alternative in your mind, just don’t do the processing? That sounds like making progress towards being green. If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”.
    - ironmagma 2y ago
      I didn't make any claims, I just explained what the parent was saying. There could be multiple ways to make it more green: one being not doing the processing, or another perhaps just optimizing the work being done. But actually, no, you don't need a viable way to be green in order to call greenwashing "greenwashing." It can just be greenwashing, with no alternative that is actually green.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      > Which honestly is still good for the environment to have the work distributed across the entire electricity grid. Sometimes, but parallelization has a cost. The power consumption from 400,000,000 iPhones downloading a 2gb LLM is not negligible, probably more than what you'd consume running it as a REST API on a remote server. Not to mention slower.
      - peapicker 2y ago
        Downloading 2gb of anything on my iPhone via wifi from my in-home gigabit fiber barely puts a dent in my battery life let alone much time. The random ads in most phone games are much worse on my battery life.
        talldayo 2y ago
        Yeah it's a shame that mobile games are shit when console and PC gaming gets taken so serious by comparison. If you want to blame that on developers and not Apple's stupid-ass policies stopping you from emulating real games, be my guest. That's a take I'd love to hear. Keep downloadin' those ads. This is what Apple wants from you, a helpless and docile revenue stream. Think Different or stay mad.
        peapicker 2y ago
        Blame? Simply saying downloading 2gb isn’t the power consumption hit you seem to think it is. Not much of a gamer anyway, just an observation when I tried a couple apparently dodgy games. Not sure why your reply wasn’t related to your original comment. Felt rather knee-jerk reactionary to me instead. Oh well.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > Which honestly is still good for the environment to have the work distributed across the entire electricity grid. This doesn't make any sense. > If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”. Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether it's real or fake. Though in this case using renewable energy can help.
      - nozzlegear 2y ago
        > Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether it's real or fake. Baselessly calling every greening and sustainability effort “greenwashing”, especially when there’s practically no thought put into what the alternative might be, is trite and borderline intellectually dishonest. They don’t want to have a conversation about how it could be improved, they just want to interject “haha that’s stupid, corporations are fooling all of you sheeple” from their place of moral superiority. This shit is so played out.
        dyauspitr 2y ago
        This is what I wanted to get across but you said it so much better.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        > Baselessly calling every greening and sustainability effort “greenwashing”, especially when there’s practically no thought put into what the alternative might be Baseless? The foundation of this accusation is rock solid. Offloading the exact same computation to another person so your energy numbers look better is not a greening or sustainability effort. Fake green should always be called greenwashing. You don't need to suggest an improvement to call out something that is completely fake. The faker doesn't get to demand a "conversation". You've seen a bunch of people be incorrectly dismissive and decided that dismissiveness is automatically wrong. It's not. For an extreme example, imagine a company installs a "pollution-preventing boulder" at their HQ. It's very valid to call that greenwashing and walk away. Don't let them get PR for nothing. If they were actually trying, and made a mistake, suggest a fix. But you can't fix fake.
timpetri 2y ago
That is an interesting angle to look at it from. If they're gonna keep pushing this they end up with a strong incentive to make the iPhone even more energy efficient, since users have come to expect good/always improving battery life. At the end of the day, AI workloads in the cloud will always be a lot more compute effective however, meaning lowered combined footprint. However, in the server based model, there is more incentive to pre-compute (waste inference) things to make them appear snappy on device. Analogous would be all that energy spent doing video encoding for YouTube videos that never get watched. Although, it's "idle" resources for budgeting purposes.
benced 2y ago
Apple has committed that all of its products will be carbon-neutral - including emissions from charging during their lifetime - by 2030. The Apple Watch is already there. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-unveils-its-first-carbon-neutral-products/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-unveils-its-fir...
- dns_snek 2y ago
  From your link: > "Apple defines high-quality credits as those from projects that are real, additional, measurable, and quantified, with systems in place to avoid double-counting, and that ensure permanence." Apple then pledged to buy carbon credits from a company called Verra. In 2023, an investigation found that more than 90% of Verra's carbon credits are a sham. Notably, Apple made their pledge after the results of this investigation were known - so much for their greenwashing. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...
  - benced 2y ago
    I wish we had gotten a resolution on whether that report from the Guardian was correct. Regardless, Apple says that credits make up only about 25% of their reduced emissions.
MBCook 2y ago
I’m not sure it’s that (benched pointed out their carbon commitment) as simple logistics. Apple doesn’t have to build the data centers. Apple doesn’t have to buy the AI capacity themselves (even if from TSMC for Apple designed chips). Apple doesn’t have to have the personnel for the data centers or the air conditioning. They don’t have to pay for all the network bandwidth. There are benefits to the user to having the AI run on their own devices in terms of privacy and latency as mentioned by the GP. But there are also benefits to Apple simply because it means it’s no longer their resources being used up above and beyond electricity. I keep reading about companies having trouble getting GPUs from the cloud providers and that some crypto networks have pivoted to selling GPU access for AI work as crypto profits fall. Apple doesn’t have to deal with any of that. They have underused silicon sitting out there ready to light up to make their customers happy (and perhaps interested in buying a faster device).
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  I agree with everything you said but the TSMC bit. They are quite literally competing with NVidia et al for fab space for customers chips. Sure they get the AI bits built-in to existing products but surely they’re bigger/more expensive to manufacture and commit from TSMC because of it.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    I think we’re on the same page. I was trying to say that there was still a cost to using their own chips for server AI because they still had to pay to have them made so they weren’t “free” because they’re Apple products as opposed to buying nVidia parts. You’re right, there is a cost to them to put the AI stuff on end user chips too since die space isn’t free and extra circuits mean fewer chips fit per wafer.
the_king 2y ago
It makes sense for desktops but not for devices with batteries. I think Apple should introduce a new device for $5-10k that has 400GB of VRAM that all Macs on the network use for ML. If you're on battery, you don't want to do LLM inference on a laptop. Hell, you don't really want to do transcription inference for that long - but would be nice not to have to send it to a data center.

dyauspitr 2y ago

Why would it be green washing? Aren’t their data centers and commercial operations run completely on renewable energy?

ironmagma 2y ago
If you offload data processing to the end user, then your data center uses less energy on paper. The washing part is that work is still being done and spending energy, just outside of the data center.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Which honestly is still good for the environment to have the work distributed across the entire electricity grid. That work needs to be done anyways and Apple is doing it in the cleanest way possible. What’s an alternative in your mind, just don’t do the processing? That sounds like making progress towards being green. If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”.
  - ironmagma 2y ago
    I didn't make any claims, I just explained what the parent was saying. There could be multiple ways to make it more green: one being not doing the processing, or another perhaps just optimizing the work being done. But actually, no, you don't need a viable way to be green in order to call greenwashing "greenwashing." It can just be greenwashing, with no alternative that is actually green.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    > Which honestly is still good for the environment to have the work distributed across the entire electricity grid. Sometimes, but parallelization has a cost. The power consumption from 400,000,000 iPhones downloading a 2gb LLM is not negligible, probably more than what you'd consume running it as a REST API on a remote server. Not to mention slower.
    - peapicker 2y ago
      Downloading 2gb of anything on my iPhone via wifi from my in-home gigabit fiber barely puts a dent in my battery life let alone much time. The random ads in most phone games are much worse on my battery life.
      - talldayo 2y ago
        Yeah it's a shame that mobile games are shit when console and PC gaming gets taken so serious by comparison. If you want to blame that on developers and not Apple's stupid-ass policies stopping you from emulating real games, be my guest. That's a take I'd love to hear. Keep downloadin' those ads. This is what Apple wants from you, a helpless and docile revenue stream. Think Different or stay mad.
        peapicker 2y ago
        Blame? Simply saying downloading 2gb isn’t the power consumption hit you seem to think it is. Not much of a gamer anyway, just an observation when I tried a couple apparently dodgy games. Not sure why your reply wasn’t related to your original comment. Felt rather knee-jerk reactionary to me instead. Oh well.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > Which honestly is still good for the environment to have the work distributed across the entire electricity grid. This doesn't make any sense. > If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”. Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether it's real or fake. Though in this case using renewable energy can help.
    - nozzlegear 2y ago
      > Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether it's real or fake. Baselessly calling every greening and sustainability effort “greenwashing”, especially when there’s practically no thought put into what the alternative might be, is trite and borderline intellectually dishonest. They don’t want to have a conversation about how it could be improved, they just want to interject “haha that’s stupid, corporations are fooling all of you sheeple” from their place of moral superiority. This shit is so played out.
      - dyauspitr 2y ago
        This is what I wanted to get across but you said it so much better.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        > Baselessly calling every greening and sustainability effort “greenwashing”, especially when there’s practically no thought put into what the alternative might be Baseless? The foundation of this accusation is rock solid. Offloading the exact same computation to another person so your energy numbers look better is not a greening or sustainability effort. Fake green should always be called greenwashing. You don't need to suggest an improvement to call out something that is completely fake. The faker doesn't get to demand a "conversation". You've seen a bunch of people be incorrectly dismissive and decided that dismissiveness is automatically wrong. It's not. For an extreme example, imagine a company installs a "pollution-preventing boulder" at their HQ. It's very valid to call that greenwashing and walk away. Don't let them get PR for nothing. If they were actually trying, and made a mistake, suggest a fix. But you can't fix fake.

timpetri 2y ago

That is an interesting angle to look at it from. If they're gonna keep pushing this they end up with a strong incentive to make the iPhone even more energy efficient, since users have come to expect good/always improving battery life. At the end of the day, AI workloads in the cloud will always be a lot more compute effective however, meaning lowered combined footprint. However, in the server based model, there is more incentive to pre-compute (waste inference) things to make them appear snappy on device. Analogous would be all that energy spent doing video encoding for YouTube videos that never get watched. Although, it's "idle" resources for budgeting purposes.

benced 2y ago

Apple has committed that all of its products will be carbon-neutral - including emissions from charging during their lifetime - by 2030. The Apple Watch is already there. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-unveils-its-first-carbon-neutral-products/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-unveils-its-fir...

dns_snek 2y ago
From your link: > "Apple defines high-quality credits as those from projects that are real, additional, measurable, and quantified, with systems in place to avoid double-counting, and that ensure permanence." Apple then pledged to buy carbon credits from a company called Verra. In 2023, an investigation found that more than 90% of Verra's carbon credits are a sham. Notably, Apple made their pledge after the results of this investigation were known - so much for their greenwashing. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...
- benced 2y ago
  I wish we had gotten a resolution on whether that report from the Guardian was correct. Regardless, Apple says that credits make up only about 25% of their reduced emissions.

MBCook 2y ago

I’m not sure it’s that (benched pointed out their carbon commitment) as simple logistics. Apple doesn’t have to build the data centers. Apple doesn’t have to buy the AI capacity themselves (even if from TSMC for Apple designed chips). Apple doesn’t have to have the personnel for the data centers or the air conditioning. They don’t have to pay for all the network bandwidth. There are benefits to the user to having the AI run on their own devices in terms of privacy and latency as mentioned by the GP. But there are also benefits to Apple simply because it means it’s no longer their resources being used up above and beyond electricity. I keep reading about companies having trouble getting GPUs from the cloud providers and that some crypto networks have pivoted to selling GPU access for AI work as crypto profits fall. Apple doesn’t have to deal with any of that. They have underused silicon sitting out there ready to light up to make their customers happy (and perhaps interested in buying a faster device).

vineyardmike 2y ago
I agree with everything you said but the TSMC bit. They are quite literally competing with NVidia et al for fab space for customers chips. Sure they get the AI bits built-in to existing products but surely they’re bigger/more expensive to manufacture and commit from TSMC because of it.
- MBCook 2y ago
  I think we’re on the same page. I was trying to say that there was still a cost to using their own chips for server AI because they still had to pay to have them made so they weren’t “free” because they’re Apple products as opposed to buying nVidia parts. You’re right, there is a cost to them to put the AI stuff on end user chips too since die space isn’t free and extra circuits mean fewer chips fit per wafer.

the_king 2y ago

It makes sense for desktops but not for devices with batteries. I think Apple should introduce a new device for $5-10k that has 400GB of VRAM that all Macs on the network use for ML. If you're on battery, you don't want to do LLM inference on a laptop. Hell, you don't really want to do transcription inference for that long - but would be nice not to have to send it to a data center.