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Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tec

Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.

bigyabai 1y ago
Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that. Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro, Apple has to prove their worth to the wider consumer market again.
- jleyank 1y ago
  Their X/OpenGL support has also been in stasis for 10 years or more. There’s not enough money taking over for SGI to move their needle.
- orionblastar 1y ago
  Don't abandon Intel Macs, then and call them Mac AI systems with NVIDIA chips. Sell them for more than the Apple Silicon Macs.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    No one would buy slower hotter computers for more money. Most people who own Apple computers today are extremely satisfied with Apple silicon, and AI enthusiasts are an increasing large slice of those people (since there really isn’t anything else and getting a 3090/4099/5090 is still hard and expensive).
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Silicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Great news, but entirely lost on commercial hyperscalers and much of the PC market. Apple's recalcitrance towards supporting Nvidia drivers basically killed their last shot at real-world rackmount deployment of Apple Silicon. Now you can go buy an ARM Grace CPU that does the same thing, but cheaper and with better software support.
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      You really can’t. NVIDIA’s arm chip still looks nerfed compared to apple’s offering, and…I can run 40GB sized LLMs on the plane with no internet…it’s not something that you can do with any other platform.
  - pstuart 1y ago
    I imagine they recognize the need for increased memory bandwidth and will bump that up significantly -- they are well positioned to do so.
- paulpauper 1y ago
  Macs are basically a dead business. The key is somehow creating the AI equivalent of an App Store or something
  - unsigner 1y ago
    Dead business? The Mac is something like 30 billion in revenue per year, and 10 billion in profit. The entire "generative AI" "industry" is struggling to reach 30 billion in revenue even with their creative accounting (my free Perplexity that comes with Revolut is somehow counted at full price, even though I never paid anything, and I'm sure Revolut doesn't pay full price), and gross profit is deep in the negative.
- stockresearcher 1y ago
  > Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? Doesn't somebody (not named Nvidia) need to make a serious profit on AI before we can say that Tim Cook failed? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't anywhere close. Meta? Google? The only one I can think of might be Microsoft but they still refuse to break out AI revenue and expenses in the earnings reports. That isn't a good sign.
  - Fade_Dance 1y ago
    I certainly don't think that profit would be required. Many of the massive tech companies that exist today went through long periods of time were they focused on growth and brand no profits for many years even post IPO. I won't pretend to know exactly how the AI landscape will look in the future, but at this point it's pretty clear that there's going to be massive revenue going to the sector, and Moore's law will continue to crank. I see what you're saying though. In particular is first generation gigs data centers might be black holes of an investment, considering in the not too distant future AI compute will be fully commoditized and 10x cheaper.
    - stockresearcher 1y ago
      Yeah, I think we're on the same page on this one. "failed to skate where the puck was headed" assumes that we know where the puck is going to be. We don't. Everyone is skating towards that same spot while Apple is over by the blue line practicing their swizzles. They sure look like they're doomed. But large groups of people have skated to the "wrong spot" thousands of times. That's the entire point that Gretzky was making with his quote. He's not big enough, strong enough, fast enough to get in that scrum. They're all fighting it out and the puck slides away. To him. All alone. Maybe that is Apple, maybe it's not. I mean, they're still learning to skate while everyone else is playing hockey.
aunty_helen 1y ago
Or, apples just so bad at this they’re fumbling the bag. Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money. They have their own hardware like google does but are talking about perplexity??? They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time? Sometimes company’s just don’t do good enough.
- paulpauper 1y ago
  Undercut the competitors by charging less. Apple can afford to run its product at a loss.
- anon7000 1y ago
  > Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money It remains to be seen whether this was a smart move, or just flailing money at the wall
  - aunty_helen 1y ago
    The difference is it’s a move. Actually doing something rather than putting out internal PR. Zuck tried and flailed with the metaverse. That was a huge waste, but he can afford it and fortune favours the brave.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      You don’t think Apple makes moves? Not everyone has to make the same move at the same time.
      - SebFender 1y ago
        Apple did many - Just not the right or good ones in the past decade.
        lotsofpulp 1y ago
benoau 1y ago
They don't really have much time to wait, they could be forced to allow default voice assistants and access to private APIs by the DOJ antitrust, the App Store Freedom Act, the Open Markets Act, if any of those come through then OpenAI and Gemini will quickly end up entrenched.

bigyabai 1y ago

Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that. Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro, Apple has to prove their worth to the wider consumer market again.

jleyank 1y ago
Their X/OpenGL support has also been in stasis for 10 years or more. There’s not enough money taking over for SGI to move their needle.
orionblastar 1y ago
Don't abandon Intel Macs, then and call them Mac AI systems with NVIDIA chips. Sell them for more than the Apple Silicon Macs.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  No one would buy slower hotter computers for more money. Most people who own Apple computers today are extremely satisfied with Apple silicon, and AI enthusiasts are an increasing large slice of those people (since there really isn’t anything else and getting a 3090/4099/5090 is still hard and expensive).
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
Silicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  Great news, but entirely lost on commercial hyperscalers and much of the PC market. Apple's recalcitrance towards supporting Nvidia drivers basically killed their last shot at real-world rackmount deployment of Apple Silicon. Now you can go buy an ARM Grace CPU that does the same thing, but cheaper and with better software support.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    You really can’t. NVIDIA’s arm chip still looks nerfed compared to apple’s offering, and…I can run 40GB sized LLMs on the plane with no internet…it’s not something that you can do with any other platform.
- pstuart 1y ago
  I imagine they recognize the need for increased memory bandwidth and will bump that up significantly -- they are well positioned to do so.
paulpauper 1y ago
Macs are basically a dead business. The key is somehow creating the AI equivalent of an App Store or something
- unsigner 1y ago
  Dead business? The Mac is something like 30 billion in revenue per year, and 10 billion in profit. The entire "generative AI" "industry" is struggling to reach 30 billion in revenue even with their creative accounting (my free Perplexity that comes with Revolut is somehow counted at full price, even though I never paid anything, and I'm sure Revolut doesn't pay full price), and gross profit is deep in the negative.
stockresearcher 1y ago
> Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? Doesn't somebody (not named Nvidia) need to make a serious profit on AI before we can say that Tim Cook failed? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't anywhere close. Meta? Google? The only one I can think of might be Microsoft but they still refuse to break out AI revenue and expenses in the earnings reports. That isn't a good sign.
- Fade_Dance 1y ago
  I certainly don't think that profit would be required. Many of the massive tech companies that exist today went through long periods of time were they focused on growth and brand no profits for many years even post IPO. I won't pretend to know exactly how the AI landscape will look in the future, but at this point it's pretty clear that there's going to be massive revenue going to the sector, and Moore's law will continue to crank. I see what you're saying though. In particular is first generation gigs data centers might be black holes of an investment, considering in the not too distant future AI compute will be fully commoditized and 10x cheaper.
  - stockresearcher 1y ago
    Yeah, I think we're on the same page on this one. "failed to skate where the puck was headed" assumes that we know where the puck is going to be. We don't. Everyone is skating towards that same spot while Apple is over by the blue line practicing their swizzles. They sure look like they're doomed. But large groups of people have skated to the "wrong spot" thousands of times. That's the entire point that Gretzky was making with his quote. He's not big enough, strong enough, fast enough to get in that scrum. They're all fighting it out and the puck slides away. To him. All alone. Maybe that is Apple, maybe it's not. I mean, they're still learning to skate while everyone else is playing hockey.

aunty_helen 1y ago

Or, apples just so bad at this they’re fumbling the bag. Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money. They have their own hardware like google does but are talking about perplexity??? They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time? Sometimes company’s just don’t do good enough.

paulpauper 1y ago
Undercut the competitors by charging less. Apple can afford to run its product at a loss.
anon7000 1y ago
> Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money It remains to be seen whether this was a smart move, or just flailing money at the wall
- aunty_helen 1y ago
  The difference is it’s a move. Actually doing something rather than putting out internal PR. Zuck tried and flailed with the metaverse. That was a huge waste, but he can afford it and fortune favours the brave.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    You don’t think Apple makes moves? Not everyone has to make the same move at the same time.
    - SebFender 1y ago
      Apple did many - Just not the right or good ones in the past decade.
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago

benoau 1y ago

They don't really have much time to wait, they could be forced to allow default voice assistants and access to private APIs by the DOJ antitrust, the App Store Freedom Act, the Open Markets Act, if any of those come through then OpenAI and Gemini will quickly end up entrenched.