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Apple AI servers unused in warehouses due to low Apple Intelligence usage
- righthand 7mo agoApple will utilize them when needed and scoop up extra capacity after the bubble burst.
- fmajid 7mo agoDid you read the article? Apple's servers are M2 Ultra class and not able to run modern models.
- righthand 7mo agoWhat does that matter? They cant be reused for other things? Nonsense.
- fmajid 7mo agoWhat other services does Apple have that people would be paying for? The ones they have today are either iCloud storage, which does not need much compute, or merely an alibi so they can claim with an almost straight face that Apple's "Services" revenue isn't basically just the App Store 30% tax. That also explains why they are constantly shoving ads for News or Fitness our throats in the Settings app.
- righthand 7mo agoAnd no other services will exist or grow?
- brcmthrowaway 7mo ago[flagged]
- abeyer 7mo agothey should just scalp the RAM on ebay, that's what people actually _want_ to buy, not ai
- dpoloncsak 7mo agoDid they not just see crazy sales on Mac Minis the second users figured out it meant they could give an AI access to blue-bubble text messages?
- bobbylarrybobby 7mo agoCan't, the RAM is soldered to the motherboard
- azinman2 7mo agoIt's in the CPU package
- Legend2440 7mo agoWhat are these servers actually used for? The Siri+LLM features of Apple Intelligence aren’t launched yet, and the other features like notification summaries run on-device.
- drcongo 7mo agoI was wondering the same thing. I turned notification summaries off as they were less than useful, and I don't think I've stumbled across any other Apple Intelligence features apart from the laughable Image Playground or whatever it's called.
- toraway 7mo agoI cringe whenever I see the Image Playground icon on my MacBook. It somehow looks worse than most scammy image generation apps you see on half-page search ads on the App Store. I have no idea how Apple willingly released it like that. It was updated on my iPhone to a bland, forgettable abstract icon that’s still fairly mediocre but no longer an ongoing embarrassment for their corporate brand standards.
- Analemma_ 7mo agoI'm a complete Apple ecosystem user-- I have a Mac, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, Apple earbuds, and an Apple TV, and I also pay reasonably close attention to their announcements and developments-- and I couldn't tell you a single Apple Intelligence feature. Nor do I ever use Siri except for setting kitchen timers. Just a total failure of execution.
- Izikiel43 7mo ago> Nor do I ever use Siri except for setting kitchen timers. If it even works, it fails with "something went wrong" for me 3 out of 5 times
- altairprime 7mo agoThe gorgeous rainbow border is one of the Apple Intelligence features, unavailable to plain Siri :/
- siva7 7mo agoImagine launching such a shitty product that AI servers are sitting unused in 2026.
- jgalt212 7mo agoMicrosoft CoPilot?
- upmind 7mo agoWhat's insane is that the market / users doesn't care, they're making more than ever... It's quite sad to see that vision pro, apple Intelligence and liquid glass were all failures and no one cared... I hope android makes a comeback against Apple in the US so they're forced to innovate.
- cosmic_cheese 7mo agoI don’t see Android making big inroads until there’s more of a presence from Android manufacturers that fill Apple’s niche in smartphones and tablets. Samsung desperately wants to be this but misses the part where iPhones don’t come with third party junkware even if they’re entry level models and don’t allow carrier junkware either. Google could be it but they’re too married to midrange hardware and underwhelming physical designs. All it would take is for a manufacturer to commit to their whole lineup being built with reasonably capable hardware (no ancient or weak SoCs as seen in budget Android devices), to completely jettison third party junkware, and have top end flagships with hardware that actually matches that description, but none thus far have managed this.
- castral 7mo agoYeah but this is how Apple has always done infrastructure/services. Their internal software teams are a mess. They constantly reinvent the wheel poorly, and then they charge a premium for exclusive access. Is anyone surprised by this?
- Hasz 7mo agoThe rest of the FAANG has invested very heavily in cloud while Apple seems to be a laggard. GCP, AWS and Azure are all publicly available products, and cloud at Netflix, Meta seems very mature for a private offering. This is not a huge disadvantage in my opinion. Let the rest of big tech fight each other to death over cloud, while controlling a very profitable differentiated offering (devices+services). Apple keeps the M series HW out of data centers, even though it presents some very attractive performance/w and per-core numbers.
- 4fterd4rk 7mo agoI think you're correct on it not being a disadvantage. Apple's competitors are the Android OEMs, Microsoft, and Dell. Apple Intelligence is a failure only in the sense that we hold Apple to a higher standard. Can anyone argue that Apple's AI implementation is more flawed than Microsoft? I don't think so.
- teeray 7mo agoJust like Siri, it’s completely useless. I don’t need Apple Intelligence to summarize my text messages. I can skim them nearly as fast.
- aurea 7mo agoI often use Apple Intelligence to proofread emails before I send them. It's nice that it runs on device. I don't think I ever had a use case where it would have to use their Private Cloud though.
- criddell 7mo agoBeing able to search photos with queries like "show me photos of me and teeray" is pretty useful. What I really want is my phone to transcribe all of my phone calls to a Notes document. Since it isn't recording an audio conversation, I don't think the consent laws come into play.
- mrguyorama 7mo agoA decade ago this didn't require LLMs and cutting edge hardware and a trillion dollars of GPUs. This was a Facebook feature in like 2012. >What I really want is my phone to transcribe all of my phone calls to a Notes document This has been doable for decades. Why haven't you done it? My Pixel phones did this with voicemail before LLMs. Windows Vista shipped with full featured dictation functionality, and it works better than you would expect, all local, all using classical algorithms, all evaluated cheaply. If it wasn't accurate enough, Dragon speech to text tools were gold standard for most of modern computing history, and greatly surpassed the accuracy of that built in system. BTW, you can, on any Windows machine right now, access that built in voice recognition, and with a "Constrained vocabulary", say if you only want a few specific voice commands, it gets near perfect accuracy constantly. You have to search for old documentation now because Microsoft wants to hide that you don't need an internet connection or an Azure account and monthly bill to ship accurate voice recognition with your app. It's trivial to use, from both C++ and C#, and anything else that allows you to invoke native code, and the workflow is easy enough to understand. I built an app to utilize it instead of buying one of those $10 "Voice control your game" apps to add voice control to ARMA, and it was easier to implement the voice recognition than it was to copy and paste native code invocations for the Win32 api to inject keystrokes. I don't even write C# code in general. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/ms723627(v=vs.85) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/... There's tons of documentation about "Grammar" and configuration but the default configuration IIRC is to just turn speech input into text, and do so with at least 85% accuracy, even without the user actually training the recognizer to their voice. If you build context specific grammars or a hierarchical grammar to support a real UX that isn't just hoping some code knows how to interpret raw speech you will get dramatically better recognition performance. This is IMO a frequent pattern. Time and time again the people who keep saying "I want LLMs to do X" don't seem to be aware that "X" was a robust and mature area of research decades ago! They don't seem to be aware that you could already do X and even buy ready to go software for that purpose! Often enough the LLM version is an outright regression in functionality, as things that were doable with a single microchip in 1960 now require an internet connection. >Since it isn't recording an audio conversation, So to be clear, you want this functionality explicitly to bypass law? Federally and in 39ish states, you only need your own consent anyway.
- wizardforhire 7mo agoTaken another way given apple’s enormous market reach, this could be seen as perhaps the most solid metric of actual consumer interest in ai and features ignoring hype.
- eknkc 7mo agoNot sure. I'm a heavy AI user at this point. Oh, also a heavy Apple user and never once used an Apple AI thing since they released them. I don't even know what they released. It is complete failure of execution on their part.
- eagerpace 7mo agoI've been wondering about this failed Apple Intelligence project, but the more I think of it, Apple can afford to sit and wait. In 5 years we're going to have Opus 4.6-level performance on-device, and Apple is the only company that stands to benefit from it. Nobody wants to be sending EVERY request to someone else's cloud server.
- bitpush 7mo agoHave you tried running a reasonably sized model locally? You need minimum 24GB VRAM to load up a model. 32GB to be safe, and this isnt even frontier, but bare minimum. A good analogy would be streaming. To get good quality, sure, you can store the video file but it is going to take up space. For videos, these are 2-4GB (lets say) and streaming will always be easier and better. For models, we're looking at 100s of GB worth of model params. There's no way we can make it into, say, 1GB without loss in quality. So nope, beyond minimal classification and such, on-device isnt happening. -- EDIT: > Nobody wants to be sending EVERY request to someone else's cloud server. We do this already with streaming. You watch YouTube that is hosting videos on the "cloud". For latest MKBHD video, I dont care about having that locally (for the most part). I just wanna watch the video and be done with it. Same with LLMs. If LLMs are here to stay, most people would wanna use the latest / greatest models. --- EDIT-EDIT: If you response is Apple will figure it out somehow. Nope, Apple is sitting out the AI race. So it has no technology. It has nothing. It has access to whatever open source is available or something they can license from rest. So nope, Apple isnt pushing the limits. They are watching the world move beyond them.
- andrewmcwatters 7mo ago[dead]
- rsynnott 7mo agoI mean I think a lot of it is that they're not _really_ forcing it upon people. I think I've declined it maybe twice over the last two years. Meanwhile, Google are trying to crowbar bloody gemini in _everywhere_, and I gather Microsoft is doing ditto.