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My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer
by hylaride 4mo ago
My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer market is full of Chromebooks at cheap laptops. Laptops are a tool (again?) instead of a necessity.
- vovavili 4mo agoWould be foolish of them not to take advantage of Microsoft having self-sabotage as its favorite pastime.
- PaulHoule 4mo ago... and a huge amount of help from Dell, Lenovo and the like.
- forsalebypwner 4mo agoyeah, that's a good point... man, my opinion of Lenovo has tanked in the last decade and I'm only just realizing it now. I always thought of Dell as kinda shitty, but Lenovo had a great thing going that just kinda atrophied in some cases, and actively got worse in others
- bigyabai 4mo agoApple has taken advantage of that for the past 2 decades, to the tune of a minority share in the PC market. Meanwhile Nvidia is happily cresting what, 5 trillion in valuation? It's a weird time to be an Apple shareholder.
- seanmcdirmid 4mo agoApple M series are competitive in inference at least. I wish Apple would just aim their chip people at NVIDIA in everything else. They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.
- bigyabai 4mo agoThey're honestly not competitive for inference, it's why datacenters largely ignore Apple Silicon. Even the M5 Max is still bottlenecked for dense models due to the relatively weak GPU and paltry ~500-600gb/s of GPU memory bandwidth. For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks Even for home inference, it's hard to recommend a dedicated Mac over a cheap Nvidia server box. > They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that. Apple invented OpenCL. The problem was their reluctance to work with the rest of the industry, and once CUDA took over it was too late for them to even try.
- seanmcdirmid 4mo ago> For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks NVIDIA hampers their GPUs with un-unified graphics memory, while the M series can use everything the computer has (well, you need to save 4GB or so). It also works on airplanes and in hotel rooms, a cheap NVIDIA server box with 64GB of RAM (what my M3 Max laptop has)....how cheap is that?
- andriy_koval 4mo agoI think un-unified memory issue is solved by software layer in datacenter setting: model is distributed across multiple GPUs in the same server, or across multiple servers if model is extra large.
- robertjpayne 4mo agoI'm quite happy Apple stays focused on their products. They enter a market when they can own it end-to-end -- it makes no sense for them to all of a sudden become an AI chip house or AI server house.
- 4mo ago
- varispeed 4mo agoChromebook should be classified as torture device.
- actionfromafar 4mo agoEnhanced interrogation computing device. We just need your personal data!