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768GB RAM pipe dreams make no sense to Apple. By discontinuing 256GB / 512GB M3 Ultra and raising prices $5000 -> $7000 on Macbook pro with 128GB they basically

• petercooper 4mo ago
  They could treat the extreme spec machines separately from the prosumer ones, like they did with the Xserve. Let business customers spec up to 768GB (say) who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag, while keeping them away from the stores and usual consumer supply chains (Amazon et al). It may not be a big enough market segment for them to care about anymore, though.
  • SXX 4mo ago
    They can do it, but that gonna need to be different SKU not Mac Studio. Otherwise news will be full of discussions about Apple price hike from $8000 to $24,000 or who the hell knows $48,000. So yeah the only way I see them selling it is usual "call us" enterprise price tag. But since its not what Apple usually do its easier to sell 4x Mac Studio 256GB RAM boxes with interconnect for lets say $12,000 - $15,000 each.
    • porphyra 4mo ago
      Imagine if they bring back the Mac Pro with 768GB of ram to compete with the $100k DGX Station.
      • matt-p 4mo ago
        A very good idea, the Mac Pro also had a rack mount option didn't it? That would be the kind of thing you could sell as many as you could make.
        • bigyabai 4mo ago
          > That would be the kind of thing you could sell as many as you could make. People said that about the M1 Ultra Mac Pro, a few years before it was discontinued. I don't think there are many HPC customers looking at Apple hardware.
      • newsclues 4mo ago
        The timing of the demise of the Mac Pro has been about as bad as the Steam Machine launch timing.
        • icedchai 4mo ago
          You mean the Mac Pro that was still on the M2 and hadn't been updated for 3+ years?
    • matt-p 4mo ago
      I don't think it's needs 'call us' just a separate SKU, I mean if they called it Xserve Ultra and it was just a studio in a 1u format with dual PSUs and extra RAM, it would fly off the shelves.
      • AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
        Isn't that the same thing you can get from ordinary 2S Epyc/Xeon servers at a similar price that have 24 memory channels (when the M3 Ultra has the equivalent of 16)? And the reason people rarely use that for AI is that the enterprise GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are only moderately more expensive but are significantly faster because they use HBM instead of DDR5.
        • matt-p 4mo ago
          Yeah kind of, I think a 24 channels DDR5 works out approx 1TB/s, but the cost is astronomical, a M5 studio would probably beat that performance for around half the cost. You also get to use the GPU/NPU cores of the mac vs CPU only on the servers. M5 ultra studio with 128GB RAM could probably beat out a sever with a RTX 6000 pro at half the price.
          • AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
            24 channels of DDR5-6400 is 1.2TB/s, M3 ultra is 0.8TB/s. They both use DDR5-6400. > a M5 studio would probably beat that performance for around half the cost. A barebones 2S system with no CPUs or memory is ~$2000, a pair of 16 core CPUs another ~$1000 each, and then however much memory you want. The price seems pretty comparable. The "problem" with doing this is actually that 128GB is too little memory, because you want to populate all the channels, but even using 16GB sticks, 24x16GB is already 384GB. > You also get to use the GPU/NPU cores of the mac vs CPU only on the servers. You only need enough cores to make sure the bottleneck is memory bandwidth.
            • spwa4 4mo ago
              > but even using 16GB sticks, 24x16GB is already 384GB. Question: you need 16GB sticks because they're the smallest doublesided ones, which you need for maximum BW, right? Otherwise why not 8G?
  • rdsubhas 4mo ago
    > Let business customers spec up to 768GB who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag There is a clear difference between $25k and $100k. 64 iPhones at retail price is already around $64k. For something at 768GB to be profitable at Apple's terms, this has to retail at $100k for it to be profitable. That was the OP's point.
  • andy_ppp 4mo ago
    Honestly you're still looking at (from my understanding) ~3 minutes prefill (TTFT) even with architectural improvements and so on with a 32k context window (against a large model). How is this going to be competitive with Nvidia and all of the tricks massive scale get's you to parallelise context across many machines?
    • mrngld 4mo ago
      Is it supposed to be? I think the point with some of these Macs is you get the capability in something the size of a heatsink from Intel's Netburst architecture era, or a Macbook light enough to stick in a backpack and take with you to lunch. If you're talking about chaining together multiple GPUs you're talking about a different game -- I suspect, anyway. Seems like a high-spec Mac would be good for development and testing. Arrays of GPUs, better aimed at production use.
  • waffletower 4mo ago
    They'll sell more $20-25k Macs when Goldman green lights Apple Card credit limits that will fit one of them.
    • zerohp 4mo ago
      Apple Card already offers credit limits high enough for it
• Lio 4mo ago
  I think you have an excellent point and I'll bet someone at Apple has all this in spreadsheet and is making that case. However, I think without the very high end machines Apple is also seeding a lot of professional middle market too. If the choice is between, say, a Framework desktop vs nothing from Apple I'll obviously pick the Framework. If I get used to a Framework desktop running Linux then I'd probably stop buying MacBook Pros. Right now Apple has a chance at capturing local AI but that opportunity won't last forever.
  • throawayonthe 4mo ago
    do you mean ceding that market?
    • Lio 4mo ago
      Yes! Thanks for point that out as it's an important difference. Mea culpa, dyslexic moment.
  • SXX 4mo ago
    If they cared about local AI market they would price hike M3 Ultra instead of discontinuing them. After all they conviniently introduced RDMA just few months before that. Initially when it happened everyone expected they did it because they planned to announce M5 Ultra shortly, but its not looks like this is happening. Now IMHO its indicates they simply run out of RAM supply.
  • chris_money202 4mo ago
    If you’re truly serious about local AI you’re not using a Mac. A Mac is for people who want the best of both worlds, GPUs are much faster if memory is equal.
• KaiserPro 4mo ago
  Forward planning though. They are assuming that they are able to get ram in the future, once the AI bubble either dissipates or pops. Its far easier to build something you planned for 3 years ago, than crash build it in 3 months.
  • SXX 4mo ago
    Of course if RAM prices crash Apple might of bring high RAM options back. We just cant bet on it as consumers. Right now RAM shortages are bad to the point where likely even Apple have to decide what products they make and what they discontinue. There been short time where M3 Ultra with 256GB / 512GB been best offet on market because Apple lagged with price increase. Now HN crowd expect Apple of all companies jump into price war with Nvidia and to subsidize their inference hardware.
• sajithdilshan 4mo ago
  [dead]
• sheepscreek 4mo ago
  The message I’m getting is that Apple will never compromise on its healthy margins. If something becomes basically unaffordable for their target market, they’d cut the production and even discontinue the product, than take a hit on margins. Their business model is refreshingly simple.
  • jltsiren 4mo ago
    It's just a planned economy failing the way planned economies often do: the central planner failed to predict the demand correctly. Instead of trying to secure additional stock from the market at spot prices, they are simply waiting for the next batches they had planned for.
    • Grombobulous 4mo ago
      I don’t think that represents the scenario at all, not to mention the fact that it’s literally not a planned economy (but also not very analogous to one, either). What’s really happening is that the effort of securing additional stock isn’t worth it because the price is so high that there aren’t enough buyers. If ground beef were to suddenly cost $50/pound, McDonald’s doesn’t raise the price of the Big Mac to $25 and hope people buy it, because it makes zero sense for their business model. Sure, some fancy restaurant will still be selling hamburgers, but not your chain of thousands of working class fast food restaurants. McDonald’s would find some other alternative item to sell. The truth is that nobody’s going to be buying Mac Studios that cost $25,000. Not even enterprises.
      • jltsiren 4mo ago
        Businesses are usually planned economies, and supply chain management is literal central planning. Apple failed to predict the demand for Mac Studios. Many other companies in its supply chain likely failed to predict that Apple would come back asking for more. There is no excess stock for some key components or the spare capacity to make them on demand. Apple would have to scour them from the market, likely paying much higher prices than it will pay for scheduled deliveries.
• chorsestudios 4mo ago
  This is only true under the assumption that RAM price per GB scales linearly.
  • SXX 4mo ago
    It's even worse than that. Demand is so high so every next GB will be sligly more expensive. There is a lot of smaller hardware manufacturers that unable to secure DRAM chips at any price, there just no free capacity on market. Of course Apple is massive, but if they announce inference boxes that everyone wants they need to make 10,000s or even 100,000s of them. And it's very much likely they'd rather sell 600,000 - 10,000,000 more iPhones or Macbooks Neo. End users bring Apple money with every OpenAI / Claude subscriprion sold through their platform. And inference boxes is just one-off sale of hardware that will bring no further income.