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That article is a bit incoherent. I think it is pretty clear at this point that Apple has gone all-in on being the ideal edge silicon for AI. This leverages th

That article is a bit incoherent. I think it is pretty clear at this point that Apple has gone all-in on being the ideal edge silicon for AI. This leverages their core competencies, requires only modest investment, and will likely pay out no matter how the AI market eventually shakes out. They are in one of the only parts of the obvious future AI market where there isn't really a fight for greenfield turf with other big companies. Staying in their lane is arguably the optimal business decision for Apple and they lose nothing by it.

fassssst 3mo ago
Not really. Their new Siri is powered by Gemini.
nunez 3mo ago
They've been investing in NPUs for a long long time. Since the first iPad Pro at least (2018). Apple Silicon is a natural fit for tensor/matrix operations due to unified memory, so if anything them going "all in" on that has been a nice side effect.
- _davide_ 3mo ago
  > Apple Silicon is a natural fit for tensor/matrix operations due to unified memory, This is a common misconception. This is NOT true: memory designed for CPU performs horribly for GPU tasks. Mac/Strix Halo/NVIDIA Spark are performing horribly compared to a desktop video card with GDDR. I spent quite a few weekends optimizing ROCM kernels for strix halo, i WISH I had GDDR instead of high-frequency CPU RAM; the bandwidth would be SO MUCH better. I'm quantizing weights not to make computation faster, not because I'm out of memory, but because memory cannot move fast enough to be processed and it's cheaper to load quantized version, convert into bf16 compute, and discard; This happens every single time a token is generated for the whole model over and over.
  - TimByte 3mo ago
    The whole point of Apple silicon isnt speed, it is capacity. You can grab a Mac Studio with 192 gb of unified memory and shove a model in there that would otherwise require building a rig with multiple rtx 4090 s. For local dev just being able to fit the weights in memory is often way more important than token generation speed
ghaff 3mo ago
I generally agree. Xserve didn't work out for Apple and they dropped it pretty quickly--think I still have an A/UX coffee cup. Wasn't really in their DNA even if there was an argument before Linux took off. For better or worse, they're basically a client company and barely a software (OK and basically a software services) one--although they spend a fair bit on (roughly) user experience.
- robertoandred 3mo ago
  They sold the Xserve for ten years, across the PowerPC and Intel eras.
  - ghaff 3mo ago
    Still, in the scheme of Apple stuff it was a failed experiment--even if a worthwile one.
    - Danox 3mo ago
      It was worthwhile because in the end it taught them that they needed to do something like Apple Silicon. And hopefully the current memory fiasco will convince them that they need to take memory in house if they want to build what they need to build going forward. I really don’t see any alternative long-term to not engineering and designing memory in house and collaborating with TSMC onshore in America. Hopefully having an engineer from the Apple Silicon design group as the next CEO will pay off.
      - ghaff 3mo ago
        Maybe. Intel got out of the memory game baecause it became a commodity. That said, I was involved in some research years back where there was the potential opportunity for memory optimized for specific purposes. Which didn't make sense for the vendor at the time. Apple's already doing it to some degree on-chip. But you can imagine it making sense for a vendor owning the whole stack which wasn't really the case for the vendor we were doing the research for.
    - 3mo ago
whywhywhywhy 3mo ago
Just feels like the Apple press/podcast circuit just keep trying to spin ways to frame Apples fumble of the AI era as some sort of savvy move.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3mo ago
  AI is overhyped regardless of whether Apple exists or not. They’re getting attention only because they didn’t jump on the bandwagon, and from a purely investment standpoint their fiscal discipline is honestly astounding.
- Danox 3mo ago
  When your competition is currently burning billions of dollars left and right, Apple refunding Google $1 billion and giving OpenAI zero dollars seems pretty smart to me, Apple‘s largest acquisition in their entire history is only three billion dollars that’s planning.
  - bigyabai 3mo ago
    Apple's competition is high-performance compute. Nvidia is eating their lunch to the tune of $4 trillion, and Apple just let it happen. They left billions on the table in revenue that Nvidia eats up with their own ARM servers that aren't arbitrarily restricted by the OEM.
- red-iron-pine 3mo ago
  marketing has always been one of their strong suits
btown 3mo ago
Here's an interview with the senior product manager of Apple Silicon that more-or-less says the same thing: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/06/apple-silicon-exec-explains-mac-mini-ai-demand/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/06/apple-silicon-exec-expl... > He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud – a move motivated by privacy, security, and the rising cost of inference as agents consume more tokens. However, Brooks envisions a hybrid future in which agents decide what runs on-device and what gets sent to the cloud. And coupled with their efforts in auditably-private cloud computing, that's a strong pitch.
- Barbing 3mo ago
  > auditably-private cloud computing Do those of you who have read the white paper have confidence in this claim (as I’d hope)? Blog: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
  - btown 3mo ago
    The top threads here have commentary: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22private%20cloud%20compute%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... especially https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41937664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41937664 IMO - while nothing is a guarantee against a state-level actor that can compel both hardware-level bypasses and put such bypasses under a gag order, it's a well-thought-out system under those constraints. The idea of a self-auditing and self-healing fleet that requires simultaneous compromise of software and enclave hardware is a meaningful level of defense in depth against literally everything else.
bee_rider 3mo ago
I don’t think they need to go all-in on anything related to AI. > This leverages their core competencies, requires only modest investment, and will likely pay out no matter how the AI market eventually shakes out. This looks more like a call or a small raise or whatever (I don’t play poker).
lern_too_spel 3mo ago
If they've gone all in on that, it looks even worse for Apple. Qualcomm's Hexagon has been a better NPU since the beginning. Now even Mediatek is better at it than Apple. Blogs like macrumors and daringfireball are notorious for not having any clue about what is going on in the broader industry.

fassssst 3mo ago

Not really. Their new Siri is powered by Gemini.

nunez 3mo ago

They've been investing in NPUs for a long long time. Since the first iPad Pro at least (2018). Apple Silicon is a natural fit for tensor/matrix operations due to unified memory, so if anything them going "all in" on that has been a nice side effect.

_davide_ 3mo ago
> Apple Silicon is a natural fit for tensor/matrix operations due to unified memory, This is a common misconception. This is NOT true: memory designed for CPU performs horribly for GPU tasks. Mac/Strix Halo/NVIDIA Spark are performing horribly compared to a desktop video card with GDDR. I spent quite a few weekends optimizing ROCM kernels for strix halo, i WISH I had GDDR instead of high-frequency CPU RAM; the bandwidth would be SO MUCH better. I'm quantizing weights not to make computation faster, not because I'm out of memory, but because memory cannot move fast enough to be processed and it's cheaper to load quantized version, convert into bf16 compute, and discard; This happens every single time a token is generated for the whole model over and over.
- TimByte 3mo ago
  The whole point of Apple silicon isnt speed, it is capacity. You can grab a Mac Studio with 192 gb of unified memory and shove a model in there that would otherwise require building a rig with multiple rtx 4090 s. For local dev just being able to fit the weights in memory is often way more important than token generation speed

ghaff 3mo ago

I generally agree. Xserve didn't work out for Apple and they dropped it pretty quickly--think I still have an A/UX coffee cup. Wasn't really in their DNA even if there was an argument before Linux took off. For better or worse, they're basically a client company and barely a software (OK and basically a software services) one--although they spend a fair bit on (roughly) user experience.

robertoandred 3mo ago
They sold the Xserve for ten years, across the PowerPC and Intel eras.
- ghaff 3mo ago
  Still, in the scheme of Apple stuff it was a failed experiment--even if a worthwile one.
  - Danox 3mo ago
    It was worthwhile because in the end it taught them that they needed to do something like Apple Silicon. And hopefully the current memory fiasco will convince them that they need to take memory in house if they want to build what they need to build going forward. I really don’t see any alternative long-term to not engineering and designing memory in house and collaborating with TSMC onshore in America. Hopefully having an engineer from the Apple Silicon design group as the next CEO will pay off.
    - ghaff 3mo ago
      Maybe. Intel got out of the memory game baecause it became a commodity. That said, I was involved in some research years back where there was the potential opportunity for memory optimized for specific purposes. Which didn't make sense for the vendor at the time. Apple's already doing it to some degree on-chip. But you can imagine it making sense for a vendor owning the whole stack which wasn't really the case for the vendor we were doing the research for.
  - 3mo ago

whywhywhywhy 3mo ago

Just feels like the Apple press/podcast circuit just keep trying to spin ways to frame Apples fumble of the AI era as some sort of savvy move.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 3mo ago
AI is overhyped regardless of whether Apple exists or not. They’re getting attention only because they didn’t jump on the bandwagon, and from a purely investment standpoint their fiscal discipline is honestly astounding.
Danox 3mo ago
When your competition is currently burning billions of dollars left and right, Apple refunding Google $1 billion and giving OpenAI zero dollars seems pretty smart to me, Apple‘s largest acquisition in their entire history is only three billion dollars that’s planning.
- bigyabai 3mo ago
  Apple's competition is high-performance compute. Nvidia is eating their lunch to the tune of $4 trillion, and Apple just let it happen. They left billions on the table in revenue that Nvidia eats up with their own ARM servers that aren't arbitrarily restricted by the OEM.
red-iron-pine 3mo ago
marketing has always been one of their strong suits

btown 3mo ago

Here's an interview with the senior product manager of Apple Silicon that more-or-less says the same thing: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/06/apple-silicon-exec-explains-mac-mini-ai-demand/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/06/apple-silicon-exec-expl... > He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud – a move motivated by privacy, security, and the rising cost of inference as agents consume more tokens. However, Brooks envisions a hybrid future in which agents decide what runs on-device and what gets sent to the cloud. And coupled with their efforts in auditably-private cloud computing, that's a strong pitch.

Barbing 3mo ago
> auditably-private cloud computing Do those of you who have read the white paper have confidence in this claim (as I’d hope)? Blog: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
- btown 3mo ago
  The top threads here have commentary: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22private%20cloud%20compute%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... especially https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41937664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41937664 IMO - while nothing is a guarantee against a state-level actor that can compel both hardware-level bypasses and put such bypasses under a gag order, it's a well-thought-out system under those constraints. The idea of a self-auditing and self-healing fleet that requires simultaneous compromise of software and enclave hardware is a meaningful level of defense in depth against literally everything else.

bee_rider 3mo ago

I don’t think they need to go all-in on anything related to AI. > This leverages their core competencies, requires only modest investment, and will likely pay out no matter how the AI market eventually shakes out. This looks more like a call or a small raise or whatever (I don’t play poker).

lern_too_spel 3mo ago

If they've gone all in on that, it looks even worse for Apple. Qualcomm's Hexagon has been a better NPU since the beginning. Now even Mediatek is better at it than Apple. Blogs like macrumors and daringfireball are notorious for not having any clue about what is going on in the broader industry.