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Comment by cwoolfe | Hacker News Reader

As others have said, a high powered Mac could be used for the same purpose at a comparable price and lower power usage. Which makes me wonder: why doesn't Apple get into the enterprise AI chip game and compete with Nvidia? They could design their own ASIC for it with all their hardware & manufacturing knowledge. Maybe they already are.

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called it! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-24/apple-say...

The primary market for such a product would be businesses. And Apple isn't particularly good at selling to companies. The consumer product focus may just be too ingrained to be successful with such a move.

A beefed up home pod with a local LLM-based assistant would be a more typical Apple product. But they'd probably need LLMs to become much, much more reliable to not ruin their reputation over this.

Why? Siri's still total crap but that doesn't seem to have slowed down iPhone sales.

Siri mostly hit the expectations they themselves were able to set through their ads when launching that product - having a voice based assistant at all was huge back then. With an LLM-based assistant, the market has set the expectations for them and they are just unreasonably high and don't mirror reality. That's a potentially big trap for Apple now.

> And Apple isn't particularly good at selling to companies.

With a big glaring exception: developer laptops are overwhelmingly Apple's game right now. It seems like they should be able to piggyback off of that, given that the decision makers are going to be in the same branch of the customer company.

For roughly the same reason Steve Jobs et al killed Hypercard; too much power to the users.

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