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Comment by __loam | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy they ate shit here because I like my mac not getting co-pilot bullshit forced into it, but apparently Apple had two separate teams competing against each other on this topic. Supposedly a lot of politics got in the way of delivering on a good product combined with the general difficulty of building LLM products.

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I do prefer that Apple is opting to have everything run on device so you aren’t being exposed to privacy risks or subscriptions. Even if it means their models won’t be as good as ones running on $30,000 GPUs.

It also means that when the VC money runs dry, it's sustainable to run those models on-device vs. losing money running on those $$$$$ GPUs (or requiring consumers to opt for expensive subscriptions).

I’m kind of surprised to see people gloss over this aspect of it when so many folks here are in the “if I buy it, I should own it” camp.

On device.

If you have say 16GB of GPU RAM and around 64GB of RAM and a reasonable CPU then you can make decent use of LLMs. I'm not a Apple jockey but I think you normally have something like that available and so you will have a good time, provided you curb your expectations.

I'm not an expert but it seems that the jump from 16 to 32GB of GPU RAM is large in terms of what you can run and the sheer cost of the GPU!

If you have 32GB of local GPU RAM and gobs of RAM you can rub some pretty large models locally or lots of small ones for differing tasks.

I'm not too sure about your privacy/risk model but owning a modern phone is a really bad starter for 10! You have to decide what that means for you and that's your thing and your's alone.

> Apple had two separate teams competing against each other on this topic

That is a sign of very bad management. Overlapping responsibilities kill motivation as winning the infighting becomes more important than creating a good product. Low morale, and a blaming culture is the result of such "internal competition". Instead, leadership should do their work and align goals, set clear priorities and make sure that everybody rows in the same direction.

It’s how Apple (relatively famously?) developed the iPhone, so I’d assume they were using this as a model.

> In other words, should he shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod? Jobs preferred the former option, since he would then have a mobile operating system he could customize for the many gizmos then on Apple’s drawing board. Rather than pick an approach right away, however, Jobs pitted the teams against each other in a bake-off.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna44904886

But that's not the same thing right? That means having two teams competing for developing the next product. That's not two organisations handling the same responsibilities. You may still end up in problems with infighting. But if there is a clear end date for that competition and then no lasting effects for the "losers" this kind of "competition" will have very different effects than setting up two organisations that fight over some responsibility

Apparently? From what? Where did this information come from that they had two competing teams?

I feel like I hear people referring to Wayne Ma’s reporting for The Information to that effect.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-fumbled-siris-...

> Distrust between the two groups got so bad that earlier this year one of Giannandrea’s deputies asked engineers to extensively document the development of a joint project so that if it failed, Federighi’s group couldn’t scapegoat the AI team.

> It didn’t help the relations between the groups when Federighi began amassing his own team of hundreds of machine-learning engineers that goes by the name Intelligent Systems and is run by one of Federighi’s top deputies, Sebastien Marineau-Mes.

https://archive.is/Ncefp

This is a pretty good article, and worth reading if you aren't aware that Apple has seemingly mostly abandoned the vision of on-device AI (I wasn't aware of this)

I heard it from the Verge podcast several months ago but someone has shared another source.

Mac LLM vs Lisa LLM?

Apple ][ LLM Forever!

https://paleotronic.com/2025/08/03/connect-ai-to-microm8-app...

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