It would need a path to a $2,500 machine, I think. But this is a niche I don’t think another consumer-facing brand could do like Apple.
Like, take out the price sheets for the Apple Car. Then sell me an AI tower at those price points.
Those Macbook Neo users would be very reliant on Apple intelligence, enough maybe to pay for a service with it. I think Apple's much happier going this path.
If it's an "or," absolutely. But if it's an or, they should be prioritising Macbooks over the Mac Mini Doug Brooks is discussing.
When we breach the "and" of memory supply sufficient to allow for more Mac minis (and Mac Studios), I think it would make sense to consider relaunching Xserve (with new branding, of course) as a consumer/small business product.
The writing has been on the wall since 2019. Apple doesn't like the old way of computing, their goal is to expand the ecosystem by prioritizing install-base and then pushing first-party service offerings like they did with the iPhone. And like they did with the iPhone, Apple is great at ignoring power users to focus on features that make them more money.
You may be waiting a few decades for this type of product, memory supply be damned.
Now that the Mac Pro is depreciated, Apple's plan to pivot to service offerings seems set in stone. That's the "want it all" attitude they've adopted with the App Store.
At the $150 mark (which is probably accurate factoring in lifetime service spend), that's a $10,000 minimum return on the 64x Macbook Neos. Apple can charge that type of premium on consumer hardware, but they're in no position to command $10,000 margins on professional hardware. They're not Nvidia, Apple has always been LARPing as an HPC vendor.
Apple won't subsidize these low-margin enthusiast products with the profits made from services and higher-margin hardware. Tim Cook would much rather ship the 64 Macs, and get ~15-20 school-age kids hooked on Apple One or the App Store for the rest of their life. There's understandably not much patience for catering to people that want to opt-out of the Apple Intelligence service ecosystem, effectively leeching off of more successful products. The volume and opportunity cost kills the concept in the cradle.
The hard part is the GPU architecture. Apple Silicon was designed with a laser focus on raster efficiency (similar to AMD's GPUs) which makes a lot of sense for highly mobile hardware, but is a crippling mistake for high-performance compute. Apple's largest Ultra chips are hamstrung with SOC-tier GPU performance, their highest-end desktops are outperformed by Nvidia's laptop offerings. Apple has to find a way to scale upwards without imposing too much architectural strain on their cheaper hardware like the iPhone and Macbook. Nvidia has already solved this issue; full CUDA compute stacks are usable on extremely cheap GPUs like the Nintendo Switch's Tegra SOC, or the Mac Mini-sized Jetson boards.
In terms of "who needs to redesign more to address the market", Apple has a lot of technical debt to unearth before they catch up to Nvidia. And if they do catch up, Nvidia will still support Linux and other differentiating features that Apple refuses to implement. It definitely feels like Nvidia is closer to a winner with the Spark than Apple is with the Mini or Studio.
It assumes that RAM remains supply constrained and that none of the existing RAM contracts are cut short.
But Meta and xAI putting A TON of AI compute onto the market. OpenAI and Anthropic are raising the costs of inference (by reducing how much inference users get via subscriptions). And we haven’t seen Oracle / CoreWeave struggle to pay their debts yet, but they will be selling assets once they get close to that point.
Edit: Okay, this doesn’t mean that that’s actually possible in the short-term, so I think you’re right. But that means as the silver lining, in the medium term horizon there’ll be enough supply again? :’)
Memory is a cyclical market that has historically rewarded conservatism [1].
Counterpoint: there is enough demand from enough capital-rich customers that they may be willing to shoulder the capital risk.
[1] https://www.ldeepai.com/tech-hub/dram-industry-consolidation... Sorry for the slop link, it has a good chart from a solid source
So essentially, due to technological progress and other factors inducing price collapses (or at least cycles), you can’t start stockpiling insane amounts of finished-product semiconductor, which means you can’t scale production at current technology levels to infinity either?
I also believe there would be one or two tech companies that will get into memory by taking it in-house to make sure that they won’t have this problem again in the future.
This is a good hypothesis. Curious if anyone has data on the failure rates of new entrants in semiconductors based on how frothy it was on founding.
On one hand, more demand makes selling easier. On the other hand, a shortage makes your input costs (consumable and capital) pricier.
EDIT: It seems like the 2 to 3 year lead time and a crowding effect from new entrants historically made booting up a fab into a boom a bad bet [1]. (The article argues, convincingly, that this time may be different.)
[1] https://www.uncoveralpha.com/p/every-memory-cycle-ends-the-s...
https://www.techspot.com/news/112502-memory-prices-tipped-fa...
If a place can do it, another place, with a huge track record on manufacturing and lately expanding all kinds of tech, can.
Whether or not you feel like those are good overall (I do), they do actually also slow things down.
Yes, like how it helped western industry early on. Or, well into the 70s for the most part.
Unfortunately its not so cheap anymore as everyone ramped prices up of course.
Last year I could still get 32GB of DDR4 for under $60 from chinese brands.
I just upgraded my 2008 Thinkpad R61i to 8GB of DDR2 a few months ago while I was also upgrading to a core2duo.
DDR2 and DDR3 are still in active use by SBC manufacturers.
Uhhh… ok… good for you I guess…
Chinese fabs might not be so tied with red tape and regulation upon regulation (which is a funny reversal, in terms of "communism vs capitalism" bureucracy/inefficiency cold war thinking)
All of their fabrication ability is based on old processes.
2.) Authoritarianism can move faster than anything. They can just say "wipe out that village, build the coal plant there, data center here, fab here.
3.) If it's red tape and regulation holding the US back, then that's clearly not "capitalism."
Except in the actual historical sense. They appear to enjoy all sorts of freedoms, increased prosperity, even have elections at different levels but under a single party system. Which is not necessarily that different than a effectively two party system.
>2.) Authoritarianism can move faster than anything. They can just say "wipe out that village, build the coal plant there, data center here, fab here.
Now that China is more effective, "it's easy because they're authoritarian". Before the argument was "authoritarianism can never be as effective as free-market democracy".
>3.) If it's red tape and regulation holding the US back, then that's clearly not "capitalism."
It's real world capitalism, not some fantasy some guy imagined removing all warts.
And that's somehow fascist, as if the problem with fascist Italy or nazi Germany was that they didn't hand out citizenships?
what if demand keeps rising faster than production capacity is deployed?
We are in a bubble which will be burst the moment the world starts retaliating against the US' 20+ year history of supporting genocide and committing war crimes unabated.
Buy the AI toys while you still can.
> Multiple motherboard and PC component makers move forward with Chinese-made memory validation
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/multiple-motherboard...
The only thing standing in the way of a major Chinese DDR5 ramp up is money.
There are lots of signals that the sector has been overinvested and that corporate customers are pulling back on spending as the cost of the APIs is revealed.
Once the hyperscalers start struggling to bay their debts (it will happen, just a question of time), there will be a supply glut.
So the only question is: do we share the same definition of “short term”.
The issue with the M3 chip is the compute performance, as it doesn't fit well the transformer architecture. This changed with the M5 (apple baked their own matmul into the chip), which would significantly speed up PP (and video/image generation btw), making the M5 Ultra significantly faster than the M3 Ultra and in practice much more usable. You can try to load Kimi or GLM on M3 Ultra, but it's not usable. Now the M5 Ultra is not out yet, but undoubtedly it will be a superior offering, and shilling 15k on 512GB version is actually reasonable (if it's every priced remotely around that tag).
My money is on small companies or affluent programmers experimenting with some new hobby / business model.
Apple simply cannot comprehend the ask.
Apple knows the market demand for this type of device.
You may have paid $50,000 for it, but you’re only one customer. At Apple scale they need to focus their finite resources on the products that serve the largest market demand.
$50,000 rack mount servers are not a large demand.
From a historic standpoint though Apple came back from near-death because they differentiated by focusing on the consumer first.
While other companies were recycling the same beige boxes meant to be tucked under desks for home use, Apple came out with products in candy colors.
While Microsoft was rolling out new business process tool SKUs, Apple came out with GarageBand and bundled it in for free.
Apple is not the company prioritizing going after a Fortune 500 company to replace their fleet with Macs. So their focus isn't going to be to design products and features to try to get that deal closed.
It's just that Apple isn't really focused on software development professionals, and it's still fashionable to throw shade on them, so we hear a lot of kvetching about it, in communities like this.
I've been using Macs for all kinds of stuff, since 1986, so I can definitely state they get work done.
But I still strongly believe that Apple hates pro users because they don't make as much money and because they get in the way of serving laymen. The Aperture fiasco, the Final Cut Saga, the Xcode war of attrition and the never ending chain of failures with MacPro - all suggest that I'm right.
(Developer of a major plugin for DaVinci here)
As an Apple developer, since then, I have been incandescent with rage at Apple, many times.
Guess I’m a walking demonstration of Stockholm Syndrome (at least, that’s what I’ve been told).
And I definitely feel the pain with Aperture, not making it to Apple Silicon.
There are many larger software companies that can support all three operating systems, they just make up excuses/reasons as to why they can’t perform over the years.
I am unsure that apple themselves understand why their hardware (top end & bottom end) has been so successful, without this understanding leaning into these use cases isn't really going to be possible.
You have a bold career as a technical journalist ahead of you!
With their apple finger right there on the pulse, they are going hard on the VR/AR glasses (following the lead of the visionary CEO of facebook), cars and folding phones. By the end of the year (tm) we 100% will have all the features that were showcased and demonstrated 2 releases ago.
I trust they know more about their business model than some rando on the internet, sorry.
How you hold it is, of course, up to you.
For me, the privacy pitch wins. I have a friend visiting, however, who spends like $2,400 with Anthropic every year. That's a solid ROI even if the thing becomes obsolete after a couple years. (I'm still on my 2020 MacBook Pro. I love it and will be sad when I have to replace it.)
How can that be a solid return on investment? There's no model you can run locally to have frontier model level performance. Also who spends 2.4k yearly for personal AI usage, like what's the usecase? If your friend is spending that money for his business then it's not personal computing.
I'm betting he doesn't need a frontier model. Sonnet, today, is likely good for 80% of his tasks, which largely involve repretitive, tedious work.
> Also who spends 2.4k yearly for personal AI usage, like what's the usecase? If your friend is spending that money for his business then it's not personal computing
Combination of business and personal.
I do the $100/mo for myself, then about ~$200/mo for startup.
Apple makes product lines with assembly lines, its not a hand fab or custom build type of place.
I think "buy this $10,000 box and to easily grant every Macbook Neo on your team safe, private, free AI" could be a real winner.
I could absolutely justify having that machine for the actual work I do, and I'm not even doing any of the really hard AI things. If I were, I might prefer a Thelio Mega workstation from System76, which is $90,383.00 fully loaded.
Alas I can not afford a 10K personal computer right now, which is not the same thing.
If Apple released a machine that would let me run, say, DeepSeek V4 Pro or GLM 5.2 locally at 100 tok/s for $10k, I might hurt myself running to get my credit card.
But then, I'm also posting this sitting in my truck while my family attends an event, with a Vision Pro on my face so I can monitor 7 Claude Code sessions without constantly switching screens on my laptop.
It’s not necessarily out of reach or unusable over the course of time, the thing I keep hearing over and over is how usable many people find Mac’s very useable over the course of time, obviously software support plays a big part of that.
On top of that, AI models are getting more useful despite their smaller size. The future is a personal computer future, not a mainframe computer one. Yes, larger computers are useful, but most people will not be using that larger computers, which will be relegated to universities and larger companies.