In the long run I truly believe local AI will win and Apple will be the world's most important AI company because of these chips. Imagine something like today's Opus running for free and in complete privacy on your local machine with a beautiful Apple UX on top. For most tasks for most people, that's a much better proposition than a frontier model in the cloud you have to pay for and send all your data to and that only works when you're online.
Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
141–150 of 396 posts
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#142What's their backup plan if the AI world doesn't pan out? What if it turns out people want base compute capability and lots of RAM for filestore cache and programs? Maybe this strategy works, even in that world. Remember when we all thought (were told we thought) the world was heading to 3D views of our 2D lived experience like a solid Cube of GUI we could rotate around and live inside? Well Apple took the simple 2D…
this is the backup strategy. the "AI doesn't pan out" scenario is basically if claude and openai go bankrupt, we continue running local models on our hardware.
there isn't a future where we all just decide that nah, we don't want AI anymore. usefuly things don't disappear.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Though, I've been saying for a while that the local AI inflectiom point is the death knell for these frontier labs. "Death knell" is a touch hyperbolic. Hardware that can only run quantized models that take up GBs in VRAM falls short of even an A100 (by almost an order of magnitude[0]), which in turn falls short of what an 8xH100 cluster can do (also by another order of magnitude[0]). I'm an avid believer in local…
Doesn’t need to be a winner head to head. If it can do 90% of the tasks the big boys do, at 50% speed, for virtually no extra overhead cost save for the power consumed by a prompt - that’s gonna work for a lot of people. And that’s also basically where we’re at today. Qwen3.6 35b running quantized on 10 year old hardware solves basically all of my uses cases for agents except for coding. The frontier models are faste…
Consider this. One of the smallest Qwen models (4B parameters) powers my home automation voice assistant, and runs on CPU alone at >20 tok/s. It is enough for that use case, and could be made even better/faster with a modest GPU. It isn't as smart as some cloud-connected thingamajig, but I would never allow a literal Google or Amazon bug in my home. Huge SOTA models aren't relevant everywhere. Most people use LLMs for rather trivial tasks such as finding typos or drafting text.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#144In the long run I truly believe local AI will win and Apple will be the world's most important AI company because of these chips. Imagine something like today's Opus running for free and in complete privacy on your local machine with a beautiful Apple UX on top. For most tasks for most people, that's a much better proposition than a frontier model in the cloud you have to pay for and send all your data to and that on…
I would say local AI is very real. I use it but so many here am on other forums do so nowadays as well. This is the reason I just cannot fathom the valuations of the AI firms out there.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we have any explanations of what WLCM means that are more industry focused? I couldn't find anything that didn't look like blogspam. And that explanation of the DRAM being on the same wafer doesn't really make sense. For one, at that point there's no "multi chip" part if you're integrating more onto the same die rather than less. And their explanation isn't really passing the smell test for me for other reasons, f…
The terms to search for are fan-out wafer level packaging (FOWLP) and TSMC InFO. The chiplets come from different wafers and are reconstituted into a molded plastic wafer, allowing multiple die side-by-side. Then multiple layers of wires are built on top, terminating in a BGA.
My astonishment at these manufacturing processes is never-ending.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem is affording the ram…
Well yes. But similar to the Apple TSMC relationship, could Apple step in with large orders to established RAM makers such that the RAM makers can invest with stability?
M series chips are system-on-chip with RAM on the same wafer with CPU and GPU, so it impossible to outsource only part of the chip
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#147Apple is actually interesting. They are one of the few companies with a chip / PC play with real power AND basically no play I'm the hyperscalar market. That means they're actually incentivized at least short term, to benefit PCs becoming strong enough to do local LLMs. Which makes this play make even more sense. Though, I've been saying for a while that the local AI inflectiom point is the death knell for these fron…
> Though, I've been saying for a while that the local AI inflectiom point is the death knell for these frontier labs. "Death knell" is a touch hyperbolic. Hardware that can only run quantized models that take up GBs in VRAM falls short of even an A100 (by almost an order of magnitude[0]), which in turn falls short of what an 8xH100 cluster can do (also by another order of magnitude[0]). I'm an avid believer in local…
Indeed. Local models becoming available and halfway decent don't obviate the laws of scale. And because there's no ceiling to what scaling more will buy you in terms of capability, there's no reason not to scale more, there's no incentive for billionaires not to grab all the fab capacity they can.
Enjoy paying $1000 or more for a little 4 GiB cloud terminal that connects you to all your online accounts where all your actual work gets done. This is the future.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. If Apple makes it feasible to run models like GLM 5.2 at home, I will become their customer.
you're not a customer of any of their products at all already? not a single apple device in your household?
None. And I have a PC, a personal laptop, a work laptop, my current and my previous Android phone.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well yes. But similar to the Apple TSMC relationship, could Apple step in with large orders to established RAM makers such that the RAM makers can invest with stability?
M series chips are system-on-chip with RAM on the same wafer with CPU and GPU, so it impossible to outsource only part of the chip
No it isn't, DRAM is made with a different process and those are chiplets, perfectly possible to outsource, and the only possibility really as TSMC does not make DRAM.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. If Apple makes it feasible to run models like GLM 5.2 at home, I will become their customer.
you're not a customer of any of their products at all already? not a single apple device in your household?
What a bizarre bubble you live in to even be asking this question... I've never owned a single apple product, and never will.
And in the rare occasions in which I have to use someone's MacBook, I'm completely lost - like some elderly person.