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Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

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Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#161

Post by asimovDev »

aurareturn wrote: post #27

The M7 Pro and M7 Max are scheduled for as early as the end of 2027, while the M7 Ultra is on track for 2028. This means there won't be a redesigned MBP this year since there won't be M6 Pro/Max chips. People were expecting a redesigned slimmer MBP with OLED display later this year, myself included. I was holding out for one until I decided to switch from an M1 Pro 16" MBP to an M5 Air 15" due to the expected price i…

Current MBPs are such a delight, I really don't want to think about a thinner MBP again, I just get shivers remembering the Ive butterfly keyboard models

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#162

Post by ramesh31 »

lowkeyokay wrote: post #106
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's plausible but is the Apple Tax for a 1TB memory machine on top of current memory prices really worth it? I paid around $4000 for 4090m laptop with 16GB VRAM back in 2023, it's great but DoA for even quantized LLMs. I can run SLMs and fine tune it but that's it. We need one of those specialized inference chip startups to succeed and a PC manufacturer willing to bet on them against Nvidia for the local AI to find…

I recently bought a Mac mini M4 16 GB - mostly to run Immich. I assumed I needed a Linux box. After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax.

>" After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax."

Apple has always been the most cost effective choice for the value you get going all the way back to the Apple II, it's just that the floor of that cost has always been high. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a just a fanboy one way or the other.

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#163

Post by simondotau »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #117
simondotau wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local AI is going to help Apple, especially with a return to normal RAM pricing being an inevitability, even if it takes years. They don't need to pull out of this approach.

How is it going to help them? Do you really think the average Apple user will use it when there’s already better AI provided by OpenAI and Anthropic which don’t require advanced local hardware?

I was just countering your argument with an equally compelling counter-argument.

As for how it helps: we're not talking about this year's AI ecosystem, or even next year's. This rumor, assuming it's true, is talking about two chip generations into the future — and probably at least three or four chip generations before it's a mature AI platform. What will AI be doing for us in five years from now? How does Apple plan for that future? Will concerns of privacy increase or decrease in that time?

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#164

Post by simianparrot »

LtWorf wrote: post #154
enos_feedler wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me AI is on par with the internet and what made it so powerful was piracy and porn and just the wide spectrum of things that are possible when you connect machines together. We are going to need the same thing again. Freedom to use any model that does any thing we want.

If it happens it's because of china but it will be forbidden in USA.

[flagged]

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#165

Post by mikestorrent »

overfeed wrote: post #151
kennywinker wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If it can do 90% of the tasks the big boys do, at 50% speed I want to live in this world too, but these numbers, as of today, are very aspirational and far removed from reality. I'm no tokenmaxxer; I find my modest local setup useful, I also know the limitations, it's slow and it sucks (relatively) at high-level and/or long-context planning, compared to frontier models. Only a minority of my prompts are max-effort…

Consider also that right now LLMs run slowly enough you can watch them think. I've seen a demo of an LLM running at an absurdly high speed and it reminds me of when I moved from a 2400 baud modem to a 14.4 - BBS screens that I could watch draw were all of a sudden nigh-interactive. Faster-than-realtime video generation is also coming, and will also continue to require huge hardware for a long while yet.

I love local models - I have a machine at home that runs a few for me and it's a lot of fun - but for the time being they are not super trustworthy on tool calls and staying on script. Another year or so might change all that!

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#166

Post by VeejayRampay »

MisterKent wrote: post #57

Apple 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…

I really wish people stopped saying things "I've been saying that"

why not just say "I think that"

do you see yourself as some kind of visionary about this particular topic? literally EVERYONE is saying that, it's the most obvious fact about AI

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#167

Post by dainiusse »

drnick1 wrote: post #143
kennywinker wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Curious, what exactly does it do for you? I has bad luck with these small models to do anything useful tbh.

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#168

Post by khalic »

ggm wrote: post #67

What'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…

AI isn't going anywhere, this is akin to the .com bubble. It burst, but the internet didn't go anywhere. While companies can fail, this technology is with us for the long run now, short of societal collapse.

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#169

Post by rajnathani »

MisterKent wrote: post #57

Apple 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…

Tangential: About 8 years ago ex-Apple chip engineers left to design server-grade chips, this was Nuvia, and they got sued by Apple to the point that they had to get acquired by Qualcomm.

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#170

Post by dofm »

techpression wrote: post #63
behnamoh wrote: post #11

Apple is very late to the AI party. By the time M7 is shipped, Nvidia will announce 6090 and people will be buying used (3|4|5)090 GPUs to run local models at much better performance than heat throttled M7.

What people? Are you seriously thinking the hundreds of millions of customers Apple have is going to be buying run-to-the-ground GPUs second hand and build local workstations for AI? Might as well ask them to self host email while you’re at it.

The difference between these two is that one of them is an unsolved research problem that we’ve all spent far too much time on, and the other is just running an LLM.
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