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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

#191

Post by rick_dalton »

john_minsk wrote: post #73
Schiendelman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notch does not matter at all, you will forget it's there.

Well… your menu items will disappear behind it still in 2026. You would need an extra app for that… But in terms of “noticing it” you are correct. You won’t pay attention after a day or two. EDIT: this menu managing app will need permissios to make screen captures. So much for the privacy. Forgot to mention.

I think this is one of the things they're fixing in macOS 27 golden gate, took them long enough. https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1u0lhyz/macos_27...

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

#192

Post by dgellow »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #172
jimbokun wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is finally going to realize Jobs vision where sand comes into the factory, is turned into RAM and CPU chips, then installed in a Mac or iPhone then shipped to a customer.

Isnt the proper kind of sand in short supply aswell?

Just curious, is there a way to invest in sand?

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

#193

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

9dev wrote: post #174
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 paid around $4000 for 4090m laptop That's how much many developers currently spend on tokens - every day. Whatever "Apple Tax" applies to a device that can run a capable model offline will amortise itself in a blink.

>Whatever "Apple Tax" applies to a device that can run a capable model offline will amortise itself in a blink.

Current high-end Mac Studio with 32-core M3 Ultra chip and 96 GB of memory is $6800, 96GB is not enough to run GLM 5.2 without extreme quantization or stacking HW; but for the sake of discussion let's run quantized version on a single high end Mac Studio.

GLM 5.2 Max plan costs $ 112/m, so it would take ~60 months to recover the costs assuming the machine was bought just for AI. By then the current AI landscape would have changed drastically.

I use local AI on both Linux and Mac every single day, there's freedom, privacy and peace of mind in running the model locally. But I feel cost/value of local AI is overblown.

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

#194

Post by genxy »

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 worked at a hyperscaler when the M1 came out. A MacBook Air M1, running a Linux VM was faster and more energy efficient than anything we had in the data center.

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

#195

Post by khurs »

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…

"What if it turns out people want base compute capability and lots of RAM for filestore cache and programs?"

Can't it do both? The M1 Pro with 16gb+ is still more than nearly everyone needs.

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

#196

Post by khurs »

watersb wrote: post #43

Former AnandTech editor Gavin Bonshor had reports that the M7 would be manufactured on Intel's 18A node. https://bontechlabs.com/news/apple-is-reportedly-using-intel... Given the risks involved in establishing Apple Silicon designs with a new fab, I would expect early M7 parts to be in test production right now. The fundamental M7 design is already set in stone. Mark Gurman's Bloomberg article does not mention fabric…

Wouldn't this help Intel compete?

If they have Apple's designs months prior to launch, rather than after launch.

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

#197

Post by khurs »

sho wrote: post #96

Well, I guess this is the silver lining to the price increases. I'd been thinking about an M5 128GB for local inference (eg DS4), probably off the table now given that it jumped $2k overnight. But I was on the fence about it for a long time given that even the M5 is not that good compared to even a 4090. It would have been good, but not "omg" good. If they are pulling out all the stops to make the M7 more competitive…

I imagine they weren't planning for their plans to be leaked so publicly, as yes it will now mean some buyers will delay their purchases.

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

#198

Post by swiftcoder »

zombot wrote: post #126
NuclearPM wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An ‘ypothetical!

In what neck of the woods? English pronunciation never gets boring.

In British English the "an" is correct, even though most English dialects don't actually render the H as silent. It's a French-derived word that had a silent H originally, ergo we use "an".

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

#199

Post by khurs »

habosa wrote: post #141

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 on…

>In the long run I truly believe local AI will win

What do you mean by 'win'?

For a normal coder/person's use cases, yes. But AI companies are becoming more specialised in different fields and these tailored models will be leagues ahead in those niches.

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

#200

Post by fatata123 »

enos_feedler wrote: post #131
atonse wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine any world where we put this AI stuff back in the box. It is simply too useful and too powerful. And as we start seeing all his upheaval where models are getting banned, etc, I can even see the appeal of on-device AI increasing for a lot of use cases. So I think Apple has the right instinct. In fact, I've had the thought multiple times that I really want a lot of workflows just running on my device. Wo…

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.

[dead]
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