Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it happens it's because of china but it will be forbidden in USA.
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Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
251–260 of 396 posts
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#252768GB RAM pipe dreams make no sense to Apple. By discontinuing 256GB / 512GB M3 Ultra and raising prices $5000 -> $7000 on Macbook pro with 128GB they basically confirmed how badly RAM shortage affecting them. 768GB is 64-times of 12GB which is rumored to be amount of RAM in new iPhones. Imagine what profit margin 768GB Mac Studio gonna need in order to justify making one instead of 64 iPhones. Apple is the company t…
They could treat the extreme spec machines separately from the prosumer ones, like they did with the Xserve. Let business customers spec up to 768GB (say) who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag, while keeping them away from the stores and usual consumer supply chains (Amazon et al). It may not be a big enough market segment for them to care about anymore, though.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big question for local LLMs is whether there is a 100 tok/s model which requires less than 16 GB of memory and is competitive on most tasks with the cloud models. There is some signal that this is possible through both hardware innovation and training/data improvements. Cloud models have their own constraints - I can’t have opus4.8 spend 4 hours on a deep research question I had in the shower without spending mon…
if you do the electricity math you'll see that you pay more on local models while getting less (local is more heavily quantized) compared with OpenRouter. I'm not talking local Gemma/Qwen vs cloud Opus, but against OpenRouter same Gemma/Qwen there are reasons to run local - privacy, availability, but cost is not one of them
> do the electricity math
Could you give an example with real figures?
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#254What'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 we don't want that? Do we have a choice? It's being forced upon us by folks who have the power to distort any market they want. Energy prices are rising, and the PC industry is about to be destroyed by component prices. It will be dumb clients that run the software our feudal overlords of the data centers will have the grace to grant us. And the government lets it happen because it furthers their interests.
China might be the only spanner in those works, so expect further action taken against them. Most likely sanctions on their hardware
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#255The 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…
Isn't that switch basically a downgrade? You get some more single core performance and some weight savings, but also a worse (and smaller) screen, less multicore performance, less GPU performance, less video encoding performance and a smaller battery? I'm on an M2 Max myself, and glad they introduced a larger form factor Air, but it seems like a long way from an upgrade.
M5 is faster than the M1 Pro in ST, MT, GPU. Not sure about video encoding as it's something I rarely use. It's a smaller battery but overall a battery life improvement since my 5 year old M1 Pro only had 79% battery capacity left.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#256The 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
I can see why people would want a more powerful machine but as someone who moves around a lot, the 16" MBP weight is a pain. The 14" MBP screen is not big enough.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
A hypothetical M7 Ultra with LPDDR6 14.4Gbps memory would be 1.85 Tb/s. You're look at about 100 tokens/s for a 1T MoE 37B active 4bit model. It'd probably cost $30k or more I'm guessing if memory prices do not come down. Even at $30k, it could still be a relative bargain since an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell 96GB card costs $12k today. The M3 Ultra with 512GB was around $8k before Apple discontinued it. I expect an M7 Ult…
> A hypothetical M7 Ultra with LPDDR6 That’s indeed very hypothetical considering that Apple silicon uses on-package HBM.
Apple only uses LPDDR.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe he wants really fast or large AI models inside immich? (I just run the defaults on my CPU, works for me)
I'm not sure why you would need large AI models for Immich, the face detection is pretty cheap and will run on 10 year old hardware without a blip. I think the decision comes primarily on how much data you would like to store for Immich, if you want to go cheaply, a 100 bucks used laptop will do the job, if you have too much data, a NAS will be more suitable (and you are certainly not going to get a mac where you can…
Not for faces, but the CLIP model for the context search https://docs.immich.app/features/searching/
That needs to be in (v)ram for searches.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#259768GB RAM pipe dreams make no sense to Apple. By discontinuing 256GB / 512GB M3 Ultra and raising prices $5000 -> $7000 on Macbook pro with 128GB they basically confirmed how badly RAM shortage affecting them. 768GB is 64-times of 12GB which is rumored to be amount of RAM in new iPhones. Imagine what profit margin 768GB Mac Studio gonna need in order to justify making one instead of 64 iPhones. Apple is the company t…
They could treat the extreme spec machines separately from the prosumer ones, like they did with the Xserve. Let business customers spec up to 768GB (say) who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag, while keeping them away from the stores and usual consumer supply chains (Amazon et al). It may not be a big enough market segment for them to care about anymore, though.
They can do it, but that gonna need to be different SKU not Mac Studio. Otherwise news will be full of discussions about Apple price hike from $8000 to $24,000 or who the hell knows $48,000.
So yeah the only way I see them selling it is usual "call us" enterprise price tag.
But since its not what Apple usually do its easier to sell 4x Mac Studio 256GB RAM boxes with interconnect for lets say $12,000 - $15,000 each.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. If Apple makes it feasible to run models like GLM 5.2 at home, I will become their customer.
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…
"Apple tax" is such a lazy and inaccurate accusation to level. Sure we've had expensive wheels on the cheese grater (ie Mac Pro) but we've also had:
1. When Apple came out with the real Macbook Air in 2010/2011 (not the silly 2008 one), nobody could compete with it with those specs at that price and they couldn't for years. And every competitor usually sucked in some major way, most often the trackpad;
2. The Mac Mini is an outstanding piece of hardware for $600. Or was;
3. I've generally found that "Apple tax" complaints levelled against the iPhone to be nothing more than Android cope;
4. The M-series silicon has been an absolute game-changer. I honestly thought the first-generation M1s would be not great but they came out swinging. And the price points for these Macbooks have all been great, much better than the last-gasp-of-Johnny-Ive touch bar butterfly keyboard series, which were objectively awful.