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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

#321

Post by sheepscreek »

SXX wrote: post #239

768GB 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…

The message I’m getting is that Apple will never compromise on its healthy margins. If something becomes basically unaffordable for their target market, they’d cut the production and even discontinue the product, than take a hit on margins. Their business model is refreshingly simple.

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

#322

Post by Lio »

throawayonthe wrote: post #293
Lio wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have an excellent point and I'll bet someone at Apple has all this in spreadsheet and is making that case. However, I think without the very high end machines Apple is also seeding a lot of professional middle market too. If the choice is between, say, a Framework desktop vs nothing from Apple I'll obviously pick the Framework. If I get used to a Framework desktop running Linux then I'd probably stop buyi…

do you mean ceding that market?

Yes! Thanks for point that out as it's an important difference.

Mea culpa, dyslexic moment.

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

#323

Post by entrope »

brookst wrote: post #80
evanjrowley wrote: post #4

Seems like a made-up distinction that shouldn't be necessary since M6 has not even released. I suspect this is a marketing ploy to meant to drive up both interest while also increasing prices for the next generation of Mac hardware.

It’s an amusing conspiracy theory, but I don’t get it. Are you thinking Apple is leaking that there will be a long wait for much more expensive chips in order to… what?

Perhaps to support demand for the products with recent price hikes, and/or the upcoming Mac Studio with M5 Ultra, rather than have customers sit on the sidelines thinking they'll wait this generation out.

I am still skeptical that Apple intentionally leaked this because they normally are so tight-lipped, but there are reasons in favor of leaking this.

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

#324

Post by pylotlight »

uneoneuno wrote: post #109
linguae wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come to think of it, modern cars have a lot of electronics such as touchscreens, cameras, and sensors. It wouldn’t surprise me if new car prices are not immune to what’s happening with RAM and storage prices.

Why don't people run their AI on their car? Two birds, one fragglerock.

I'm pretty sure the vision/hwa reqs for cars is much less than an LLM/genai in general so that doesn't quite work out. But it would be nice to have an AI server with wheels :p

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

#325

Post by swiftcoder »

marmarama wrote: post #319
swiftcoder wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic planning. While I'm sure some level of internal leakage does take place, at least on paper the fab's planning needs to be firewalled off from their own chip roadmap. I'm also not sure how much Apple actually cares, tbh. Yes, they currently have an edge in silicon, but it's heavily due to being…

I think Apple doesn't really have a choice. They've been very strongly encouraged by the current US government to move as much chip manufacturing to the US as possible, and particularly to make Intel Foundry work, or face... problems. Also the AI boom means NVIDIA et al. can afford to buy TSMC's best processes at scale, which means less available capacity for Apple. I'm sure given no other forces at work, Apple would…

I mean in the opposite sense. If Intel can glean enough from Apple's roadmap to close the performance/watt gap, great, but they still can't match the vertical integration Apple has

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

#326

Post by genxy »

ac29 wrote: post #276
genxy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm certainly willing to believe the M1 was the most energy efficient, but your data center didnt have anything faster than a laptop?

Nope, across all benchmarks, Linux running in a VM on the M1 had higher perf (4 cores) than any instance type I launched across Intel, AMD and Arm. Triad, coremark, openfoam, verilator, etc. This may have changed, but my hunch is this is still probably true with M5 vs all the cloud providers.

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

#328

Post by jltsiren »

sheepscreek wrote: post #321
SXX wrote: post #239

768GB 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…

The message I’m getting is that Apple will never compromise on its healthy margins. If something becomes basically unaffordable for their target market, they’d cut the production and even discontinue the product, than take a hit on margins. Their business model is refreshingly simple.

It's just a planned economy failing the way planned economies often do: the central planner failed to predict the demand correctly. Instead of trying to secure additional stock from the market at spot prices, they are simply waiting for the next batches they had planned for.

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

#329

Post by ProZsolt »

ramesh31 wrote: post #162
lowkeyokay wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're happy with the base model, then Apple has a great value/price ratio, but there's nothing below it and any upgrade is really bad value for the money.

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

#330

Post by overfeed »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #285
overfeed wrote: post #114

Earlier 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…

> Hardware that can only run quantized models that take up GBs in VRAM That's the today hardware. Now suppose Apple goes to any of Samsung/Micron/Hynix and says "we'll pay you the entire cost of building another DRAM fab and in exchange we want its entire output" and then releases M7 devices with enough memory and compute to run bigger models. > Unless Apple surprises everyone and brings back the XServe with M7, if n…

> Now suppose Apple goes to any of Samsung/Micron/Hynix and says "we'll pay you the entire cost of building another DRAM fab and in exchange we want its entire output"

It's revealing that they aren't doing this: no one wants to fund that gamble on the state of AI demand 12-18 months out, but ate happy to capitalize on their current product lines/capacity.

> Desktops can dissipate more heat than the amount of electricity you can draw from a typical household wall outlet

100% agree, but the data center power and cooling infra are not limited by home wiring, and go way beyond what a wall outlet can safely provide (1,440W max on a typical 15A circuit at 120V). A single H100 maxes out at 700W

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