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Apple could probably sell a machine starting at $10,000 if they architected it as the sole place one’s Private Cloud Compute [1] ran. It would need a path to a $2,500 machine, I think. But this is a niche I don’t think another consumer-facing brand could do like Apple. [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Running models on-device on a Mac is immensely annoying though. Figuring out what will work out of BF16, FP8, BF16+FP8, NVFP4, INT8, GGUF ... the list goes on ... is 'non-obvious' at best. Apple do little to support with tooling. There's MLX, but unless you're happy to transform a model to that format yourself you'll be lagging a long way behind. Apps like LMStudio, Ollama, Draw Things, etc do a great job of simplify…
I dunno I use LMStudio pretty regularly and the MLX folks and the community usually have MLX versions of new model releases up within a day or two.
Apple could probably sell a machine starting at $10,000 if they architected it as the sole place one’s Private Cloud Compute [1] ran. It would need a path to a $2,500 machine, I think. But this is a niche I don’t think another consumer-facing brand could do like Apple. [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
The out-of-stock $6000 M3 Ultra Mac Studios with 800GB+ memory bandwidth are going for $24,000 on eBay, so yes definitely
Like, take out the price sheets for the Apple Car. Then sell me an AI tower at those price points.
No peripherals except Ethernet, integrated compute (cpu+gpu+mem) and secondary storage (+mobo, psu). No accoutrements, just the minimum amount of hardware to run a model as a utility.
Even the appliance faceplate would be a display showing stats like an old HiFi stereo.
Edit: something like a series of modules consisting of a RISC-V CPU + Vortex GPGPU + memory
If I had the capital I’d make an household inference appliance. No peripherals except Ethernet, integrated compute (cpu+gpu+mem) and secondary storage (+mobo, psu). No accoutrements, just the minimum amount of hardware to run a model as a utility. Even the appliance faceplate would be a display showing stats like an old HiFi stereo. Edit: something like a series of modules consisting of a RISC-V CPU + Vortex GPGPU +…
Apple could probably sell a machine starting at $10,000 if they architected it as the sole place one’s Private Cloud Compute [1] ran. It would need a path to a $2,500 machine, I think. But this is a niche I don’t think another consumer-facing brand could do like Apple. [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
The out-of-stock $6000 M3 Ultra Mac Studios with 800GB+ memory bandwidth are going for $24,000 on eBay, so yes definitely
It assumes that RAM remains supply constrained and that none of the existing RAM contracts are cut short.
But Meta and xAI putting A TON of AI compute onto the market. OpenAI and Anthropic are raising the costs of inference (by reducing how much inference users get via subscriptions). And we haven’t seen Oracle / CoreWeave struggle to pay their debts yet, but they will be selling assets once they get close to that point.
> "The speed of AI development right now is just crazy," Brooks said. "I can't imagine where we're going to be a year from now, three months from now, or even a month from now," he added. I don't think I'm taking this out of context when I say this is unintentionally correct. Apple still doesn't know what to do about AI. Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't…
> Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't using AI apart from google search. This is... a view. Maybe I live in a strange sphere of strange ("normie"-ish) people, but the people around me are for sure using AI. Mostly chatgpt to be fair. They use it to compare products that they intend to buy, identify plants in nature, create travel plans, find interesting pla…
SOTA AI for "serious" work is in a different position, used by fewer people but with big pockets and sometimes a pathological dependence on it.
If I had the capital I’d make an household inference appliance. No peripherals except Ethernet, integrated compute (cpu+gpu+mem) and secondary storage (+mobo, psu). No accoutrements, just the minimum amount of hardware to run a model as a utility. Even the appliance faceplate would be a display showing stats like an old HiFi stereo. Edit: something like a series of modules consisting of a RISC-V CPU + Vortex GPGPU +…
You're describing the mac mini/studio with some facelift.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The out-of-stock $6000 M3 Ultra Mac Studios with 800GB+ memory bandwidth are going for $24,000 on eBay, so yes definitely
Let me clarify, I think Apple could sell a device at the scale Apple sells at around the $10 to 25 thousand price point. Like, take out the price sheets for the Apple Car. Then sell me an AI tower at those price points.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The out-of-stock $6000 M3 Ultra Mac Studios with 800GB+ memory bandwidth are going for $24,000 on eBay, so yes definitely
Let me clarify, I think Apple could sell a device at the scale Apple sells at around the $10 to 25 thousand price point. Like, take out the price sheets for the Apple Car. Then sell me an AI tower at those price points.