Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#321

Post by doom2 » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 2:15 AM UTC

CoolestBeans wrote: post #242

throwaway63467 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices as well as having to compete with AI for fab capacity? Before all the price hikes their products were already priced at the top of the market so I would assume that memory getting more expensive will impact their sales or margin quite a bit as they can’t subsidize hardware like AI companies do (they can of course eat into their own margins a bit w…

Sure, but DRAM is a commodity and is classically cyclical. This is a particularly large cycle but so long as the historic pattern holds (and there's not a ton of reason to think it won't unless the hyperscalars can go into greater debt indefinitely which given inflation and interest rates they can't) Apple just needs to get through this peak in prices, which they have a LOT of ammunition to do so. Having to raise pri…

> Having to raise prices isn't a great look but when they come out the other side they can drop pirces

The fun part is that they can drop prices but they'll still be higher than before the initial price increase, thereby increasing volume _and_ getting some extra profit. Consumers still lose.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#322

Post by ghaff » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 3:06 AM UTC

Danox wrote: post #263

ghaff wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, in the scheme of Apple stuff it was a failed experiment--even if a worthwile one.

It was worthwhile because in the end it taught them that they needed to do something like Apple Silicon. And hopefully the current memory fiasco will convince them that they need to take memory in house if they want to build what they need to build going forward. I really don’t see any alternative long-term to not engineering and designing memory in house and collaborating with TSMC onshore in America. Hopefully havi…

Maybe. Intel got out of the memory game baecause it became a commodity.

That said, I was involved in some research years back where there was the potential opportunity for memory optimized for specific purposes. Which didn't make sense for the vendor at the time. Apple's already doing it to some degree on-chip. But you can imagine it making sense for a vendor owning the whole stack which wasn't really the case for the vendor we were doing the research for.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#323

Post by CMay » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 3:14 AM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #286

CMay wrote: post #240

Ctrl+F: "national security". Didn't see national security mentioned a single time in all the current comments or in the article. Speculations about profit are great and there are many companies that will largely be irrelevant across all the major metrics which will not be in a good position, but there are always these people lost on the profit picture of anything. Does anyone realistically believe that all of these s…

Okay, I disagree with most of Ed's takes but this is also a pretty wild refutation. National security is a canard for covering up national investment. The US doesn't need to have it's hand in the pockets of private businesses, but by making a murky NATSEC claim they can manufacture interest for investments and under-the-table cooperation. This is exactly how we saw companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft get roped…

SENTIENT wasn't doing the same kind of inference that AI companies have now, so suggesting they have nothing new to offer is incorrect. Advanced AI is clearly dual-use technology that can be used for adversarial or defensive purposes in ways most people simply aren't used to thinking about.

Your lack of imagination is not proof of reality. The US releases open source models too. The primary concern is that there should be some limitations on the capability of models released publicly. When companies are hosting their models via API, they can have many other layers involved in serving those requests that can reduce abuse. When you release an open model, there is no layer and many protections built into the model itself can often be worked around.

China puts more restrictions on models domestically than they do internationally. They did the same thing with Tiktok, where their domestic version was more cleaned up, curated and censored. There, you can't download a model without basically sharing your identity. Huggingface is banned. It would also be illegal there to host the open weight models on a 3rd party inference provider. Kimi? Qwen? If it's not small enough that you can run it locally then you have to use it via API, which are all highly censored. Even the smaller models are censored, it's not only bigger models. The experience people can have outside of China with those models is not the same, but the point is that this directly refutes your suggestion that China doesn't think they are a threat.

China would love to maximize the abuse of open models in the west, because there are theories that it leads to more extreme authoritarian surveillance tendencies which benefits their Leninist world view. There is also the perspective that it can hurt investment into AI if people think it's inevitable that equivalent models will be open.

> China's hosting is no less trustworthy than America's hosting.

That's unlikely: https://nationalsecurity.virginia.edu/sites/default/files/fi...

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#324

Post by keeda » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 3:48 AM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #317

tptacek wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't like or believe in the economics of the frontier labs and then works backwards from that, which takes him to some very strange places.

And I'm sure Galileo didn't like the idea of geocentrinism either for irrational reasons. Seriously, good enough telescopes havent been made yet and he's all confident etc. etc. But Galileo was still had a useful framework for his criticisms despite all of his faults. ---------- I see Ed Zitron in virtually the same spot. Especially now that the SPVs thing is publicly confirmed by 3rd parties. I agree he made a bunch…

The SPV thing has been known for months though; here's Matt Levine talking about it in his inimitable way last October: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-29/put... (https://archive.md/A40Fv)

Maybe what's become more public is the scale of these SPVs, but Matt Levine's writing makes it seem like a sensible thing to do given the $$$ amounts involved.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#325

Post by fragmede » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 4:31 AM UTC

apercu wrote: post #255

rbanffy wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good thing of the iPhone is that your next phone is just like the previous one, but faster. Some features are added, some change places and some are even removed or replaced, but it doesn't compare to, say, move from a Motorola to a Samsung - they might as well be different OSs. Last time I had to relearn how to use the camera (and I AM AN EXPERIENCED PHOTOGRAPHER!).

I’ve had a few iPhones. Own 2 right now and I completely agree with your sentiment but while the hardware gets faster the software gets slower and worse. ;)

Wirth's law: software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster :)

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#326

Post by wpm » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 4:35 AM UTC

philistine wrote: post #320

wpm wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did absorb them, this price madness began a year ago and they only increased prices last month.

Apple has long term contracts for every part that goes in the most complex supply chain on the planet. Do you think they call their suppliers every morning asking for 2 million chips? Their price increases were a mixture of absorbing some of the increase and passing what they won't on us.

So...we agree.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#327

Post by what » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 4:47 AM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #124

anthonyrstevens wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> LLM technology doesn't work very well for software development This comment is so obviously false (in my experience) I'm wondering what sort of niche environment you're working in

As I mentioned in this thread the other day, it's not worth debating AI skeptics anymore in 2026, with step changes like Fable and Sol. Maybe it was the case in 2025 and before but the field has improved rapidly that it doesn't make sense to listen to people with AI experiences prior to that who haven't touched it since. Does AI make mistakes, sure, but increasingly fewer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4905136…

I swear I’ve seen this exact same thing said every few months for the last couple of years. You’ll keep repeating it when the next model is released too.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#328

Post by what » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:04 AM UTC

sajithdilshan wrote: post #158

Silamoth wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t “need” any LLMs to do software development. Plenty of us were productively writing code for years before these models were released, and many of us continue to do so. The “AI” companies want to sell you hype. But you don’t “need” them - not if you’re a legit, professional programmer.

You don’t need it, but using it would make you more productive. As an example, I have worked in a code base which is pretty much opinionated. I have many Claude skills to build the boiler plate starting code and tests for the feature I have to build following the existing conventions and patterns in the code base and that saves a lot of manual coding time for me. This is a very personalised use case, but I think ever…

> to build the boiler plate starting code

Rails had that 20 years ago, no LLM needed.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#329

Post by what » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:12 AM UTC

benoau wrote: post #132

sssilver wrote: post #41

I will never understand the decision-making process that led to "Let's build an awesome VR headset that can't do gaming". I would love to replace my monitor with Apple Vision Pro for programming and productivity. I would gladly pay $1000 for that. But at $4000 it really needs to put me in a Microsoft Flight Simulator cockpit.

> I will never understand the decision-making process that led to "Let's build an awesome VR headset that can't do gaming". FOMO, someone else being successful in VR (and now in glasses) is a nightmare scenario for Apple because it's not their platform . They've got a lot to fear from someone else owning the platform, having written the playbook on how that platform would be controlled and exploited at everyone else'…

In what world has meta been successful with VR or glasses?

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#330

Post by rbanffy » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 8:05 AM UTC

sillywalk wrote: post #306

rbanffy wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a year from now we'll all be using MI300As and EPYC 9600s to read e-mails. Or Nvidia Veras, maybe AWS will sell some of their Graviton stuff in an effort to offset their capex. Unfortunately, I don't think IBM Cloud will suffer enough for me to play Tux Racer on my very own Z17.

> play Tux Racer on my very own Z17 Interesting. It looks like Debian has a Tux Racer package for Extreme Tux Racer on s390x. I guess it'd be remote graphics, and not accelerated.

I don’t think Linux on Z supports GPUs on the PCIe IO drawers, but that’s a relatively minor software enablement issue. All I need is a z17 for myself to play with it ;-)