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Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

arstechnica.com

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Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

#181

Post by zrobotics »

irusensei wrote: post #57
pera wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah power consumption (and performance per watt) is the main reason I keep buying Raspberry Pi, I haven't find anything similar on that regard, specially for pi zeros

It's also very hard to encounter x86 machines that can be powered from PoE.

I'm on mobile so can't easily pull up an example part number, but digital signage controllers can often be PoE powered. They're insanely overpriced new from the actual suppliers, but for hobby projects they can normally be sourced relatively easily on ebay. The trick is that many of the ebay sellers don't bother listing the specs, so you need to first search digital sign cintroller/computer on ebay then look up the spec sheet from the model number.

Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

#182

Post by tom_ »

lbreakjai wrote: post #175

Not related, but why is the word "quiet" or "quietly" suddenly everywhere?

Also mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513 - see the article section: "Quietly" and Other Magic Adverbs. Presumably the LLM writing style rubbing off, assuming the LLM hasn't been used to create the content in the first place.

Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

#183

Post by calf »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #111
GeekyBear wrote: post #109

The rumor from Gurman is that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio ships in the first half of this year. This may just be a sign that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is shipping sooner rather than later, as it's common for Apple to push out ship dates for soon to be replaced products. We do have leaked benchmarks showing that the M5 Max outperforms the M3 Ultra currently shipping in the Mac Studio, so buying an M3 Ultra Studio right now…

Slightly off-topic side remark: Every mathematician and computer scientist should feel deeply confused that the M... Ultra is more powerful than the M... Max. Why? Because if something is the maximum , there doesn't exist anything larger/better. :-)

Not really, Max is to violet as Ultra is to ultraviolet, as in something exceeding an established category (visible light)

Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

#184

Post by pwarner »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #159
Thorrez wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Apple buys and uses so much RAM across all its product lines that it’s in a better negotiating position than the likes of Framework or Raspberry Pi, but CEO Tim Cook acknowledged in the company’s last earnings call that memory pricing could begin to eat into Apple’s profit margins later this year.

There's also the fact that they were charging $200 to add 8GB of RAM before the prices went up, when that much RAM was something like $70 at retail . The problem then is that when the supply gets more expensive and you were already charging the maximally-extractive price to customers, they can't eat much more of a price increase, so instead most of it has to come out of margins.

I think part of what's happening lately is that chip folks are start to realize they can make margin too. Maybe it's possible thanks to consolidation but for sure folks see the crazy margins nvida, apple etc have, and I suspect they're like - we want that too!

Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

#185

Post by citizenpaul »

PostOnce wrote: post #3
znpy wrote: post #2

Apple recently introduced rdma support in mac os. They are probably trying to push those people buying the 512gb configuration towards buying more of the 256gb configuration and clustering them together.

A consumer computer company is not going to push people towards building a miniature HPC cluster. Closest we'll ever get to that is multiple GPUs for video games.* *Nvidia is no longer a primarily consumer company, so all the other GPU stuff is no counterpoint

The second I saw llms run on gpus i started trying to predict the last year that nvidia produces a consumer GPU product.

Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

#187

Post by carefree-bob »

citizenpaul wrote: post #185
PostOnce wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A consumer computer company is not going to push people towards building a miniature HPC cluster. Closest we'll ever get to that is multiple GPUs for video games.* *Nvidia is no longer a primarily consumer company, so all the other GPU stuff is no counterpoint

The second I saw llms run on gpus i started trying to predict the last year that nvidia produces a consumer GPU product.

I am doing the reverse, and trying to predict the last year that LLMs use NVIDIA GPUs. It's just an accident of history that video game cards are useful for LLMs, and there is absolutely nothing that NVIDIA is doing from a design standpoint that the big hyperscalers can't do on their own, cutting NVIDIA out, and doing a better job of it as they know their own unique needs. The only advantage NVIDIA has is supply chain relationships and it takes time to establish those, but once that's done, we'll see all the big companies rolling their own silicon and no longer relying on NVIDIA.

Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

#188

Post by ajross »

thfuran wrote: post #88
ajross wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story is literally about them cancelling a product variant...

And you think this is the first sign that they’ve decided they’re going to spend the next few years being a RAM reseller before starting to sell consumer products again?

No, but "shipping less RAM" is clearly on that spectrum. The point wasn't about literal product strategy, it's that there's a limit to what actions are financially feasible and it's set by "what else could you do with that junk?"
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