Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isnt the proper kind of sand in short supply aswell?
Just curious, is there a way to invest in sand?
Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
221–230 of 396 posts
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
For Immich, the cheapest option will either be a NAS or a used laptop depending on the amount of data you need, I wouldn't buy a mac for that.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 1080ti is out there for almost 10 years now. It has 11GB of VRAM. A 5090 has 32GB. SOCs with unified memory have shifted this a bit forward, but they're also expensive as shit. 10TB ram in a consumer device is simply not happening in the next 10 years.
Half a year ago you could get a AI max 395+ with 128GB ram in mobile form factor for ~$2200. The same thing costs $3700. Same SoC, same memory.
10TB is about 80 times that, 200K in today’s money. A lot of capacity is coming online in the next 5 years and it’s reasonable to think we can get there with better process and stacking (the latter does little for pricing, but enables shorter latencies).
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#224Earlier 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.
Most cars with AI run their AI locally. Not LLMs though.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
>there's no ceiling to what scaling more will buy you in terms of capability This is highly doubtful. Rule of thumb: everything people think is exponential is actually an S curve.
There's a limit that won't be breached without a fundamental breakthrough in physics of computation, but we're not there yet by a long shot. You can train bigger models, faster, and infer with them faster and more precisely, by throwing more compute at the problem for the foreseeable.
At some point, and I can already see it, they’ll be better than us at writing code. We are still in the loop to coerce them into architecting well, but that’s nothing magical.
What’s frontier now is prosumer in a couple years and commonplace in a couple more.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#226Earlier 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.
Hmmm, not always. Between at least 1998 and 2005, PCs were just better. Better CPUs.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#227What'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.
those billion people which use LLMs every week, are they all being forced to use it?
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do stand in front of a great opportunity that would also benefit consumers, which seems rare in the llm era. If people can get opus4.6/gpt5.5-like models locally, labs could raise their prices and sell token speed, better reasoning, mobile-focused improvements, you name it. Not all consumers are power users and many will be happy to pay for flexibility.
Most people don't actually want to manage models, updates, context limits, quantization, etc. They just want the thing to work everywhere
Once one person figures that out and writes a blog post, everybody else can do it.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#229Earlier 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
That's assuming consumption pricing remains as-is.
There has been a lot of market-subsidy in AI which is starting to fade away: e.g. the copilot quotas/pricing. When VC switches from investing to wanting a return, the price equation is likely to change.
Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
That's assuming consumption pricing remains as-is. There has been a lot of market-subsidy in AI which is starting to fade away: e.g. the copilot quotas/pricing. When VC switches from investing to wanting a return, the price equation is likely to change.
There is no subsidy on most OpenRouter providers, they are profitable today.
You buy a big GPU, you serve LLMs, you print money.