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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

#331

Post by jmyeet »

oblio wrote: post #309
jmyeet wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I think it's fair to say that AI isn't going away. That doens't mean that SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic won't crash. But I've long believed that within 5 years we'll have access to relatively cheap hardware that can run sufficient but not cutting-edge models locally. You can buy a 5090 PC for So what happens? Nothing. If Apple make M7 Max/Ultra computes with 128-768GB of RAM and nobody buys them then... nobody buys…

> Google isn't Google sold (will sell?) about $70bn worth of Google shares to fund AI infrastructure build outs. It's also issued bonds (=debt; I forget the number, $30bn?) to pay for more infrastructure. Fairly sure it also has established a shadow company, a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to stash away unpleasant financial things it doesn't want to show, also for the AI build out. Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle are ov…

Google has a market cap over $4 trillion and it's 2025 financials were $130 billion profit on $400 billion revenue, which was something like 15% Y/Y growth.

$100 billion in equity and bond offerings is not betting the farm on AI.

Additionally, Google's data centers are notoriously efficient and they build their own networking hardware as as their TPUs. Now their TPUs lag behind NVidia offerings obviously but they'll keep getting better.

Google is the company I'm least concerned about in the AI space.

As for Amazon, I'm not sure what their split is on in-house AI build out and usage vs AWS. I suspect the majority is for AWS and I also suspect their ROI is insanely short (ie less than 5 years) on any AI capex.

A lot of us on HN dismiss Oracle with good reason but it's also fair to say they've survived and thrived through the dot-com crash, the GFC and the pandemic until now. They're clearly doing something right.

Meta I think is the Sick Man of Tech. Their social media assets are of declining value (IMHO) and they seem completely unable to adapt to changing conditions. The whole Metaverse was a massive $70B+ boondoggle on something long before they had anything resembling a product-market fit. They seem unable to leverage their social media assets for building any competitive AI products or tech. Plus they seem unable to hire and retain key staff in this space.

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

#332

Post by khurs »

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.

That works only if the product is the product.

Iphones/tablets drive app sales/apple subscription services, if they force a user to move to android they may never return.

Why do you think they sell the iPhone 17e/se? They need to maximise their user base as its ongoing recurring income stream.

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

#333

Post by chorsestudios »

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…

This is only true under the assumption that RAM price per GB scales linearly.

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

#334

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

nottorp wrote: post #261
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true only for the entry level macs. My M4 Mac Mini has the best Performance/value. But my workstation laptop with 32 cores, 96GB DDR5, Nvidia GPU costs lesser than Macs with lesser performance; not to mention I upgraded the RAM post purchase.

It really depends what you factor in as value, because wintel laptops like you described tend to require noise canceling headphones when working on them.

True, can't beat current Apple chips on power efficiency.

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

#335

Post by Schiendelman »

rick_dalton wrote: post #191
john_minsk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well… your menu items will disappear behind it still in 2026. You would need an extra app for that… But in terms of “noticing it” you are correct. You won’t pay attention after a day or two. EDIT: this menu managing app will need permissios to make screen captures. So much for the privacy. Forgot to mention.

I think this is one of the things they're fixing in macOS 27 golden gate, took them long enough. https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1u0lhyz/macos_27...

I'm not even convinced this is a bug. Menu icons proliferated over the last couple of years, this isn't a problem unless you enable more than you have room for.

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

#336

Post by Schiendelman »

dosisking wrote: post #86
Schiendelman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notch does not matter at all, you will forget it's there.

Basically, you are saying "There are 4 lights"

I'm a huge fan of Star Trek, David Warner, and Patrick Stewart, and I'm really not. The notch isn't taking anything away, it's a way to give users more screen space than they could otherwise get. Normally the camera has to be above the screen, this was a way to get the menu bar off of the rest of the screen real estate and get you more usable pixels.

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

#337

Post by Schiendelman »

LtWorf wrote: post #158
airstrike wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have that much in your menubar you have bigger problems

Blaming the user, nice to see apple traditions still respected.

It just doesn't seem like a problem. If you put too many icons somewhere than fit in that place, of course you're going to run out of space…

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

#338

Post by SXX »

chorsestudios wrote: post #333
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…

This is only true under the assumption that RAM price per GB scales linearly.

It's even worse than that. Demand is so high so every next GB will be sligly more expensive. There is a lot of smaller hardware manufacturers that unable to secure DRAM chips at any price, there just no free capacity on market.

Of course Apple is massive, but if they announce inference boxes that everyone wants they need to make 10,000s or even 100,000s of them.

And it's very much likely they'd rather sell 600,000 - 10,000,000 more iPhones or Macbooks Neo. End users bring Apple money with every OpenAI / Claude subscriprion sold through their platform.

And inference boxes is just one-off sale of hardware that will bring no further income.

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

#339

Post by monocasa »

GeekyBear wrote: post #140
monocasa wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have any explanations of what WLCM means that are more industry focused? I couldn't find anything that didn't look like blogspam. And that explanation of the DRAM being on the same wafer doesn't really make sense. For one, at that point there's no "multi chip" part if you're integrating more onto the same die rather than less. And their explanation isn't really passing the smell test for me for other reasons, f…

You can start by reading up on TSMC's name for the tech (although there are many versions at TSMC and TSMC isn't the only company packaging chiplets and memory on top of a silicon interposer). > CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) https://semiwiki.com/wikis/industry-wikis/cowos-chip-on-wafe... It's a more advanced update from their older InFO tech.

As your article states, they're already using CoWoS; that's not a new technology for Apple to adopt.

Also, InFO-oS is a CoWoS technique.

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

#340

Post by waffletower »

petercooper wrote: post #252
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…

They could treat the extreme spec machines separately from the prosumer ones, like they did with the Xserve. Let business customers spec up to 768GB (say) who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag, while keeping them away from the stores and usual consumer supply chains (Amazon et al). It may not be a big enough market segment for them to care about anymore, though.

They'll sell more $20-25k Macs when Goldman green lights Apple Card credit limits that will fit one of them.
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