41–50 of 264 posts
I was just looking to buy a Raspberry Pi 5: the 8GB one is now 58% more expensive than last year; that's more than what I'm willing to pay.
They may be trying to sell through the existing CPU before a launch (soft or not) of the M5-based versions (though I've heard the rumor is there will be no M5 Ultra and we might be looking at an M6 Ultra later in the year).
I’m sure they wanted to order more but were priced out for the increase in ram costs. Apple probably decided it wasn’t worth it until they revamped the architecture (and put a larger order in this time around).
I’m not a buyer but I suspect that’s what’s playing out right now behind closed door meetings.
I was just looking to buy a Raspberry Pi 5: the 8GB one is now 58% more expensive than last year; that's more than what I'm willing to pay.
The raspberry pis have been bad value for money for at least 4 or 5 years now unless you're really sensitive to the power draw. Once you add in a case and fan (required if you don't want it to overheat and screw the SD card), the charger, SD card it generally comes in at roughly the same price as more capable intel 1L PC like the Lenovo M920Q (though of course, they aren't new)
In all seriousness, though, as one of the uninitiated, what would be the value of hosting LLMs on a machine like this that has a lot of memory that you pay for up front versus some sort of VPC-based approach?
I think it's unlikely that Apple is paying the spot price for memory. They almost certainly negotiate delivery/price contracts in advance. Maybe the contract for the chips used in the 512GB model will expire soon?
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
And besides that, high end macbook prod and studios are workstation-class computers, not consumer-level computers.
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
Apple isn't a just a consumer computer company. Both iPhones and Macs have very large business markets. In fact, I'd argue that the primary reason Apple hasn't locked down MacOS as much as iOS is that it'd absolutely kill the demand from software developers.
I think it's unlikely that Apple is paying the spot price for memory. They almost certainly negotiate delivery/price contracts in advance. Maybe the contract for the chips used in the 512GB model will expire soon?
Even if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.
My guess is they are doing this because they make more money selling two 256GB devices than they do on one 512GB device.
I think it's unlikely that Apple is paying the spot price for memory. They almost certainly negotiate delivery/price contracts in advance. Maybe the contract for the chips used in the 512GB model will expire soon?
Even if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.