tht

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tht
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  • iPhone sales drop 10% as Samsung steadies and Chinese rivals grow

    thttht
    M68000 said:
    tht said:
    This story happens every year for like the last 10 years at least. Can’t believe it is making the rounds. Like, does no one remember?
    Perhaps not everyone is aware of these things and has not been following for at least 10 years.  Therefore,  the info is new to some people. 
    IDC, MacRumors and 9to5mac are most certainly aware of it. 

    Apple occasionally takes the top unit share spot during the holiday quarter, and will typically lose that spot to Samsung during the post-holiday quarters. Sometimes Apple’s drop in the post-holiday quarter is big, sometimes small. 

    All these websites track Apple’s financial quarters. It’s not hard to remember trend lines or old news, especially when they wrote and published them. 
    tmay40domiwilliamlondonwatto_cobraAlex_V

  • When to expect every Mac to get the AI-based M4 processor

    thttht
    blastdoor said:
    libertyandfree said:
    blastdoor said:
    libertyandfree said:
    NYC362 said:
    blastdoor said:
    That roadmap implies no m3 Mac mini. I wonder if there will also be no m3 Mac Studio and if maybe the Mac Studio will get an m4 faster than we’d otherwise expect. And if all that turns out to be true, I wonder if the explanation might be that the first 3nm process from TSMC had yield issues, so maybe Apple wants to move to N3E ASAP
    I wonder if we might see an intro of an M4 Max and Ultra for the Mac Studio and Mac Pro at WWDC.   Introduce them on June 10th, available on June 21 or 28 (which is a bit longer than the normal announcement to availability span for Apple)... that's 10 or 11 weeks away.  Considering the relative small numbers of units needed compared to MacBook Pros, this could be a possibility.  
     
    Also, putting an M3 Max and Ultra chip into a Studio in June, really makes no sense as the processors (at least for the Max) as it would already be eight months old.  
    LOL, this is never going to happen.  The M4 is not that far along and the basic vanilla M4 would be the first one out of the fab due to less complexity compared to the Pro/Max/Ultra. Fabs rarely if ever start with the more advanced chips and then work backwards. Moreover, if the M4’s are ready now one has to question how many “AI” enhancements it actually has.   

     I would imagine Apple will have the vanilla M4 pretty much ready to go to production but it will not have much in terms of significant AI enhanced features that will be added to the Pro/Max/Ultra models in which I can see each iteration being more AI capable.  This also allows Apple to continue working on further AI enhancement capabilities that will be part of the Ultra or Max. 
    I agree it is unlikely to happen in June, but never say never. The max and ultra are very low volume relative to other chips in apples lineup so it’s not crazy to think they could come earlier in the cycle than was the case for m1 and m2. 

    Heck, m3 max was out at the same time as m3, so there is that precedent. 
    If for some reason the M4 max was released so soon I doubt it would have compelling AI capabilities since it seems Apple has been a little late to the AI party.  
    Apple first included an NPU in the A11, back in 2017. They have increased the number of cores from 2 to 16 during that time. They’ve primarily used it for image related ML tasks. 

    Apple is only late to the GPT NLP game. But no later than they were to the mp3 player or smartphone games. It might be too early to count them out.
    Don’t think they need to count on being in it. They will have chatbot and LLM oriented features that will be very useful to some niche of people, but I’m having a hard time imagining it as a feature that will sell computers or phones. 

    LLMs seem adjacent to automation and scripting support. That has been a thing, a desire among many users, for at least 30 years. Automation and scripting is a niche feature all this time, it speaks to what the mass market does with computers, and how many things are not scriptable or automated for those workflows. 

    So wait and see. This is for Apple’s bread and butter consumer computing products. Server markets? LLMs look like a big product and a new instrument of torture. The non-deterministic outputs based on vague inputs will be interesting to see. 

    Meanwhile, steady as she goes with Apple. Add LLM features that make a difference to users. 
    Alex1Nwatto_cobrabaconstang

  • iPhone sales drop 10% as Samsung steadies and Chinese rivals grow

    thttht
    This story happens every year for like the last 10 years at least. Can’t believe it is making the rounds. Like, does no one remember?
    ssfe11danox40domiwatto_cobraAlex_V

  • Rumor: M4 MacBook Pro with AI enhancements expected at the end of 2024

    thttht
    blastdoor said:
    tht said:
    mobird said:
    What's up with the Mac Studio?
    The hope is that Apple announces Mac Studios with M3 Max and M3 Ultra in June. If so, it's right on schedule for M4 versions in June of 2025.

    There is speculation that Apple will have a discrete monolithic M3 Ultra chip with a silicon bridge to make a M3 Extreme consisting of 2 M3 Ultra chips. That would be interesting. If so, this could open up a MBP18 model or MBP16 with the M3 Ultra. Just not a lot of customers for a Mac Studio with Ultra or a Mac Pro with Ultra or Extreme.
    If the next ultra is a single chip then I’ll bet it’s less than twice a max. Maybe 18 big CPU cores plus 4 little cores and 60 GPU cores.

    but I could imagine Apple skipping the ultra for the m3 lineup and bringing it back for m4. 
    Yes, they don’t need to double. The MCM Ultra models did not scale all that well, especially GPU performance. If it is one chip, and they can maintain a nice linear core scaling, especially for the GPU cores, they won’t need to double core count at all. 60 GPU cores in a monolithic chip could outperform a MCM model with 80 GPU cores. 

    The issue is still size of the market. Not many people need a desktop computer with a lot of CPU cores. Then, Apple doesn’t have a presence in the gaming market which is rather significant portion of desktop GPU sales. 

    If they do make a monolithic Ultra chip, they should find a way to get it into more places. Put it into a MBP16 for $4000. Make it a PCIe module for the Mac Pro. Making a blade server for Mac virtualization would be a possible market, but Apple doesn’t do server hardware nor software. 
    Alex1N

  • Rumor: M4 MacBook Pro with AI enhancements expected at the end of 2024

    thttht
    mobird said:
    What's up with the Mac Studio?
    The hope is that Apple announces Mac Studios with M3 Max and M3 Ultra in June. If so, it's right on schedule for M4 versions in June of 2025.

    There is speculation that Apple will have a discrete monolithic M3 Ultra chip with a silicon bridge to make a M3 Extreme consisting of 2 M3 Ultra chips. That would be interesting. If so, this could open up a MBP18 model or MBP16 with the M3 Ultra. Just not a lot of customers for a Mac Studio with Ultra or a Mac Pro with Ultra or Extreme.
    narwhalAlex1N