mjtomlin

CheeseFreeze said:

I’m in the market for a new laptop and it baffles me that just because Apple wanted to show to Qualcomm they can keep up, they decided to launch an M4 chip with a product that is inherently limited in how it can utilize the chip for day to day productivity. 

Thus creating a “I’ll wait with buying a new computer” holding pattern with Mac users. 

If the above timeline is correct, that’s a terrible strategy. Especially since I’m deep into AI for work, I can use all the extra power there is.

That sentiment baffles me... There is no limit in how it can "utilize" the chip. There is however an inherit limit in how much sustained performance it can get from the chip, due to thermal ceilings. But, the M4 is just as much about efficiency as it is performance, if not more. The M4 provides the same performance of the M2 while using half the power.

That efficiency is dramatically on display in the fact that they could put an SOC like that in a device like the iPad. It's a mind blowing demonstration of the scalability of their designs. Wait until these cores hit the Apple TV, or Home Pods, or even Apple Watch.

9secondkox2 said:

Kinda feeling Apple will buck history here and update quite a few Mac’s this year to m4 status for multiple reasons:

a) it cleans up the generational mess over the last couple of years. 

b) it puts further distance between apple silicon and Qualcomm’s disingenuous comparisons. 

C) it allows for Apple Intelligence to shine on all Mac’s, showcasing Apple as the AI leader. 

Between a and b, apple gets seen as the place to go for top tier ai. 

D) M3 is/was expensive to fab.

Personally I think Apple will make the most of the M3 line until it becomes cost effective to ditch it. Sticking those SoC's in their highest selling systems; laptops and iMac is an indication that's what's going on here, especially after debuting the M4 in the latest iPad Pro. Any new Macs from this point forward will have the M4, and I think all of the aforementioned systems will be the last to get upgraded to it.

This year (after macOS Sequoia is released) we'll see the rest of the "low sales" systems get upgraded to the M4...

Mac mini M4/Pro
Mac Studio M4 Max/Ultra
Mac Pro M4 Ultra

Then next Spring/Summer, the others will get updated. (And with the debut of the iMac M4, we'll finally get back the larger iMac Pro M4 Pro/Max)

The DMA ultimately leads to a technological monoculture where there is a single platform. It would take a lot less resources for Apple to just support and ship EU iPhones with Android. Any European customer that wants a real iPhone can just order one online from outside the EU market.

danvm said:

tmay said:

nubus said:

Kierkegaarden said:

canukstorm said:

Competent management would have also invested whatever it takes to have their own in-house LLM to power Siri and have their own AI datacenter infrastructure ready to go by now. 

And this “AI data center infrastructure” you speak of — what would this power, and what income would this generate? 

With Apple paying OpenAI - 49% owned by MS and hosted on Azure we see Apple making Microsoft stronger. Actively funding your competitors, having no control over core tech, and fumbling around copying products from Zuckerberg and Musk - that is Team Cook.

You mean the MS that has no mobile presence vs Apple with 1.46 B iPhone users?

Who do you think gains the most fainancially from OpenAI on iOS; Apple or MS?

Yes, the Apple with no generative AI / LLM infrastructure vs MS with one of the largest infrastructures in the world.
Right now, no one knows how will gain more, since there are no details of Apple agreement with OpenAI. I suppose Apple will be paying far more than the $30M per month to Amazon and the $300M they pay Google for GCP cloud services. 

That’s a highly dubious claim for sure. There’s been many rumors that Apple has already been running and using their own internal LLM for a couple of years now. There’s also been rumors that Apple does in fact intend to expand that out at some point and have been working on it for a while now. Just because they haven’t released anything to the public, doesn’t mean they aren’t working on something. 

Furthermore, we know they’ve been working in this area because the new predictive text feature on their devices is based off the same transformer models used by ChatGPT.

charlesn said:

Kierkegaarden said:

That’s a lot of power — I can’t help think that something else with be unveiled at WWDC to take advantage of this.  Maybe I’m completely off, 

Hello? Did you see the new Live Multicam capabilities with four iPhones?! I'm sure more is coming at WWDC, but that alone is INSANE. 

HOWEVER... Mark Gurman really nailed the crux of the issue in his most recent Power Up column: Apple has intentionally held back the iPad from becoming a true laptop replacement by hobbling it in iPadOS. How else to explain that they can pull off a near miracle like Live Multicam but the simple task of multitasking on an iPad remains a kludge? This much is clear: the new iPad Pros, at first blush, might be the best hardware Apple has ever produced--they are at least in the running for that title. But will Apple FINALLY provide an iPadOS as good as the hardware? We'll soon see... If they do, I'd trade in my MBA M2 immediately. 

Thermal ceiling is much lower in a device as thin as the new iPad Pro… Limiting the OS in how much it can do at once, will still provide the perceived amount of performance users expect. They actually mentioned how they’ve attempted to increase the thermal ceiling to enable being able to make it thinner. If you attempted to run a completely unrestricted OS, like macOS on this device, you would see a major hit to performance as the SoC got hotter and hotter.