discountopinion

OMG so tempting to get the M4 IPad Pro with all the trimmings. I am holding out though to understand if the 8GB vs 16GB is of material importance or not for the future.

Woah.. NPU in M4 seems to be 2x of TOPS than M3... Memory bandwidth is also up 20%. GenAI here we go.

Can't wait to see an Ultra or Extreme version of this baby.

Any tech company that wants to be a player has to be a player in AI. Any company that wants to be a player in AI has to amass a lot of training & inference compute. 

Currently king of the hill is Nvidia with H100 and upcoming B100. AMD, Grok and others are also supplying capacity and some hyperscalers like GOOG and AWS have their own silicon. Nvidia is expensive and a massive energy and resource hog.

Apple has a fantastic silicon design team and a world class partner in TSMC and strong relationship with them. Their Neural engine, GPU and industry leading power efficiency creates interesting possibilities to explore. Since Apple also has their own dev tools, MLX frameworks, Metal etc then Nvidia's CUDA advantage may not be a factor for an in-house used Apple solution.

Question I have is what Apple will bring to the table to network the chips together as I have yet to see Apple being strong similar to the Nvidia infiniband acquisition and NVlink.
This is likely the deciding factor if they will prevail as large models and training requires a lot of systems to communicate very fast at scale.

Would Apple be prudent to explore their own silicon and AI farm designs like Tesla is doing/has done with Dojo? Yes absolutely. Is Apple also likely amassing existing AI compute - of course.

Balance of probabilities is strongly towards Apple having in-house designed server side AI compute in their labs and potentially already live in their server farms. If they get it right then their Capex story to scale with AI may become a key differentiator for earnings. Tesla got hit with a Billion dollar AI compute ramp in recent results and this has a material impact on earnings.

This tech is just outstanding and I keep seeing more and more stories about how Apple saved lives or made a significant health difference in peoples lives.

This is the way. I hope that Apple feels encouraged by all the success stories and triples down on efforts to accelerate evolution of their tech.

Here is wishing the tech evolves to be usable for earthquake victims and people trapped under rubble so rescue teams can find them quicker. 

Apple has a natural mesh wifi option which would be to take a page out of Amazons book for their Echo smart speakers that can act as wifi extenders. 

Eero and other mesh wifi devices are slowly encroaching on smart home connectivity such as being thread hubs or zigbee hubs. This is a slow constriction of Apples home aspirations and I see no gameplan to remain relevant.

Why not have the HomePods act as mesh wifi? Clearly the trend is to have the computational horsepower and add some augmented wifi circuitry and antennas. Not ideal likely but could potentially work.

Apple with its gross margin targets will unlikely compete successfully with dedicated mass market mesh wifi.