thadec

danox said:

Yep, Apple’s gonna buy Nvidia AI servers, when they have everything in house to build their own and learn more from the experience, Nvidia, Intel, and AMD servers are barn burners. I don’t think Apple will go down that path not at that wattage when then can build their own without the need for additional coolant fluid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dhuxRF2c_w&pp=ygUMb3B0aW11bSB0ZWNo 13:12 mark high wattage and MHz at all cost Apple isn’t on that path…… Long term Apple appears to building up from ground level with a different solution.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Disappointing-Core-i9-14900K-performance-watt-vs-Ryzen-7-7800X3D-showcased-as-Intel-CPU-appears-to-guzzle-energy.761067.0.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/17esez1/exclusive_nvidia_to_make_armbased_pc_chips_in/ Opps, Nvidia wants to make Arm chips I think that cancels them out.

Good grief. Let me tell you this: Apple is a consumer products company. Apple doesn't even have a workstation chip good enough to compete with the latest Intel Xeon W, which itself (by Intel's admission) can't compete with the latest 96 core 192 thread AMD Threadripper workstation chip. So where on earth are they going to get a server class chip design? Before you answer, Apple Silicon doesn't have anywhere close to the single core performance of an x86 server or even a generic ARM Neoverse V2 or V1 server (maybe a Neoverse N1/N2). As for multicore, Nvidia Grace chips have 144 cores. In 1Q2024 Intel Sierra Forest will have 196 cores. And that is CPU. Where on earth is Apple going to get the parallel processing power from? (AI/ML uses GPUs as parallel processors.) The M2 Ultra only provides raw performance - no we aren't talking about the hardware accelerators that are just good for video, audio and photo processing - equivalent to a midrange Nvidia card that you can pick up off the shelf at a retail store. Comparing it to an Nvidia Hopper data center GPU or the competing products that AMD has and Intel is trying to make is hilarious. And that is the hardware. Where are the software tools going to come from? You know, like Nvidia CUDA, AMD ROCm or even Intel's DPC++?

You are aware that Apple doesn't use their own chips for their data centers, right? They use Intel Xeons - with some AMD Epyc - just like everybody else, and those servers run Linux, not macOS or some Apple home-grown server OS, like everybody else. Apple loves to talk about how their data centers run on green energy, but the tech that they use in them? Not so much. Just as they don't like to talk about how much they rely on Amazon AWS (plus some Google Cloud Platform for redundancy and data analytics) to deliver iCloud and their other cloud products. It would demystify everything I guess. 

So just like Apple was unable to design a 5G modem as good as Qualcomm's - and they aren't even starting from scratch because they bought Intel's 5G division way back in 2019, they just reupped with Qualcomm through 2026 so we are talking about at least 7 years here meaning that they will finally have 5G done for 2027 right about the time that the industry is going to start shifting to 6G (testing begins in 2028 and commercial release in 2030) - they won't be able to snap their fingers and create their own genAI server stack at the drop of a hat either.

@hmlongco ;

More like "they didn't have to do business with Apple unless they had the knowledge necessary to know what were favorable terms for them - and not Apple - beforehand as well as the clout to insist on them and the lawyers good enough to hold Apple accountable should Apple try to change the terms of the deal beforehand."

In other words, be Samsung, who refuses to sign contracts with Apple unless they guarantee a large profit for Samsung.
Be Qualcomm, who had the legal resources to take on Apple and win when Apple tried to force Qualcomm to accepting significantly less per modem than both had mutually agreed to AND less than Qualcomm charges every other customer using some "you'll still be getting billions from us anyway so quit whining" nonsense logic.
At the very least, insist on a deal that gives you the same ability to walk away if it is not working out for you as Apple does.

Do not be like tons of companies who signed deals with Apple only to have Apple walk away with all the cash while their "partners" were left holding the bag. No other bank, credit card or lending company in the world would have agreed to Apple's terms. Goldman Sachs did because they were inexperienced in direct-to-consumer banking, wanted to get into it and figured that hopping onto the Apple infrastructure and brand name would lower their startup costs and risks. Goldman Sachs tried to use Apple to cut corners and got burned. So they don't deserve a lot of sympathy, if any. They should have hired Bain to review their deal with Apple, and if Apple didn't allow a reputable third party to review the deal they should have seen it as a red flag and walked away. Goldman Sachs should have put in the work to build up their own consumer division from scratch, or they should have just bought a smaller bank or lending company and built their own consumer division on top of it (similar to how Apple Music was built on top of Beats Radio). Now, thanks to all the money that they are going to lose on this deal, they can't do either.

But yes, stuff like this is exactly why there is no "Apple Car." Every single manufacturer they talked to knew that they would be locked into an extremely long deal that they couldn't get out of that would result in their investing tens of billions of dollars (or more) while Apple would walk away with the profits AND the IP. The partnering car company wouldn't even be able to say "buy a Nissan because we help Apple make the Apple car!" because ... that isn't a very effective advertising campaign. 

StrangeDays said:

Honkers said:

Can hardly blame them, after Apple pulled OS support for 32 bits apps, rendering a massive chunk of Steam's library obsolete on Mac.  Apple are a flighty partner when it comes to other parties' interests; best to stay away if you can.

And yet, Valve specifically cited CS2 is 64-bit only, because that’s the right direction. 

I find it hard to believe the Linux market has greater potential than the macOS market.

Yes, but only because the macOS gaming market potential is 0. It is 100% people who buy Macs for other purposes but also use it to play games. Absolutely - and I mean absolutely - no one buys a Mac to play games, not even partially. Anyone who is even partially motivated to buy a computer to play games is going to consider A. the widest possible selection of playable games and B. the best possible gaming performance for the money. Macs come up way short in both. Put another way: when listing the reasons to buy a Mac to game ... all of them on that list will be reasons to buy a Mac. They are extremely important to Mac fans but irrelevant to gaming and to gamers. 

Nothing Apple can do about this either. The 3 year old entry level MacBook Air will buy an Nvidia RTX 4050 system with 16 GB RAM and a recent Intel Core i5. The latest 16" M2 Max MacBook Pro costs the same as an Nvidia RTX 4090 machine with the latest AMD Ryzen 9. Yes, those machines will be very thick, extremely heavy, have noisy fans, plastic frames, unreliable trackpads, terrible webcams, outdated Wi-Fi and bluetooth radios and be absolute eyesores. Guess what? No one who buys them will care. They have machines that will max out their resolution/FPS ratio and so long as the screen is fine and the oversized keyboard is responsive they're thrilled. 

The gamer crowd and the Mac crowd are apples and oranges, cats and dogs, Lakers and Celtics. Nothing in common. Apple will continue to pay lip service here but don't expect them to actually do a whole lot.

The elephant in the room: inflation. It is also why smartphone purchases are way down. People who used to buy a new phone or watch every 2 years as a "not luxury or impulse but not entirely necessary either" purchase are now holding onto perfectly usable devices for another year or three. The same thing happened during the recession. While technically we aren't in a recession now, inflation is causing recession behavior. And that is just North America. There are some big markets for Apple - China, Europe - that actually are experiencing a recession right now. 

Not defending Microsoft or Google here, but I just want to point out that Microsoft is not suing Google here (because they would lose). The feds are. The feds called Microsoft as one of the many witnesses for the prosecution. They aren't trying to prove that Google did anything illegal or is a monopoly with respect to Microsoft. Instead, they are using Microsoft as a single data point in a much longer case to prove that Google has either done something illegal or is a monopoly. Microsoft really didn't want to have anything to do with this, because they knew that Google would mock them for their massive failures in mobile and search, as well as remind people of the stuff that Microsoft does to leverage Windows.