alt Hacker NewsI'm purely talking in terms of revenue. There's a huge demand for AI systems from personal workstations to datacenter servers, and Apple was one of the few companies in the world in a position to build complete systems for it.
But for some reason Apple thought the sound recording engineer or the video editor market was more important... like, WTF dude? Have some vision at least!
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It is more important. Both for the customer base that actually buys Apple machines as well as the cache and mindshare of being used by the people that create American culture.
Even if Apple had an amazing GPU for AI it wouldn’t matter hugely - local inference hasn’t taken off yet and cloud inference and training all uses servers where Apple has no market share and wasn’t going to get it since people had already built all the stacks around CUDA before Apple could even have awoken to that.
Some people at Apple see it. That’s why they added matmul to M5 GPU and keep mentioning LMStudio in their marketing.
Apple already seems to do pretty well when it comes to AI systems on personal computers. Datacenters simply isn't their business, it would need some major changes on their part. Also, AI is a bubble, it will burst eventually, and because Apple doesn't have the fist mover advantage Nvidia has, they have a lot to lose entering this market now.
Sound recording engineers and video editors will not disappear after the AI bubble bursts, and Apple is wise to keep that market. Bursting the AI bubble will not make AI disappear, it will just end the crazy cashflows we are seeing now. And in that regard, with the capabilities of their hardware, Apple is in a pretty good spot I think.