alt Hacker NewsYes, I want Apple to focus on Mac inference. It could be the return of laptops/desktops as a major revenue source for Apple. Macs have been ~10% of Apple's revenue for the last 10 years or so. I'd love to see Macs get up to 20-30%.
I do expect personal AI machines to take off in a few years once local models and local hardware hit an inflection point. M5 Max is a major improvement for local inference due to the added matmul accelerators, but the RAM capacity and bandwidth bottleneck is huge.
That said, enterprise AI chips will still take the cake in terms of margins.
At any point in the last six years, Apple could have signed Nvidia's aarch64 BSD drivers and watched their revenue climb. It's a minuscule commitment that is fully supported by the higher-end Mac Pros, only disabled by software. That would have sent sales skyrocketing as far as the supply could handle it.
But Apple is about B2C, and customers buy services. All of us know, deep down, that Apple Intelligence will be a subscription service offered as part of Apple One. The Mac won't become the magical backbone for your personal inference network, it's a product used to consume Apple Services first and everything else comes second.