alt Hacker NewsMaybe a bit of hindsight bias / the outside view here, but I feel like they're completely asleep if they didn't anticipate strong demand for this specific use case.
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I think a reasonable story could have been told that goes like this: local models aren’t as good as frontier models with a $20/month subscription, and the hardware costs a lot. So only a few enthusiasts will buy Apple machines for this purpose.
This story turned out to be false but I think smart, reasonable people a couple years ago could have believed it with conviction. It doesn’t really seem like “completely asleep” to me.
I don’t understand how that’s possible. They should have had a better idea of what was happening in the memory markets than pretty much any other entity.
Tim Cook has been touted as the greatest supply chain logistics person on the planet and revolutionizing Apple's product delivery, securing exclusive contracts years in advance, etc., etc.
But "oops, we missed that people are interested in AI work on our machines" seems like a really fucking big myopia. But then again, Tim's off to retire on a bed made of cash this week, so...
They were investing in ANE and Metal before everyone in consumer. Hardly asleep. They just underestimated the market size, as pretty much everyone did.