I think the question to me is whether Apple can ship affordable consumer devices with enough memory to run sufficiently useful models sufficiently fast.

Right now 128GB MacBook is the top of the line and you could do Qwen 3.8 Flash or similar.

There is a rumor that the M7 chip can use 1.5TB of memory which would imply Apple is aiming for more memory on devices.[1]

Would that imply the entry-level MacBook will have 128GB and top of the line models could run larger reasoning models? Then the question is price and if any of this will translate to iPhone for on-phone models.

With how expensive memory is, IDK if they can pull this off but I hope they do

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ap...

Cloud compute has been completely commoditized. Yes, local models will get better and better, but I think for the vast majority, it will continue to be both cheaper and more productive to use cloud based models, far into the future, where bulk purchasing, oversubscription, and discounted industrial electric rates can be taken advantage of.

Where I am, it's cheaper to purchase multiple claude subscriptions than it is for the power bill from running a local model. Factor in the hardware costs, and you're looking at a break over a decade in the future, for comparable cloud models. Yes, there's privacy, etc, but now you're down into fractions of a percent of users who care about the government reading the memory of their computer.

Man, if all that makes Apple a "winner" then I'm dying to hear your assessment of Nvidia.

Factoring in the increased cost of memory, Apple's threatened service revenue and the stagnation of ecosystem products like the Mac and iPad, I think they have a really challenging future to navigate. The whole "sell people a B2C ecosystem" business model is more threatened than ever.