alt Hacker News> M2 Ultra processors ... are not powerful enough to run the latest frontier models
The local AI community would strongly disagree with that assessment. They may not be able to run them with low latency for interactive use and this is most likely the real blocker for them, but they will have strong compute per watt compared to nVidia GPU's.
You cropped the part of the quote that is relevant:
> like Gemini, which the new Siri will be based on.
The local AI community isn't evaluating the internal Gemini models. Apple's Private Compute hardware is specifically competing against Google's TPU hardware, which is a foregone conclusion if you've seen the inference economics. The money and electricity wasted on Mac inference at that scale isn't even attractive to Apple.