alt Hacker NewsIt just doesn't feel very "skate to where the puck is headed" to me. Apple is holding on for dear life to a business model that has very little momentum. Apple was ready for the AI buildout, which is what upsets me. The rackmount Mac Pro is the perfect product for Apple to sell datacenter customers, all they need to support are CUDA drivers (which are already ARM/BSD-ready) and some sort of PCIe interconnect. There was no "pivot" that was required, outside of their software policy. Maybe AI was a bubble, but missing out on that capital is a bigger problem than suffering from success a-la Nvidia. When AI hype dies down, there's going to be new markets that Apple has to be ready to capitalize on. AI and GPGPU compute have been good exercises for testing Apple's flexibility, but a lot of those advances are flushed down the toilet on hardware like the Mac Studio, which forces customers into non-scalable Thunderbolt RDMA clusters.
I'd argue the supply chain is a non-issue, too. Apple's chips are a high/low mix, and most of them go to TSMC when they really shouldn't. Apple's A-series SOCs could be manufactured by Intel or Samsung without setting them back too far on fab nodes. Mac chips could remain TSMC products, and Apple could pivot their high-memory SKUs to the Mac Pro form factor instead of forcing it into a non-scalable Studio chassis. That would give them a product that the industry could start to buy again, and they could even offer it as a consumer product if they wanted to thumb up their nose at Nvidia. The current Studio is a sad flagship to sell, reminiscent of the Trash Can form factor with even fewer hardware features.
It's Ternus' choice, and he seems to be open to new ideas. Apple isn't immune to bad decisionmaking though, and I bet that future generations will be confused why the ARM datacenter was dominated by non-entities like Ampere and Nvidia selling low-performance licensed cores.
My medium-long term view on Apple is their entire future business model relies on them making the best personal robots. Robots are the single best physical embodiment of the value of technology to everyday people, and there's always decades of refinements possible whenever a new hardware platform of that versatility arrives.
Sure in the medium-long run they'll still make computer-like experiences that let people learn, create, and work, and those will be enabled by increasing investment in AI infra, but at their heart Apple is a hardware company and must rely on that incredible strength to be the physical embodiment of technology. Robots will be part of the mix of hardware that will do those things, as well as act as an omni-appliance that does all of the other home things (dishwashing, cooking, washing clothes, cleaning, massages, diy crafts, play, walking the dog, etc) as well as entire categories of need like social work, light industrial work, etc. Those are all new markets that Apple could have an incredibly significant role in.
This is why I'm not super bummed that Apple isn't a meaningful AI datacenter hardware player. I think that's just the enabling technology for the markets that Apple really would be the single best company in the world to handle, specifically all of those addressed by the personal robot.
I think Apple will naturally find its way to the personal robot in the next decade. The issue I think they'll struggle more with a cultural one. I think the biggest shift that needs to take place at Apple is an increasing focus on whole-life use cases enabled by AI, rather than hiding behind the idea that third parties are the ones to deliver those use cases. Apps are done, they present walls between use cases where none should exist. And because apps are run by companies that want things that may come at the expense of users, apps also add a great deal of cognitive overhead in terms of dealing with third party brands and motivations, and all the subtle things that the buttons on screen actually mean to the user beyond their immediate function (can i trust pressing this? what does the system behind this button do and does that align with what I want?). Life is a holistic and integrated experience, but the way computers present life, in terms of the many domains various apps occupy, is siloed and untrustworthy. This is the business tension and power struggle I see arising most in the next decades in the consumer software industry.
I agree the Nvidia developer play was something they could have done, and it definitely would have increased shareholder value if they'd had any passion for that kind of work. I don't think it would have cost them too much in terms of who they are either, at least at first. My sense is the personal & small cluster market is an inconsequential market, even though their entrance would have undoubtedly enlarged it. Local models are just a very niche thing, and that has to do with the state of technology not any particular hardware availability. The majority of the effort would have had to been at the datacenter side to capture any significant value, and that's where it would have been a pretty big change in company culture.
Anyway its fun to speculate which paths get them where. I'm swayed by the implicit part your argument which is that the Nvidia play was knowable in advance had they just been engaged with the (mac) pro market more, which is where they would have gotten the signal earlier on AI's growing opportunity.