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.
[–] npunt 1 day ago
[–] bigyabai 11 hours ago
At risk of sounding like a glazer, Nvidia has a super clean path to home robotics no matter who wins the consumer segment. They have experience selling their hardware to system integrators like Nintendo and Tesla, and have shipped low-power GPGPU platforms on an SOC since the mid-2010s. The value add of CUDA is enormous, versus the struggle Apple will have bringing developers into the CoreML ecosystem. Nvidia has the momentum with Tegra and Jetson, the hardware and software lead will take years to catch up with.
I guess in a fair essay, this is the point where I should commend Apple for their output. They make the fastest AArch64 CPUs on the market, have an excellent "ecosystem" sell to the billions of iPhone owners in the world, and can ship any service from advertisement to F1 and sports streaming. Individually these are very impressive accomplishments that Tim Cook deserves commendation for. Taken as a whole, I don't see any coherent strategy that ties it all together. The "iPhone ecosystem" concept can't save expensive masterpiece products like the Vision Pro, even if it's a great headset. Users despise Apple's advertisement and service upsells, and single-core CPU performance isn't constraining home robotics. All of Apple's strongest tactics are pretty benign in the light of who they'll have to oppose.
This was a good discussion, and it's fun to game-theory future products with other people. Admittedly, asking Apple to compete with Nvidia's tech stack is like asking the coughing baby to defuse a hydrogen bomb. I recognize that the full scope of my demands for competition are unrealistic, but I think there's some meat on the bone that Apple is leaving for no good reason. The Mac Pro is one of those lowest-hanging fruit that didn't have to die, or at the very least could have been redesigned to champion the advantages of Apple Silicon. The Mac Studio is not a very confident future-facing product, and I feel a bit of worry for Apple's future designs seeing it as their flagship Mac. Apple has all the resources to push out the compute frontier for consumers and datacenters alike - here's hoping they join the fray, for all of our sakes.
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.