I was pleasantly surprised Apple Silicon came out at all. Someone has their eye on long term vision at Apple at least, they just didn't do this on a whim.

They did have Xserve back in the day. As great as Apple silicon is for running local llms along with being a general-purpose computing device, it’s not clear that Apple silicon have enough of a differentiating advantage over a rack of nvidia gpus to make it worthwhile in enterprise…

I think that would spread Apple’s chip team too thinly between competing priorities - and require them to do E2E stuff they’d never be interested in doing. What’s always happened, even during Jobs, is that Apple would do something nice and backend-y, and then not be able to keep it up as they’d pour resources into some consumer product. (See: WebObjects, Xserve, Mac OS Server.)

Apple silicon does not compete well in multicore spaces. People seem to think that because it can run single core things really well on a laptop, it can do anything. Servers regularly have 100-200 cpu cores maxing out of rapid fire threads. This is not what Apple silicon excels at.

On top of that, it only performs so well on consumer devices because they control the hardware and OS and can tune both together. Creating server hardware would mean allowing linux to be installed on it, and would need to run equally well. Apple would never put the development time into linux kernel/drivers to make this happen.

Is expansion to all possible markets really a sign of product vision? Windows is in everything from ATMs to servers to cheap laptops, and I am not sure it’s a better product for it OR that Microsoft makes more money that way. Certainly the support burden for a huge number of long tail applications is huge.

And I suppose we’re giving credit to other people for Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro?

It doesn't just end with AI, but it seems the most blatant. At a bare minimum, he could assign someone to fulfill that vision for AI. Google has their own chips which they scale. Apple doesn't need to rebuild ChatGPT, but they could very much do what Microsoft does with Phi and provide Apple Silicon trained and optimized base models for all their users. It seems they are already doing something for XCode and Swift, but they're just barely scratching the surface.

I remember when the iPhone X became a thing, it was because consumers were extremely underwhelmed by Apple at the time. It's like they kicked it up less than a notch sadly.

If Tim Cook decided to be a little more of a visionary, I would say keep him. I would at least prefer he would delegate someone to do the visionary work, he will eventually need a successor.

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It’s a mistake to generalize from the HN population.

Most people don’t care about privacy (see: success of Facebook and TikTok). Most people don’t care about subscriptions (see: cable TV, Netflix).

There may be a niche market for a local inference device that costs $1000 and has to be replaced every year or two during the early days of AI, but it’s not a market with decent ROI for Apple.

> Just sell a proper HomePod with 64GB-128GB ram

The same Homepod that almost sold as poorly as Vision Pro despite a $349.99 MSRP? Apple charges $400 to upgrade an M4 to 64GB and a whopping $1,200 for the 128GB upgrade.

The consumer demand for a $800+ device like this is probably zilch, I can't imagine it's worth Apple's time to gussy up a nice UX or support it long-term. What you are describing is a Mac with extra steps, you could probably hack together a similar experience with Shortcuts if you had enough money and a use-case. An AI Homepod-server would only be efficient at wasting money.

Have a team pushing out opitmised open source models. Over time this thing could become the house AI. Basically Star Treks computer.

Apple often wants to do it their way. Unfortunately, their foundation models are way behind even the open models.

There are local LLM coding models that ship with XCode now too.

Give me a majority share in AAPL if that's what you want ;)

I sometimes read posts on here and just laugh.

Its easy to sit in the armchair and say "just be a visionary bro" when they forget Tim worked under Steve for awhile before his death - he has some sense and understanding of what it takes to get a great product out of the door.

Nvidia is generating a lot of revenue, sure - but what is the downstream impact on its customers with the hardware? All they have right now is negative returns to show for their spending. Could this change? Maybe. Is it likely? Not in my view.

As it stands, Apple has made the absolute right choice in not wasting its cash and is demonstrating discipline. Which when all this LLM mania quietens, shareholders will respect.

Yes. And everyone is glossing over the benefit of unified memory for LLM applications. Apple may not have the models, but it has customer goodwill, a platform, and the logistical infrastructure to roll them out. It probably even has the cash to buy some AI companies outright; maybe not the big ones (for a reasonable amount, anyway) but small to midsize ones with domain-specific models that could be combined.

Not to mention the “default browser” leverage it has with with iPhones, iPods, and watches.

Why? This is something that plays into all of Apple's supposed strengths: Privacy/no strict cloud dependency/on-device compute, hardware/software optimization while owning the stack and combine that with good UI/UX for a broad target audience without sacrificing too much for the power users. OP never said that local AI would be the only topic a new CEO should focus on.

Not what I am suggesting. However, having trained a few different things on a modest M4 Pro chip (so not even their absolute most powerful chips mind you), and using it for local-first AI inference, I can see the value. A single server could serve an LLM for a small business and cost a lot less than running the same inference through a 5090 in terms of power usage.

I could also see universities giving this type of compute access to students for cheaper to work on more basic less resource intensive models.

> They have hardware designers who can design GPUs from scratch, write proprietary graphics APIs and fine-tune for power efficiency. The only organizational roadblock that I can see is the executive vision, which has been pretty wishy-washy on AI since for a while now.

The vision since Jobs has always been “build a great consumer product and own as much as you can while doing so”. That’s exactly how all of the design parameters of Ax/Mx series were determined and relentlessly optimized for - the fact that they have a highly competitive uarch was a salutary side-effect, but not a planned goal.

> But whenever you mention crypto mining or AI datacenter markets, people act like Apple is above selling products that people want.

People also want comfortable mattresses and high quality coffee machines. Should Apple make them too?

Apple not being in a particular industry is a perfectly valid choice, which is not remotely comparable to protecting their interests in the industries they are currently in. Selling datacenter-bound products is something Apple is not _remotely_ equipped for, and staffing up to do so at reasonable scale would not be a trivial task.

As for crypto mining... JFC.