Software-wise, it makes sense: Nvidia has the IP lead, industry buy-in and supports the OSes everyone wants to use.

Hardware-wise though, I actually agree - Apple has dropped the ball so hard here that it's dumbfounding. They're the only TSMC customer that could realistically ship a comparable volume of chips as Nvidia, even without really impacting their smartphone business. 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 for a while now. Apple wants to build a CoreML silo in a world where better products exist everywhere, it's a dead-end approach that should have died back in 2018.

Contextually it's weird too, I've seen tons of people defend Cook's relationship with Trump as "his duty to shareholders" and the like. But whenever you mention crypto mining or AI datacenter markets, people act like Apple is above selling products that people want. Future MBAs will be taught about this hubris once the shape of the total damages come into view.

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nxobject 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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jen20 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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bigyabai 4 days ago | parent [-]

Apple is perfectly well equipped to sell datacenter products. They've done it in the past, even supporting Nvidia's compute drivers along the way. If they have the staff to design consumer-facing and developer-facing experiences, why wouldn't they address the datacenter?

Money is money. 10 years ago people would have laughed at the notion of Nvidia abandoning the gaming market, now it's their most lucrative option. Apple can and should be looking at other avenues of profit while the App Store comes under scrutiny and the Mac market share refuses to budge. It should be especially urgent if unit margins are going down as suppliers leave China.

	▲	jen20 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> They've done it in the past, even supporting Nvidia's compute drivers along the way. If they have the staff to design consumer-facing and developer-facing experiences, why wouldn't they address the datacenter? They did a horrific job of it before. The staff to design consumer facing experiences are busy doing exactly that. The developer facing experiences are very lean. The bandwidth simply isn't there to do DC products. Nor is the supply chain. Nor is the service supply chain. Etc, etc.
	▲	saagarjha 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Apple makes more profit on iPhones than Nvidia does on its entire datacenter business. Why would they want to enter a highly competitive market that they have no expertise in on a whim?