One can only hope.

That said, Apple's vertical integration is a massive competitive advantage here, IMO. Nvidia's reliance on Microsoft & Windows for software support likely makes competing w/ Apple an uphill battle.

If/when Local AI gets good enough to compete with Cloud AI on most inference workloads, Apple starts to look like Nvidia's biggest competitor.

While this is admittedly a dream scenario, the biggest downside would be Apple effectively having a monopoly in "Agent-ready" consumer electronics. Hopefully local AI both becomes the norm, and there is sufficient competition among the consumer platforms.

Side-note: I would love to see an "RTX Spark" Framework 13 mainboard at some point.

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bigyabai an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't understand this stance. Microsoft is reliant on Nvidia, they don't have a good ARM SOC to ship with without them. They will bend over backwards to accommodate these SOCs on Windows, and probably don't have much work to do in the first place.

Apple's vertical integration has led to a Siri overhaul that took half a decade to roll out, and it won't even run locally. They built an NPU coprocessor that's basically dark silicon for expensive inference, and then shipped MLX to stop Tensorflow and Pytorch from replacing Apple's role in the stack entirely. Mac owners are pleading for signed CUDA drivers for the PCIe or Thunderbolt in their $5,000+ Mac Pros. Apple's ecosystem is pure liability for AI, they're not moving any product for datacenter inference and can't even sell the hardware to themselves: https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...

Nvidia's profit margins are safe. Even if the RTX Spark is a completely failed product, Apple is not encroaching on the markets that Nvidia dominates.

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h14h 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

Fair points all around. Ultimately it all comes down to execution.

In theory, Apple SHOULD have an advantage given they have everything they need in house and can all pull in a unified direction. In practice, it's not always the case that all the teams in a large corporation are all that much better at pulling in the same direction than multiple different corporations in a partnership. And all this will be moot if Local LLMs never catch up to cloud LLMs in terms of quality.

Regardless, it'll be very interesting to see how Nvidia's partnerships with Microsoft & hardware OEMs play out. If the AI inference compute share shifts appreciably to local consumer hardware, I'll want to see strong competition.

	▲	bigyabai 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'd argue that Apple had the upper hand, but they folded super early. They abandoned OpenCL, which was the most promising CUDA competitor with industry-wide buy in from dozens of companies. Then they transitioned to an ecosystem-first mindset prevented Apple from cooperating to take down Nvidia, and their locked-down software stopped the industry's first high-speed ARM servers from reaching their audience. Nvidia capitalized on both opportunities to the tune of trillions in valuation. Without Khronos involved, I don't think that Apple has the buy-in to create a real industry-scale CUDA alternative. At this point, it might just be most profitable to support CUDA in macOS and give the people what they want.