What year are you talking about? When I was in grad school, around 2007, Nvidia was aggressively marketing GPUs for high performance computing. They would go to campuses, talk to professors, etc.

Yes, the whole Deep Learning thing was luck, but as with most lucky things, they ensured they were positioned to capitalize on it.

to their credit, there was a lot of work behind "luck". Jensen showed up in person in 2017 in NEURIPS and he and likely a lot of his top brass basically sat down and read the entire conference proceedings/abstracts; there was likely a lot of work behind the scenes to behind the ML research pivot.

In 2006. The next 20 years of cuda support weren't luck, as anyone trying to use AMD will know.

I might have believe this story, if not at the same time Intel had made an expensive bet on producing not-quite-gaming cards, later looked at the same trillion dollar question.. and then almost decided that this did not bring enough luck to keep spending.

I think Jobs was quite sceptical about courting enterprises. Personally this is one of the reasons I choose Apple over Microsoft.

Apple has not in the past three decades really courted the capital E Enterprise market. They'll definitely sell to Enterprise customers and have Enterprise sales teams for big customers. But they're not and never have been Dell or HP.

Enterprise sales sucks. There's infinite amounts of politicking and glad handing and buyers will get all sorts of sweet brib..."sales dinners" then go with the cheapest option. Margins on hardware sucks and the only money is in support contracts. Apple instead invests in consumer sales/support primarily and all the other channels are side businesses.

Stuff like the Xserve existed mostly for Apple internal purposes and ended up being sold externally to goose the scale enough to make them not a huge loss. At one point a large percentage of the offices on Bubb road were packed with Xserves running portions of the iTunes Music Store and the Apple online store. More offices were packed with Xserves doing media ingest and encoding for iTMS. Just about every building had racks of them as build and file servers.

I think a reasonable story could have been told that goes like this: local models aren’t as good as frontier models with a $20/month subscription, and the hardware costs a lot. So only a few enthusiasts will buy Apple machines for this purpose.

This story turned out to be false but I think smart, reasonable people a couple years ago could have believed it with conviction. It doesn’t really seem like “completely asleep” to me.

They were investing in ANE and Metal before everyone in consumer. Hardly asleep. They just underestimated the market size, as pretty much everyone did.

I don’t understand how that’s possible. They should have had a better idea of what was happening in the memory markets than pretty much any other entity.

Tim Cook has been touted as the greatest supply chain logistics person on the planet and revolutionizing Apple's product delivery, securing exclusive contracts years in advance, etc., etc.

But "oops, we missed that people are interested in AI work on our machines" seems like a really fucking big myopia. But then again, Tim's off to retire on a bed made of cash this week, so...

They didn't "accidentally" add tensor units to the GPU cores in the M5 generation.

However, I don't think they expected the level of Enterprise interest they saw.

That raw statement is completely and totally false.

“Not as fully staffed as some people might hope” or “Developer Relations isn’t as responsive as I’d like” are both at least not obviously false.