I think the question to me is whether Apple can ship affordable consumer devices with enough memory to run sufficiently useful models sufficiently fast.

Right now 128GB MacBook is the top of the line and you could do Qwen 3.8 Flash or similar.

There is a rumor that the M7 chip can use 1.5TB of memory which would imply Apple is aiming for more memory on devices.[1]

Would that imply the entry-level MacBook will have 128GB and top of the line models could run larger reasoning models? Then the question is price and if any of this will translate to iPhone for on-phone models.

With how expensive memory is, IDK if they can pull this off but I hope they do

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ap...

> Would that imply the entry-level MacBook will have 128GB

Most people neither need nor want to run large LLMs locally.

The entry level MacBook Neo costs $599. Even if RAM prices revert to the pre-AI mean, the entry level models are not going to be that stacked with RAM.

Eventually we'll get to a doubling where entry level means 16GB of RAM, but most people won't be running anything more than simple models for light local work.

Have you ever tried running large LLMs on a MacBook Pro? It's hot, loud, and makes your battery level disappear at rates you didn't know were possible if you're not plugged in. It's a very niche hobby.

Even if it's 2030 - that's a mere 3 years from now - it will take at least that long for the greater economy to figure out how to use LLMs. And probably a memory boom/bust cycle in that time too.

If Apple, in 2030 has a compute product that a worker can BYO(X) to work that has 2TB RAM, with an encrypted personalized context that can float between agents, then they will be in a very interesting place.

I'm on 128gb Mac and Laguna2.1 is able to do 800tps coding as good at Sonnet 4.5 or Opus 4. It's awesome.

The Mac Studio hardware can do 512GB. That might be a hardware limit of the current architecture.

But the family shouldn’t be limited by that. We’re not going to see M6 Max hardware, because the M7 line is being fast-tracked and pulled forward. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see M7 capable of 1-2TB or more.

> whether Apple can ship affordable consumer devices with enough memory to run sufficiently useful models sufficiently fast.

i suspect that they will at least do offloading for casual usage as well. if they can ship 24GB in a homeview or appletv style product, it's game over.

> Would that imply the entry-level MacBook will have 128GB

why would a company who locks iPad Pro entry level literally out of ram that exists on its own chips.

I get their high end 10k-20k laptops will be able to reach these specs and gatekept behind also upgrading the cpu to the ultra but no way will it be an option in entry level.

Most likely Apple has been spending whatever they can to get in front of the memory market.

Apple’s position down the road. When the Chinese company CMXT takes a much bigger share of the memory market worldwide, and they will. Their dominance in memory will probably be pretty close to what BYD is today in the worldwide car industry.

I don’t think Apple can be in a position where all of the Chinese device-making companies can get memory at a significantly cheaper price from CMXT, and Apple is stuck with buying memory from the three hyenas of memory at a significantly higher price.

That’s not going to help Apple sell their devices at a competitive price worldwide over time against the Chinese computer makers (Lenovo, Asus, and Motorola) and make no mistake about it: their share of the market worldwide will get bigger because of this change in the memory market; their focus will be on the long term, while the lawyers/MBA/finance types in the West will have their heads stuck in the short term.

It’s the (Chinese companies’) opportunity, and they’re not going to let it pass; I wouldn’t. In addition, Apple is in competition with Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Meta, and indirectly with Anthropic and OpenAI (whose CEO, Sam Altman, recently declared that computer ram is wasted on low-level regular computer users), along with a whole legion of other 3D model makers on the procurement of memory.

The combination of all these elements going into the future means that if Apple wants to stay ahead, I believe Apple has no choice but to take memory in house, they have the design and engineering capability in-house, and they have the money because they didn’t burn it on AI models and data centers.

This scenario is no different than replacing Intel or Qualcomm; you can see the writing/destination and the ultimate train wreck up ahead if Apple doesn’t roll up its sleeves and get busy, the market has changed and again Apple has to change and adapt to the new conditions.

I dunno, I reckon they are targeting 64GB and will develop a smaller model thats built in by default that handles a lot of simple tasks quickly.

Probably sitting under a router, so that it can hand off bigger jobs to an Apple DC somewhere, probably with a certain number of credits based on your iCloud sub.

Why is there a desire to have this stuff on the edge on the engineers lap instead of just building some arbitrarily scalable cluster for I'm guessing cheaper than apple's usual premium? Habitual practice from the engineers who would compile on the device getting hot in their lap? Lack of widespread hpc experience compared to running docker?