[naravara]

Apple has clearly had difficulties scaling its company to maintain this sort of integration though. They're not bad enough to materially harm it, but you can see the seams. Nothing hides problems like success so I suspect, if Apple does start to founder in the next decade, we'll look back and blame the nest of internal dependencies they have leading them to fall behind peers using off-the-shelf parts.

[AlbertCory]

Like I said: tough tradeoffs.

Maybe now you can't easily access a ginormous cloud of AI-optimized processors (I don't actually know this is true, by the way. Anyone?).

A few years from now, maybe some large player will offer that, and Facebook / Google will be stuck with these big investments while their little competitors just pay for what they use.

I'm not taking a position one way or the other; just saying that it's always a hard call.

[scarface74]

The major cloud providers already offer instances with GPUs. Google is one of the three.

And before anyone says that AWS was an offshoot of Amazon Retails excess capacity, this is an urban myth. AWS was always a separate product with separate servers just for selling to customers.

[scarface74]

I see just the opposite. The Mac was the last outlier in Apple’s integration. From the software side, Swift UI is bringing all of their software development together.