The H100 is currently $30000-40000 because there is no other game in town due to CUDA/software compatibility and the upcoming H200 will be even more expensive. These cards "only" have 80GB of RAM and there are other cards that I couldn't find a price for with more RAM for training LLMs. So people are already paying a huge premium for "ecosystem". Apple could easily do the same for machine learning driven server products.
I find it interesting that you think Apple products are more expensive because of the branding, I'm willing to pay more because they work much better than other systems for me and also if you subtract the much higher resale value they are actually the same value as other products.
> I find it interesting that you think Apple products are more expensive because of the branding, I'm willing to pay more because they work much better than other competing systems and also if you subtract the much higher resale value they are actually the same value as other products.
You're assuming that resale value matters for most people, when it probably doesn't (many will use hardware until it's dead, or will pass it on to siblings, which renders the resale value moot).
And I fundamentally disagree that Apple products work better, and especially enough to merit the price difference. A fun case is RAM/disk upgrades. You really cannot say that Apple's premiums on 16GB and more RAM have anything to d with their hardware/software being better (and again, it really isn't).
If you're curious why I think Apple hardware/software isn't better, in no particular order:
* hardware is pretty good, but with limited options (I want a matte screen ffs, the reflections of glossy screens kill my eyes over a few hours) and brutal premiums for trivial things like not having only 8GB of RAM available.
* UX is actually pretty bad. As someone who grew up on Windows, has used various Linux distros with GNOME or KDE extensively, macOS is a nightmare for a few reasons:
* same as with hardware, very limited options. Want to not follow Apple's special way of doing things? You cannot without installing a bunch of extra software, which is sometimes paid (I mean things that any other OS has had for years, like key remapping, or window management). Do you want to have a different scroll direction between the touchpad and the mouse wheel? Well, there are two settings in the two different menus, one for mouse and one for touchpad, but they toggle each other... This is horrendous UX even Microsoft wouldn't do.
* there are massive amounts of hidden tricks, which are sometimes useful, sometimes not, but you cannot (usually) disable them. I do not care for Apple Music and have never used it, yet it will always pop up if macOS considers I don't have anything else to play when I tap the play button on my keyboard. I do not care for Apple Notes, but it will always pop up if I click at the bottom right on my screen by mistake. Discovery of those tricks is also hard
* The OSes absolutely sucks in providing any sort of feedback to the user. "Something went wrong", now go fuck yourself. I've had that with screen mirroring to iPad, installing apps on an iPad, a USB device misbehaving on macOS, Apple TV+ app on iPad failing to download stuff offline... there's no information whatsoever to help you understand what is happening and how you can fix it.
So no, I don't think Apple products really work that well, or are worth the massive premiums they ask for them. There is a decent ecosystem, but it locks you in it, so IMO most people are paying for the brand and due because that's all they know (hammer, nail, etc.)
If you want the same memory bandwidth and latency in your windows laptop, you would similarly need to have soldered LPDDR5 memory and pay the premium for it
You pay a premium for GDDR or HBM because they're actually faster. LPDDR5 isn't, Apple just used the equivalent of a larger number of memory channels to increase the memory bandwidth (x86 servers do the same thing) and then charges a premium for the ordinary memory chips because they can get away with it.
Moreover, there is an obvious way to solve this without soldering the fast memory to the system board -- you solder it to the CPU. This is not only lower latency (traces don't have to go through the system board at all) and lower cost (don't need extra pins between the CPU and the system board), it allows you to upgrade the memory by upgrading the CPU. And isn't incompatible with still having dedicated slots on the system board to add additional memory with less memory bandwidth. Which is typically what you want anyway because if you're going to solder something to the processor, you're better off to actually use HBM or GDDR (which is even faster), but then you don't want all of the system memory to be that because it costs more, many applications don't need it and cache hierarchies are a thing for a reason.
I find it interesting that you think Apple products are more expensive because of the branding, I'm willing to pay more because they work much better than other systems for me and also if you subtract the much higher resale value they are actually the same value as other products.