[raw_anon_1111]

Apple is already one of the winners of the AI race. It’s making much more profit (ie it ain’t losing money) on AI off of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok (you would be surprised at how many incels pay to make AI generated porn videos) subscriptions through the App Store.

It’s only paying Google $1 billion a year for access to Gemini for Siri

[detourdog]

Apple’s entire yearly capex is a fraction of the AI spend of the persumed AI winners.

[foobiekr]

Fantasy buildouts of hundreds of billions of dollars for gear that has a 3 year lifetime may be premature.

Put another way, there is no demonstrated first mover advantage in LLM-based AI so far and all of the companies involved are money furnaces.

[devmor]

Which is mostly insane amounts of debt leveraged entirely on the moonshot that they will find a way to turn a profit on it within the next couple years.

Apple’s bet is intelligent, the “presumed winners” are hedging our economic stability on a miracle, like a shaking gambling addict at a horse race who just withdrew his rent money.

[qingcharles]

Plus all those pricey 512GB Mac Studios they are selling to YouTubers.

[giobox]

Most of the influencer content I saw demonstrating LLMs on multiple 512gb Mac Studios over Thunderbolt networking used Macs borrowed from Apple PR that were returned afterwards - network chuck, Jeff Geerling et al didn't actually buy the 4 or 5 512gb Mac Studios used in their corresponding local LLM videos.

The financial math on actually buying over $40k worth of Mac for 1 to 2 youtube videos probably doesn't work that well, even for the really big players.

[icedchai]

They don't offer the 512 gig RAM variant anymore. Outside of social media influencers and the occasional AI researcher, the market for $10K desktops is vanishingly small.

[spacedcowboy]

Huh, interesting. I wonder if there's a premium price right now for the one on my desk...

Pretty sure the M5 Ultra will be out after WWDC, so my M3 Ultra is (while still completely capable of fulfilling my needs) looking a bit long in the tooth. If I can get a good price for it now, I might be able to offset most of the M5 post WWDC...

[Multiplayer]

My understanding is that the 512gb offering will likely return with the new M5 Ultra coming around WWDC in June. Fingers crossed anyway!

[criddell]

The best desktop you could get has been around $10k going back all the way back to the PDP-8e (it could fit on most desks!).