Comment by whizzter
14 hours ago
We had a workshop 6 months ago and while I've always been sceptical of OpenAI,etc's silly AGI/ASI claims, the investments have shown the way to a lot of new technology and has opened up a genie that won't be put back into the bottle.
Now extrapolating in line with how Sun servers around year 2000 cost a fortune and can be emulated by a 5$ VPS today, Apple is seeing that they can maybe grab the local LLM workloads if they act now with their integrated chip development.
But to grab that, they need developers to rely less on CUDA via Python or have other proper hardware support for those environments, and that won't happen without the hardware being there first and the machines being able to be built with enough memory (refreshing to see Apple support 128gb even if it'll probably bleed you dry).
I feel like the push by devs towards Metal compatibility has been 10x than AMD. I assume that's because the majority of us run MacBooks.
The only "push" towards Metal compatibility there's been has been complaints on github issues. Not only has none of the work been done, absolutely nobody in their right mind wants to work on Metal compatibility. Replacing proprietary with proprietary is absolutely nobody's weekend project. or paid project.
If coding by AI was truly solved then it would be done with AI, right?
I think that might be partly because on regular PC's you can just go and buy an NVidia card insteaf of fuzzing around with software issues, and for those on laptops they probably hope that something like Zluda will solve it via software shims or MS backed ML api's.
Basically, too many choices to "focus on" makes non a winner except the incumbent.
Which majority?
I certainly only use Macs when being project assigned, then there are plenty of developers out there whose job has nothing to do with what Apple offers.
Also while Metal is a very cool API, I rather play with Vulkan, CUDA and DirectX, as do the large majority of game developers.
Honestly though, gamedevs really are among the biggest Windows stalwarts due to SDK's and older 3d software.
Only groups of developers more tied to Windows that I can think of are probably embedded people tied due to weird hardware SDK's and Windows Active Directory dependent enterprise people.
Outside of that almost everyone hip seems to want a Mac.
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Who is "us" in this case? Majority of devs that took the stack overflow survey use Windows:
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#1-computer-...
That's the broad developer community. 90%+ of the engineers at Big Tech and the technorati startups are on MacOS with 5% on Linux and the other 5% on Windows.
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I think it's reasonable to say that the people responding to surveys on Stack Overflow aren't the same people who work on pushing the state of the art in local LLM deployment. (which doesn't prove that that crowd is Apple-centric, of course)
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Majority of devs are in the global south I presume
Torch mlp support on my local macbook outperforms CUDA T4 on Colab.
Except CUDA feels really cozy, because like Microsoft, NVidia understands the Developers, Developers, Developers mantra.
People always overlook that CUDA is a polyglot ecosystem, the IDE and graphical debugging experience where one can even single step on GPU code, the libraries ecosystem.
And as of last year, NVidia has started to take Python seriously and now with cuTile based JIT, it is possible to write CUDA kernels in pure Python, not having Python generate C++ code that other tools than ingest.
They are getting ahead of Modular, with Python.