Comment by petercooper
2 months ago
They could treat the extreme spec machines separately from the prosumer ones, like they did with the Xserve. Let business customers spec up to 768GB (say) who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag, while keeping them away from the stores and usual consumer supply chains (Amazon et al). It may not be a big enough market segment for them to care about anymore, though.
They can do it, but that gonna need to be different SKU not Mac Studio. Otherwise news will be full of discussions about Apple price hike from $8000 to $24,000 or who the hell knows $48,000.
So yeah the only way I see them selling it is usual "call us" enterprise price tag.
But since its not what Apple usually do its easier to sell 4x Mac Studio 256GB RAM boxes with interconnect for lets say $12,000 - $15,000 each.
I don't think it's needs 'call us' just a separate SKU, I mean if they called it Xserve Ultra and it was just a studio in a 1u format with dual PSUs and extra RAM, it would fly off the shelves.
Isn't that the same thing you can get from ordinary 2S Epyc/Xeon servers at a similar price that have 24 memory channels (when the M3 Ultra has the equivalent of 16)?
And the reason people rarely use that for AI is that the enterprise GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are only moderately more expensive but are significantly faster because they use HBM instead of DDR5.
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Imagine if they bring back the Mac Pro with 768GB of ram to compete with the $100k DGX Station.
A very good idea, the Mac Pro also had a rack mount option didn't it? That would be the kind of thing you could sell as many as you could make.
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The timing of the demise of the Mac Pro has been about as bad as the Steam Machine launch timing.
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> Let business customers spec up to 768GB who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag
There is a clear difference between $25k and $100k.
64 iPhones at retail price is already around $64k. For something at 768GB to be profitable at Apple's terms, this has to retail at $100k for it to be profitable. That was the OP's point.
They'll sell more $20-25k Macs when Goldman green lights Apple Card credit limits that will fit one of them.
Apple Card already offers credit limits high enough for it
Honestly you're still looking at (from my understanding) ~3 minutes prefill (TTFT) even with architectural improvements and so on with a 32k context window (against a large model). How is this going to be competitive with Nvidia and all of the tricks massive scale get's you to parallelise context across many machines?
Is it supposed to be? I think the point with some of these Macs is you get the capability in something the size of a heatsink from Intel's Netburst architecture era, or a Macbook light enough to stick in a backpack and take with you to lunch.
If you're talking about chaining together multiple GPUs you're talking about a different game -- I suspect, anyway. Seems like a high-spec Mac would be good for development and testing. Arrays of GPUs, better aimed at production use.