Comment by jandrewrogers
3 hours ago
That article is a bit incoherent.
I think it is pretty clear at this point that Apple has gone all-in on being the ideal edge silicon for AI. This leverages their core competencies, requires only modest investment, and will likely pay out no matter how the AI market eventually shakes out. They are in one of the only parts of the obvious future AI market where there isn't really a fight for greenfield turf with other big companies.
Staying in their lane is arguably the optimal business decision for Apple and they lose nothing by it.
Here's an interview with the senior product manager of Apple Silicon that more-or-less says the same thing: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/06/apple-silicon-exec-expl...
> He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud – a move motivated by privacy, security, and the rising cost of inference as agents consume more tokens. However, Brooks envisions a hybrid future in which agents decide what runs on-device and what gets sent to the cloud.
And coupled with their efforts in auditably-private cloud computing, that's a strong pitch.
> auditably-private cloud computing
Do those of you who have read the white paper have confidence in this claim (as I’d hope)?
Blog: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Just feels like the Apple press/podcast circuit just keep trying to spin ways to frame Apples fumble of the AI era as some sort of savvy move.
I generally agree. Xserve didn't work out for Apple and they dropped it pretty quickly--think I still have an A/UX coffee cup. Wasn't really in their DNA even if there was an argument before Linux took off. For better or worse, they're basically a client company and barely a software (OK and basically a software services) one--although they spend a fair bit on (roughly) user experience.
A/UX predates Xserve by 14 years.
And how much did A/UX sell? I Have an A/UX coffee mug in my kitchen. It even has a phone number on it.
They sold the Xserve for ten years, across the PowerPC and Intel eras.
Still, in the scheme of Apple stuff it was a failed experiment--even if a worthwile one.
I don’t think they need to go all-in on anything related to AI.
> This leverages their core competencies, requires only modest investment, and will likely pay out no matter how the AI market eventually shakes out.
This looks more like a call or a small raise or whatever (I don’t play poker).
They've been investing in NPUs for a long long time. Since the first iPad Pro at least (2018). Apple Silicon is a natural fit for tensor/matrix operations due to unified memory, so if anything them going "all in" on that has been a nice side effect.
> Apple Silicon is a natural fit for tensor/matrix operations due to unified memory,
This is a common misconception. This is NOT true: memory designed for CPU performs horribly for GPU tasks. Mac/Strix Halo/NVIDIA Spark are performing horribly compared to a desktop video card with GDDR.
I spent quite a few weekends optimizing ROCM kernels for strix halo, i WISH I had GDDR instead of high-frequency CPU RAM; the bandwidth would be SO MUCH better.
I'm quantizing weights not to make computation faster, not because I'm out of memory, but because memory cannot move fast enough to be processed and it's cheaper to load quantized version, convert into bf16 compute, and discard; This happens every single time a token is generated for the whole model over and over.
If they've gone all in on that, it looks even worse for Apple. Qualcomm's Hexagon has been a better NPU since the beginning. Now even Mediatek is better at it than Apple. Blogs like macrumors and daringfireball are notorious for not having any clue about what is going on in the broader industry.
Not really. Their new Siri is powered by Gemini.