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- Hacker News
- Apple could substantially eat into Nvidia’s AI lunch if they really tried, honestly Macs are fast enough… my guess is by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. If I was them I’d already be taking orders, power requirements alone even if they aren’t as fast 2 nodes ahead would make their offering sensational.by andy_ppp
- Metal has little value for research community.by pjmlp
- by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use.
I thought there were already external GPUs for Macs. Since before COVID, IIRC.
by reaperducer - I don’t think so. The GPU die itself isn’t the key it’s the interconnects and data center scale infra coupled with their closed software. If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple.by fnordpiglet
- They'll just need to start from scratch on all this. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CwyW!,f_auto,q_auto:...
I don't think some power efficient laptop SoCs gives you much competitive advantage there.
by kcb - No wonder they treat the Mac like a third-class citizen. Mac sales barely pay their tax bill.by nullbyte808
- At this point Macs have a great deal of parts in common with phones and tablets - M4 / M5 chip, flash design, and so on.
The main purpose of the Mac (for Apple) is to host the development environment that is used to create apps which sustain the iPhone ecosystem.
It does continue to baffle me just how cheap Macs are. $649 for a brand new 16GB MacBook at Best Buy with M2, more than powerful enough to do the aforementioned development. And cheaper than most iPhone models.
by trollbridge - How come they don’t add AI?by bilsbie
- They tried and made fools of themselves. They're trying again right now.by smt88
- If people are buying iPhones without AI mashed into every orifice, why bother?by sethops1
- Apple has (entirely on-device) OCR, computational photography, image segmentation for creating stickers, image classification and person/pet recognition, voice-to-text. These were added and useful before "AI" became a buzzword dujour.
If you're only talking language models, Apple has on-device language models available to developers and end-users via Shortcuts, and image generation for emojis. They just don't advertise most of their neural network models as "AI".
by lynndotpy - They have enough "AI" stuff. People just don't know it is AI. That is the best way of integrating AI into your product(s). The tech behind stuff doesn't really matter for the end user.
other companies should also follow that trend, use ai for useful features, just give the feature a good name... no need to mention "ai"... because next year it could be something else that is powering the feature.
by peterspath - Interesting that Google and Apple matched their quarterly earnings in revenue .by yRetsyM
- Why is AAPL still one stock?by YVoyiatzis
- New law: large companies grow until they become a media company and the C-suite gets to attend the hollywood premiers and awards shows.by TheJoeMan
- All these companies depend on TSMC for their life.by oxqbldpxo
- Had to look up what TSMC meant (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).
What would Apple's next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?
by nomilk - I mean... do they? TSMC is the best but in a world where they had to use Samsung or Intel is it really a death sentence?by jayd16
- If true, TSMC would command much higher margins. Their net revenue is a fraction of Nvidia or Apple
- And TSMC depends on machines by ASML they can also sell to others.
And ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC.
Which was a conglomerate of a bunch of state-funded US research labs.
And the US cut its science funding.
Misery all the way down!
by sho_hn - This stuck out like a sore thumb to me:
Q4 2024: Income before provision for income taxes $29.610 billion, Provision for income taxes $14.874 billion
Q4 2025: Income before provision for income taxes $32.804 billion, Provision for income taxes $5.338 billion
[EDIT:] The 2024 taxes were actually an aberration.
"the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision" https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-reports-fourth-...
by lapcat - Enough to pay for everything DOGE and the Trump admin cut in 2025, assuming a big chunk of that is US taxes.by nerdponx
- Are different sources of income taxed differently? Could it partly be from some change in income sources? Seems Services is more significant this quarter.by nomel
- Actually it was a huge tax addition in 2024 (from Europe over dispute about how Ireland had taxed Apple for many years). In 2024 Apple added 14.4 billion in additional taxes accrued over many years.by curiouscats
- Their 2025 US taxes are actually higher. In Q4 2024 "Apple paid a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion in order to resolve the tax issue with Ireland, which dates to 2016."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-profit-drops-36-tech-20...
by aauchter - Corporate income tax is one of those ideas that are immensely popular politically ("someone who is not me will pay billions to benefit me? yay!") but not supported by economic theory or real economic outcomes. Rent control / other price controls is another one ("No more rent increases for me, yay!").
Personal income taxes are a better choice according to [0] and that makes sense if you think about it. Let companies go wild creating wealth; eventually the company matures, growth slows, and instead of reinvesting, the money mostly gets paid out to employees and owners as salaries, dividends, or stock buybacks. That's the point where it's most efficient to tax it.
[0] https://www.economicsobservatory.com/which-taxes-are-best-an...
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/primers/primer-not-all-taxe...
by FredPret - Declining Mac sales aren’t concerning because Macs are high quality. People can skip generations and use their M1s for years.by perfmode
- Mac sales are up 12%, year over year. It's Apple's fastest growing hardware category. They're just going to be lower next month (year over year), due to the release cycles being different.by gilgoomesh
- Thinking this through… I spent around $3500 and $4500 on my last two MBPs, but got 9 years of use out of each of them. That’s only $450/yr.
But where I used to get a new iPhone every other year, I’m now on the fourth year of my 13P and it still works great. That’s only $300/yr.
It’s interesting to think about.
by skoskie - Personal take :
The iPhone and services that go with the iPhone (music apps iCloud) together make apple what it is even today. The numbers are huge and the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro are still the gold standard of smartphones. Everything else is probably secondary support hardware and software for the iPhone.
I plan on moving away from macOS (maybe Asahi on my old M1 Air but leaning towards Arch on framework) but every attempt to reconsider the iPhone for me has failed.
The biggest thing I see is how the iPhone helped fuel social media and in turn social media helped iPhone with sales. The phone is a social and secure device and the iPhone excels at that thanks to iCloud services and the ease with which you can manage the phone. Upgrading is so seamless, managing Photos with iCloud is a no-brainer. Everything about it screams social and it does it extremely well.
The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago. The iPhone won and there is not much anyone can do at this point to compete at that scale unless someone comes up with something truly extraordinary rather than just putting LLMs inside apps.