Re:The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook
by tempest_ on Thursday June 29, 2023 @09:05AM
(#36519850)
Apple is not going to enter the commodity server business, that is just a race to the bottom and probably the reason they got out of it in the first place.
The only reason XCode Cloud (or XCode at all) exists is because people need it to develop for ios, if developers could choose anything else they would.
At this point they are a luxury consumer product company, that is where the margins are that have made them successful for the last 10 years.
Re:The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook
by WastingMyTime89 on Thursday June 29, 2023 @09:08AM
(#36519866)
I'm not oracle so I can't say if you are wrong but wouldn't that be a significant investment to go compete in a market where margins are not that great while risking to dilute their brand?
Re:The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook
by jbverschoor on Thursday June 29, 2023 @09:38AM
(#36520210)
First step would be to run their own hardware. Why? $1.5B is a substantial amount of money. They can claim to be more green/energy efficient.
As for a public cloud, maybe not yet.. the problem with it is that it can be difficult to change/unwind.
However, they might just want to sell those sweet high margin AI/ML cycles running on both the backend and the client devices
They could also create some sort of blade server.. they print their own cups in literally everything. Phone, laptops, headset, apple cinema displays. The production cost of an M1 is about $30.
Remember that the 5-year $1.5B contact with AWS will expire next year. They already have XCode cloud, and have enabled virtualization natively for a while
Either large Mac Pro based rack-servers or accelerators for rendering, transcoding, and AI/ML.
They could market those 10x$30 chips on a single board as something that he 10x the power of the Mac, at “only” $20000 a pop.
You can be very certain that NVDA did not get unnoticed, while Apple had the same capabilities, and sees a future in AI/ML.