AI Summary:
Apple’s first-quarter earnings report revealed a mixed performance. While overall sales increased by 4%, iPhone sales showed weakness, particularly in China, where they declined by over 11%. CEO Tim Cook attributed this partly to the lack of Apple Intelligence in China and inventory changes. However, the Mac, iPad, and Services categories saw significant growth, with Services up 14% and both the Mac and iPad up 15%. The company reported $36.33 billion in net revenue, a 7.1% increase from the previous year.
I’d attribute this growth to the looming deprecation of Windows 10. With the decision to move to Windows 11, many orgs are replacing them with Macs. On the consumer side, the M4 is seen as worthy upgrade for those already on the earlier M chips.
I have not heard of any orgs replacing windows with Mac. This is for consulting and IT. To my knowledge, it is still something only available to execs and higher management. What sector was this for?
An IT supply chain management company and a northeastern medical society have been the latest of our clients to adopt more of them, mostly through attrition of Windows devices. In my prior role at a PE firm, I was responsible for kicking off the transition company-wide to Macs. They liked the lower cost of ownership, maintenance, and the “impression it gave to clients”. The CAD engineers absolutely rioted about it lol. Let me tell you, zip-tying a cheese grater Mac into a server rack is a surreal experience 😂.
To your point, it is still largely director level and above. They are still using MS products mind you, just on Macs.
They’ve been doing big things with the Mac lineup in recent years. Macbooks, both Pro and Air, have gotten major design shakeups and improved processors. The Mini just got a new design and hardware as well. Oh yeah, and they’ve officially ended the 8gb minimum RAM so that’s a big boost to new purchasers.
Meanwhile the iPhone has hardly changed for numerous generations now. All they really do is shuffle the camera bumps around and add in AI that nobody asked for. I have an iPhone myself but it doesn’t exactly spark much joy for me. It is a very sterile, unenthusiastic device and I get that impression from every one of their recent models. They are stagnating badly, imo. My 14P still has 100% battery health and loads every single app practically instantly. Why the hell would I get a new device? Especially when they are like $1,000+
So the lack of apple-branded AI Slop is slowing down the sales for iPhones but not for Macs?
Edit for clarity: I’m aware sequoia “has” apple intelligence but in a borderline featureless state, so it’s as good (or as bad) as not having anything.
deleted by creator
Some fanboys have been buying 192gb macs for AI. It’s one way to throw money in the bin
192GB RAM? I can see how it’s convenient for really fast cached storage, or temporary, if we ignore the price.
Practically I’m not sure why people would need anything above 24GB. Especially with Apple prices.
It’s for running AI on the GPU. You need a really expensive PC GPU to get more than like 16 GB of RAM or whatever, so the bottleneck for large AI models is swapping in and out data from system RAM over PCIe.
The Mac has an SoE with unified memory, where the GPU can access all 192 GB at full speed, which is perfect for AI workloads where you need the GPU to access all the RAM. There’s always a tradeoff where the PC GPUs have faster processors (since they have a way bigger power budget), but the Mac GPU has faster memory access, so it’s not always a slam-dunk which is better.
APUs/Integrated GPUs on PCs also have unified memory but they always targeted the low end so aren’t as useful.
If it’s for AI, loading huge models is something you can do with Macs but not easily in any other way.
I’m not saying many people have a use case at all for them, but if you have a use case where you want to run 60 GB models locally, a whole 192GB Mac Studio is cheaper than the GPU alone you need to run that if you were getting it from Nvidia.
I’ve ran them on intel cpu’s before. When putting a cpu with more than two memory channels and a several hundred watt power budget up to a beefed up mobile cpu, it’s not a fair fight.
Second hand xeons are cheaper though
I’m talking about running them in GPU, which favours the GPU even when the comparison is between an AMD Epyc and a mediocre GPU.
If you want to run a large version of deepseek R1 locally, with many quantized models being over 50GB, I think the cheapest Nvidia GPU that fits the bill is an A100 which you might find used for 6K.
For well under that price you can get a whole Mac Studio with those 192 GB the first poster in this thread mentioned.
I’m not saying this is for everyone, it’s certainly not for me, but I don’t think we can dismiss that there is a real niche where Apple has a genuine value proposition.
My old flatmate has a PhD in NLP and used to work in research, and he’d have gotten soooo much use out of >100 GB of RAM accessible to the GPU.
I had found one for about 400 recently, a bit far away tho. I ended up going with a gpu closer by. I don’t need that many gb’s
Yep, unless you’re working with huge amounts of stolen data a cloud solution is much cheaper. Or even just swapping to a standard gpu setup
