> Their vertical integration gives them an edge not many can match, when it comes to running ML models.
They have an advantage when it comes to running them locally, but it feels like they're trying to push it onto consumer hardware before consumer hardware is at the point of actually being able to run useful LLMs.
You're right. The hardware right now can't run useful models.
But that's why I think they have a couple of years to sort out their software issues. When useful models can be run on their devices they have to be ready. The hardware advantage can only be an advantage when they have the software to run useful applications. Hopefully they don't get stuck in the typical big company bureaucracy and ego matches and instead can make a change for the better.
They made it less useful because they were greedy. Before M1 we used to have laptops that had 16GB RAM as a base. With M1 the made base back to 8GB. In PC world before M1 and even before apple started soldering everything you could have easily laptop extended up to 64GB RAM for a cheap price. Those ram sticks are not expensive in retail price and should be even less expensive if wholesale and not full sticks as bill of material but just memory modules.
If last year they would make each macbook air as a standard have 32GB RAM and iPhone 16GB RAM + 250GB SSD as a base they would have the most capable hardware with big user base.
Sure they loose some money of people having upgrade models but they would sell much more Macs. As a reference they sell each year only ~20M Macs comparing to 60M ipads and 240M iphones. Macs are having only like what ~10% market share worldwide? They could easily double it but they protect their profit margin like virginity.
> Before M1 we used to have laptops that had 16GB RAM as a base. With M1 the made base back to 8GB.
You're getting product segments mixed up. From what I can tell, the 13" MacBook Pro in the Intel era never started at 16GB; the last model still started at 8GB. That's what was replaced by the M1. The 15/16" Intel-based MacBook Pro models didn't get a proper replacement until the M1 Pro and M1 Max, which started at 16GB and 32GB respectively. The only regression I can find there is that the last 13" Intel MacBook Pro could be configured with up to 32GB, which wasn't available from the base M series chips until the M4 last year.
They have an advantage when it comes to running them locally, but it feels like they're trying to push it onto consumer hardware before consumer hardware is at the point of actually being able to run useful LLMs.