The AI data center is analogous to the mainframe.
If I can run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on my DDR4 closet server with a $500 16GB GPU at 50 tok/s (which I can) then I just about guarantee you that in 2-3 years a pretty acceptable AI model is going to be running off of iPhones and M7/M8 Macs.
The other option that reduces Apple’s long-term risk is that they could just buy an AI company.
It would not be surprising that Apple just waits and snatches their compute up from insolvent companies sliding past.
We're in a time where devices are becoming more capable and developers are figuring out how to do on-device inference using less resources.
The companies that spent a fortune on AI data centers might as well have built a huge pyre of money for all the "moat" they built with it.
> Apple is cutting down Google Gemini's massive models into smaller and more secure parts through distillation, to create elements that are more suited to on-device Apple Intelligence processing.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/03/25/apple-is-distilli...
If I were Apple and wanted to make a big bet, I'd be dumping money into a top-secret robotics lab.
In terms of strategy, they picked the underdog carrier (Cingular) specifically to avoid having to bundle bloatware and carrier customization at the cost of exclusivity. Likewise, when Apple brought the iPhone to Japan, they did the same thing with the underdog carrier here, SoftBank.
The strategic importance of this was as a bargaining chip with other carriers and fundamentally gave them a lot of control they would not have had if they had gone with Verizon or similar.
In fact, one of the critical arguments Apple made as to why they weren't a monopoly was "Sure, we demand 30% - but the phone company monopoly we made obsolete used to charge 70%!" Mobile app stores on other platforms were absolutely hell.
One extra wrinkle of this is that Apple didn't actually partner with AT&T, they partnered with Cingular, the smallest national[0] carrier, who only agreed to let Apple ship an unmolested device because they got 5 year exclusivity. Then Cingular got bought out by AT&T. AFAIK AT&T didn't want the iPhone, they wanted the AT&T (insert terrible name here) Powered by AppleTM, with like 20 AT&T services preinstalled and unremovable. 'Cause that's literally what happened with the first Samsung Galaxy phone, every carrier gave it a different name and their own bloatware.
And yes, this hatred was mutual: the 5 year exclusivity meant iPhones were shackled to a terrible network in the US, and there was a significant amount of effort put into baseband jailbreaking just so people could violate Apple's exclusivity agreement and use their iPhone with their choice of carrier - which, to be clear, meant "use it on T-Mobile".
Also, while I'm giving a lot of credit to Apple, the thing that really broke the vendor lock-in was:
1. Google deliberately bidding up spectrum to trigger an FCC open-access pledge on LTE bands, which forced Verizon to allow third-party networks
2. Qualcomm giving up on UMB, forcing Verizon to adopt LTE, and by extension, SIM cards[3]
3. Clearwire / Sprint's WiMAX service totally failing, also forcing Sprint to adopt LTE and SIMs
[0] The US has a few "regional" carriers like US Cellular that only operate towers in some markets and license spectrum outside of that area.
[1] Yes, they were owned by Deutsche Telekom at one point
[2] At one point owned by Softbank, now owned by T-Mobile
[3] Strictly speaking, the SIM card spec includes CDMA/3GPP2[4] support, but the largest CDMA market was the US, and any carrier that wanted to support foreign phones used GSM/3GPP track standards
[4] Yes, Qualcomm was really that petty that they named their 3G standards body "3G 2"
I think the only market that had R-UIM cards (CDMA SIM cards) was Japan, but even with those you couldn't use non-carrier phones since they had all the configuration hard-coded into the devices. It did allow roaming abroad by putting your card into a foreign GSM phone you'd rent at the airport.
edit: apparently it was also in use in China
They went to Verizon first but were turned down. Apple needed distribution, which meant partnering with an established carrier.
Regarding "owning the entire stack" didn't make any sense in 2007, especially for a company that was new to the cell phone business.
Three years later, the first iPhone with Apple's silicon was the iPhone 4 with the A4 processor.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/google...
Similar to Apple (and everybody else) using Google maps. They survived.
They’re the bridge to the frontier models until iPhone 21 ships with then modern frontier model baked into Apple Silicon.
Citation: It Came To Me In A Dream
I am sure this time the Ruby and Terraform script kiddies will hold back progress just like all those BSD admins staved off Linux like they promised to do on Slashdot 30 years ago
Now that this site has no social moat to boast from the other side of, how out of touch yall are is ridiculously obvious
Glad I went with applied physics, electronic and computer engineering degrees. Will take hands on skill setting up experimental research of propagation of information through various physical materials at various power levels over skill in copy paste of ultimately meaningless syntax.
The "baked-in" weight technology you are describing uses enormous amounts of memory. There is not enough SRAM or flash ROM in the world to put a "modern frontier model" on every iPhone, even if you quantized it to 1 bit. It is scarce and expensive, and we are in a global shortage of memory and flash storage.
If we lived in a world where Cerebras, Taalas and Groq could dethrone Nvidia, they would have done it years ago. Turns out, cutting architectural corners has consequences, and they're extremely offputting for the majority of inference providers.
I wasn't offended but secondhand embarrassed for you. You didn't think up LLMs before they happened but you're so sure about the future nonetheless.
Because we could make up an x86 we should have by 1896!
I mean frontier like ability with less data.
You're doing the same old IT thing where ya act like your grasp of today is where progress terminates. It's cheesy.
But why would you need an ASIC for that? If you can get frontier-like models into "less data" footprints, just use the GPU.
You don't need redundant memory systems to make it work. No model has to be (or should be!) "baked into" the Apple Silicon SOC.
Apple isn't renting; they distilled Gemini to create their own model for "broad world knowledge". Some of this runs on Google's infrastructure because Apple didn't have enough compute.
All of the personal context stuff is Apple's Foundation Models.
That said renting storage from Google for iCloud reportedly carries an ~80% profit margin, there's no reason they can't also put a 5x markup on what Google charges them for PCC and Siri since they can still prevent rivals from providing the same service in most markets.
I’m sure there’s some balance of trade going on here.
this is not how it works.
Google gets a small discount on how much they pay Apple to be the default search engine on Safari.