I think the question to me is whether Apple can ship affordable consumer devices with enough memory to run sufficiently useful models sufficiently fast.

Right now 128GB MacBook is the top of the line and you could do Qwen 3.8 Flash or similar.

There is a rumor that the M7 chip can use 1.5TB of memory which would imply Apple is aiming for more memory on devices.[1]

Would that imply the entry-level MacBook will have 128GB and top of the line models could run larger reasoning models? Then the question is price and if any of this will translate to iPhone for on-phone models.

With how expensive memory is, IDK if they can pull this off but I hope they do

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ap...

Cloud compute has been completely commoditized. Yes, local models will get better and better, but I think for the vast majority it will continue to be both cheaper and more productive to use cloud based models, far into the future, where bulk purchasing, oversubscription, and discounted industrial electric rates can be taken advantage of.

Where I am, it's cheaper to purchase multiple claude subscriptions than it is for the power bill from running a local model. Factor in the hardware costs, and you're looking at a break over a decade in the future, for comparable cloud models. Yes, there's privacy, etc, but now you're down into fractions of a percent of users who care about the government reading the memory of their computer.

Take a look at how qwen3.8 27B compares on benchmarks to much, much larger models. A while back I called it the crow of AI models: paradoxically strong given its tiny size, like the brains of crows and other intelligent birds.

It's not comparable to huge models of course, but given the power/size ratio here it shows that serious gains are on the table for models that can run fast on a high-end laptop.

Sure, all you have to do is use only what can climb the walled garden

Man, if all that makes Apple a "winner" then I'm dying to hear your assessment of Nvidia.

Factoring in the increased cost of memory, Apple's threatened service revenue and the stagnation of ecosystem products like the Mac and iPad, I think they have a really challenging future to navigate. The whole "sell people a B2C ecosystem" business model is more threatened than ever.

Are you an apple user or investor.

If you are an investor, you should remember they are a fashion product more than a tech company.

If you are a user, you should remember they are a fashion company more than a tech company.

If they keep Harbor under the Claris umbrella, that is a nudge that they are doing it for SMB market instead of the consumer market and it will likely be a onerous subscription to use it.

You can also "fm chat" in terminal

Could you elaborate please?

Currently FileMaker is a really expensive but sophisticated developer deployment environment. They stayed pretty true to the original vision in the mid 80’s when they merged their DOS database and added a gui layer for the Macintosh. I started on version 2 and it was at its best at when it went relational in version 3. Since then they have been focusing on deployment of graphical data applications and being a better database.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMaker

I'm just learning that the Claris brand still exists.

It was pretty fast to get it set up. It could be better for sure, as it's not a first class concept the same way that it is in linux, but an hour of google search ai mode will get you where you need to go.

How so?