The out-of-stock $6000 M3 Ultra Mac Studios with 800GB+ memory bandwidth are going for $24,000 on eBay, so yes definitely

I don’t think we should use current prices as landmarks for large scale demand. That Studio’s current prices is inflated because of a (presumably) short term supply crunch, not because the average user is willing to pay $24k for a home AI inference device.

It assumes that RAM remains supply constrained and that none of the existing RAM contracts are cut short.

But Meta and xAI putting A TON of AI compute onto the market. OpenAI and Anthropic are raising the costs of inference (by reducing how much inference users get via subscriptions). And we haven’t seen Oracle / CoreWeave struggle to pay their debts yet, but they will be selling assets once they get close to that point.

512GB M3 Ultra is out of stock, not coming back, and there’s nothing like it on the consumer market. That’s the reason they go for so much.

Funnily the current high end Mac Studio are not suited for current LLMs. M3 Ultra is "quite an old" chip for AI, despite its bandwidth. The issue for running local models (especially LLMs), you need few things to align really well: 1) compute power (affecting PP) 2) VRAM capacity (affecting model size you can load) 3) Bandwidth (somewhat affecting decoding speed).

The issue with the M3 chip is the compute performance, as it doesn't fit well the transformer architecture. This changed with the M5 (apple baked their own matmul into the chip), which would significantly speed up PP (and video/image generation btw), making the M5 Ultra significantly faster than the M3 Ultra and in practice much more usable. You can try to load Kimi or GLM on M3 Ultra, but it's not usable. Now the M5 Ultra is not out yet, but undoubtedly it will be a superior offering, and shilling 15k on 512GB version is actually reasonable (if it's every priced remotely around that tag).

But there will be and his point is they cut off supply to make room for the new M5 ultra which I hope has 768GB or more of memory.

By the way, they cut the supply because they run out of RAM. They still sell the 96 GB model. Everything else is gone, no stock, they cannot manufacture them. Even minis are 48GB max!

Let’s see, I hope!

Yea but how many of them are selling at that price? Dozens?

Do you honestly think that’s families buying them?

My money is on small companies or affluent programmers experimenting with some new hobby / business model.

What makes you think the supply crunch is short-term?

If demand doesn't fall down or current manufacturers supply go up, somebody (presumably in China) will spin up fabs. Apple wanted to use blacklisted Chinese RAM already.

It's the euv machines that are the bottleneck. Pretty hard to ramp those up any faster in the next few years.

DDR5 is still mostly made with DUV (remember Intel 14+++++++++?), and even though manufacturers have slowly been moving a few layers to EUV the advantage is at the margin. Lack of EUV at scale will not prevent China from ramping useful RAM into this market.

spinning up fabs takes ages, micron has a US fab started bulding in 2023, its still not operational (projected to start mid-2027)

That proves that spinning up US fabs takes ages.

Chinese fabs might not be so tied with red tape and regulation upon regulation (which is a funny reversal, in terms of "communism vs capitalism" bureucracy/inefficiency cold war thinking)

The Chinese don't have access to new EUV machines.

All of their fabrication ability is based on old processes.

Not so sure about that: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manh...

DDR5 is DUV not EUV

1.) China is not communist, even remotely so. China is fascist in every sense of the word.

2.) Authoritarianism can move faster than anything. They can just say "wipe out that village, build the coal plant there, data center here, fab here.

3.) If it's red tape and regulation holding the US back, then that's clearly not "capitalism."

>1.) China is not communist, even remotely so. China is fascist in every sense of the word.

Except in the actual historical sense. They appear to enjoy all sorts of freedoms, increased prosperity, even have elections at different levels but under a single party system. Which is not necessarily that different than a effectively two party system.

>2.) Authoritarianism can move faster than anything. They can just say "wipe out that village, build the coal plant there, data center here, fab here.

Now that China is more effective, "it's easy because they're authoritarian". Before the argument was "authoritarianism can never be as effective as free-market democracy".

>3.) If it's red tape and regulation holding the US back, then that's clearly not "capitalism."

It's real world capitalism, not some fantasy some guy imagined removing all warts.

How is that ironic or necessary? Why should they hand out citizenships, when work or resident permits will do?

And that's somehow fascist, as if the problem with fascist Italy or nazi Germany was that they didn't hand out citizenships?

where is this cheap Chinese RAM? I'd like to buy some

Ebay and Amazon are flooded with it. Especially if you are looking for anything prior to DDR5. DDR2 and DDR3 are especially flooded with weird brands you've never heard of before.

Unfortunately its not so cheap anymore as everyone ramped prices up of course.

Last year I could still get 32GB of DDR4 for under $60 from chinese brands.

DDR3 is from 10 years ago. DDR2 is from 15.

And?

I just upgraded my 2008 Thinkpad R61i to 8GB of DDR2 a few months ago while I was also upgrading to a core2duo.

DDR2 and DDR3 are still in active use by SBC manufacturers.

> I just upgraded my 2008 Thinkpad R61i to 8GB of DDR2 a few months ago while I was also upgrading to a core2duo

Uhhh… ok… good for you I guess…

Some of us keep the worthwhile trash alive forever. This laptop is gonna be twenty years old soon and it's too comfortable of a machine to be tossed to ewaste.

They're already doing it

https://www.techspot.com/news/112502-memory-prices-tipped-fa...

As if it requires some unique genes or brains?

If a place can do it, another place, with a huge track record on manufacturing and lately expanding all kinds of tech, can.

It might help to not have much in the way of environmental, safety or labor regulations.

Whether or not you feel like those are good overall (I do), they do actually also slow things down.

>It might help to not have much in the way of environmental, safety or labor regulations.

Yes, like how it helped western industry early on. Or, well into the 70s for the most part.

If the increased demand is not short term, production capacity will eventually increase. In the meantime, the logistics disruptions and industrial material shortages and energy inflation will disappear as soon as the wars disrupting them stop, which should bring prices down.

you assume demand will remain flat

what if demand keeps rising faster than production capacity is deployed?

If demand and prices keep rising without production capacity being built fast enough, there will likely eventually be a rush leading to overinvestment and price crashes, but there are too many other factors involved; state investment for security, international politics and trade relations, the possibility of an AI bubble burst, etc.

DRAM doesn't require cutting edge Fabs, and Chinese manufacturers have finally caught up to the DDR5 standard.

> Multiple motherboard and PC component makers move forward with Chinese-made memory validation

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/multiple-motherboard...

The only thing standing in the way of a major Chinese DDR5 ramp up is money.

The underlying demand for massive RAM builds is coming from AI hyperscalers.

There are lots of signals that the sector has been overinvested and that corporate customers are pulling back on spending as the cost of the APIs is revealed.

Once the hyperscalers start struggling to bay their debts (it will happen, just a question of time), there will be a supply glut.

So the only question is: do we share the same definition of “short term”.

Unless the raw materials have an inherent limit on mining/production due to the amount present on the planet, why should or would companies not ramp up to eventually meet demand?

Edit: Okay, this doesn’t mean that that’s actually possible in the short-term, so I think you’re right. But that means as the silver lining, in the medium term horizon there’ll be enough supply again? :’)

> why should or would companies not ramp up to eventually meet demand?

Memory is a cyclical market that has historically rewarded conservatism [1].

Counterpoint: there is enough demand from enough capital-rich customers that they may be willing to shoulder the capital risk.

[1] https://www.ldeepai.com/tech-hub/dram-industry-consolidation... Sorry for the slop link, it has a good chart from a solid source

For existing producers expanding capacity would be a risky move. But it's the perfect time for any newcomers to enter the market. Low yields and worse product don't matter as much right now, and by the time the market cools down you have everything dialed in and can compete on even ground

> it's the perfect time for any newcomers to enter the market

This is a good hypothesis. Curious if anyone has data on the failure rates of new entrants in semiconductors based on how frothy it was on founding.

On one hand, more demand makes selling easier. On the other hand, a shortage makes your input costs (consumable and capital) pricier.

EDIT: It seems like the 2 to 3 year lead time and a crowding effect from new entrants historically made booting up a fab into a boom a bad bet [1]. (The article argues, convincingly, that this time may be different.)

[1] https://www.uncoveralpha.com/p/every-memory-cycle-ends-the-s...

I heard that China was spinning up DDR5 (but not HBM?) production in the next couple of years, with the hope of outcompeting Korea and Taiwan in the mid to long term.

It does seem like an opportunity on a silver platter for Chinese newcomers. Huge demand at the moment.

In two to four years, the Chinese will have at least half the memory market worldwide, and once in, they will continue forward and not look back.

I also believe there would be one or two tech companies that will get into memory by taking it in-house to make sure that they won’t have this problem again in the future.

Don't forget price fixing [1] which we are seeing clear indicators of happening right now too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

Thanks for the link (and underlying thoughts), I really hadn’t considered that.

So essentially, due to technological progress and other factors inducing price collapses (or at least cycles), you can’t start stockpiling insane amounts of finished-product semiconductor, which means you can’t scale production at current technology levels to infinity either?

Let me clarify, I think Apple could sell a device at the scale Apple sells at around the $10 to 25 thousand price point.

Like, take out the price sheets for the Apple Car. Then sell me an AI tower at those price points.

In 2010 one of the standard configurations for the Mac Pro was $4,999. Once you customised ram, storage, peripherals and software it could easily end up above $15,000, or $23k today accounting for inflation. Apple hardware is one thing that has actually got cheaper over time.

https://www.macworld.com/article/209019/macguide2010.html

Or they could use that same amount of memory to ship 64x Macbook Neos, and probably make higher margins off the hardware volume.

Those Macbook Neo users would be very reliant on Apple intelligence, enough maybe to pay for a service with it. I think Apple's much happier going this path.

> Or they could use that same amount of memory to ship 64x Macbook Neos, and probably make higher margins off the hardware volume

If it's an "or," absolutely. But if it's an or, they should be prioritising Macbooks over the Mac Mini Doug Brooks is discussing.

When we breach the "and" of memory supply sufficient to allow for more Mac minis (and Mac Studios), I think it would make sense to consider relaunching Xserve (with new branding, of course) as a consumer/small business product.

Memory supply isn't what held back XServe. We wouldn't need XServe if Apple treated the Mac like a regular computer and supported usable, first-class headless workflows and eGPUs.

The writing has been on the wall since 2019. Apple doesn't like the old way of computing, their goal is to expand the ecosystem by prioritizing install-base and then pushing first-party service offerings like they did with the iPhone. And like they did with the iPhone, Apple is great at ignoring power users to focus on features that make them more money.

You may be waiting a few decades for this type of product, memory supply be damned.

If we reach the and, then they can no longer demand the price

They could do both though. The margin from one user buying a $25000 is sky high compared to sixty kids all with the cheapest computer possible.

It's really not. Apple's phone margins have been as high as 30-40% per-unit, it's likely that they make at least ~$80-150 per Macbook Neo sold.

At the $150 mark (which is probably accurate factoring in lifetime service spend), that's a $10,000 minimum return on the 64x Macbook Neos. Apple can charge that type of premium on consumer hardware, but they're in no position to command $10,000 margins on professional hardware. They're not Nvidia, Apple has always been LARPing as an HPC vendor.

Maybe margin was the wrong way to phrase it, but I know which customer I’d choose to have.

But surely you understand how your preferred customer is the less profitable one?

Apple won't subsidize these low-margin enthusiast products with the profits made from services and higher-margin hardware. Tim Cook would much rather ship the 64 Macs, and get ~15-20 school-age kids hooked on Apple One or the App Store for the rest of their life. There's understandably not much patience for catering to people that want to opt-out of the Apple Intelligence service ecosystem, effectively leeching off of more successful products. The volume and opportunity cost kills the concept in the cradle.

When I was at Apple we never wanted or. We wanted all. If that push to use Chinese memory works out it will be great for us and Apple.

Apple sure doesn't act like it. The Mac is still a minority market share of PCs, and their entrants into spaces like AR do nothing to compete with incumbents.

Now that the Mac Pro is depreciated, Apple's plan to pivot to service offerings seems set in stone. That's the "want it all" attitude they've adopted with the App Store.

I think so, too, and I think it'll end up being a race between Apple & NVIDIA (or NVIDIA partners) to see who realizes this first. It would probably be easier for Apple to do it because it wouldn't require a form factor adjustment [over the Mac Studio they already have]. That said, NVIDIA already offers chipsets for both the lower end (DGX Spark with Vera + GB10, at roughly the $4500 price point) and higher end (DGX Station with Vera + GB300, for $85-100k). The DGX Station is equivalent to ~5-6 RTX6000 GPUs attached to a mid-range CPU server, but far more than most individual developers would want or need. I've heard through the grapevine that NVIDIA's received consistent feedback that they need something like a "GB20" that slots above the Spark/GB10 and can simultaneously run larger models for inference while hosting a dev environment on the same box. You can daisy-chain Sparks just like you can daisy-chain Mac Minis, but you're still constrained on model performance based on what a single device can accommodate.

Form factor is the easy part - both Nvidia and Apple are experienced SOC designers.

The hard part is the GPU architecture. Apple Silicon was designed with a laser focus on raster efficiency (similar to AMD's GPUs) which makes a lot of sense for highly mobile hardware, but is a crippling mistake for high-performance compute. Apple's largest Ultra chips are hamstrung with SOC-tier GPU performance, their highest-end desktops are outperformed by Nvidia's laptop offerings. Apple has to find a way to scale upwards without imposing too much architectural strain on their cheaper hardware like the iPhone and Macbook. Nvidia has already solved this issue; full CUDA compute stacks are usable on extremely cheap GPUs like the Nintendo Switch's Tegra SOC, or the Mac Mini-sized Jetson boards.

In terms of "who needs to redesign more to address the market", Apple has a lot of technical debt to unearth before they catch up to Nvidia. And if they do catch up, Nvidia will still support Linux and other differentiating features that Apple refuses to implement. It definitely feels like Nvidia is closer to a winner with the Spark than Apple is with the Mini or Studio.

Yeh I don't know why the emphasise the 'neural engine' - it's their stonking RAM bandwidth that just blows everything else out of the water.

Not the same issue, but makes me nostalgic for these simpler times:

https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/

I’m sure that hasn’t gone unnoticed.

How much did Apple sell them for?

I asked an Apple (via a sales rep who visited our company to showcase in internal iPad healthcare app) to please do this for iCloud when iCloud Drive was in-development. We would have easily paid $50,000 for a rack-able Mac Pro you could point "managed" devices at.

Apple simply cannot comprehend the ask.

> Apple simply cannot comprehend the ask.

Apple knows the market demand for this type of device.

You may have paid $50,000 for it, but you’re only one customer. At Apple scale they need to focus their finite resources on the products that serve the largest market demand.

$50,000 rack mount servers are not a large demand.

You'd be surprised. This was the same conversation where Numbers was pitched as an Excel replacement.

Apple just doesn't do "enterprise" well - they need to poach some Microsoft employees to figure it out.

Apple has plenty of enterprise-specific features.

From a historic standpoint though Apple came back from near-death because they differentiated by focusing on the consumer first.

While other companies were recycling the same beige boxes meant to be tucked under desks for home use, Apple came out with products in candy colors.

While Microsoft was rolling out new business process tool SKUs, Apple came out with GarageBand and bundled it in for free.

Apple is not the company prioritizing going after a Fortune 500 company to replace their fleet with Macs. So their focus isn't going to be to design products and features to try to get that deal closed.

They had Xserve, it didn't sell well enough to survive.

How do you design XServe being tied to IBM/Intel the way you want to make it, and why would you, when you’re having problems with Intel, why? would you go any further with Intel hardware wise? Makes no sense. The next four years will be interesting with an engineer CEO in charge.

Apple is quite hostile to professional users, so no.

Sadly, that is an outdated PoV. It has probably not been valid, since last century.

It's just that Apple isn't really focused on software development professionals, and it's still fashionable to throw shade on them, so we hear a lot of kvetching about it, in communities like this.

Could you please point me out which current Mac model has enough storage for full feature video editing job? Thanks.

How much internal storage do you use for your full feature video editing, vs attached/network attached storage?

I dunno. It's not my bailiwick. I do know lots of pro editors use Macs, but I think they use DaVinci Resolve (not Final Cut Pro). I'm interested in finding out what you use for it.

I've been using Macs for all kinds of stuff, since 1986, so I can definitely state they get work done.

Good on ya. I'm not interested in fighting about this stuff. I've had people hating on me for using Apple since the 1980s. It gets a bit old. Sort of like high school popularity contests.

I'm an exclusive Apple user for a couple decades so I'm not fighting here :) just acknowledging the fact that Apple has some deficiencies

Fair ‘nuff.

As an Apple developer, since then, I have been incandescent with rage at Apple, many times.

Guess I’m a walking demonstration of Stockholm Syndrome (at least, that’s what I’ve been told).

All companies have deficiencies in the tech world. However, I would rather be in Apple’s position today, in comparison to Intel or Microsoft, particularly over the last 20 years.

And I definitely feel the pain with Aperture, not making it to Apple Silicon.

Video editors use high-speed network storage.

I’m interested to know the ways that Apple doesn’t cater to Software devs the way other OS does. I hate developing on a windows/non-unix machine

That’s just excuses for example how does a relatively small company like Black Magic Design With one of the best programs in its class manage to support three operating systems MacOS, Windows OS and Linux OS simultaneously?

There are many larger software companies that can support all three operating systems, they just make up excuses/reasons as to why they can’t perform over the years.

I feel that it does, but I’m also a dev. I used to run a multi platform shop for years, and have a pretty good idea of what kind of support various companies give.

Apples on stage use cases for their hardware and software makes me wonder if they actually use computers over there, or what a "job" at apple entails.

I am unsure that apple themselves understand why their hardware (top end & bottom end) has been so successful, without this understanding leaning into these use cases isn't really going to be possible.

Having worked at Apple for over a couple of decades, I can attest there are some very (very) capable and intelligent people there.

I trust they know more about their business model than some rando on the internet, sorry.

Those of us that are less capable and less intelligent must just be holding it wrong.

you don’t need to be less intelligent or less capable, but you will necessarily be less informed.

How you hold it is, of course, up to you.

> I am unsure that apple themselves understand why their hardware ... has been so successful [like I do]

You have a bold career as a technical journalist ahead of you!

Obviously they are playing 12d chess. They stopped selling high memory machines, they stopped selling pro machines. They are the king of local Ai compute, definitely not stumbling backwards into a product category they didn't know existed.

With their apple finger right there on the pulse, they are going hard on the VR/AR glasses (following the lead of the visionary CEO of facebook), cars and folding phones. By the end of the year (tm) we 100% will have all the features that were showcased and demonstrated 2 releases ago.

Ages ago, back when the Macs would come out, my co-workers and I would take a bit of time to configure the most expensive possible configuration --- time was, it was pretty easy to hit six figures, but over time, that has gradually come down.

How many of these 'consumer' customers would they get for $10,000 and how would they reach their Apple-typical gigantic margin with that?

Our company would buy at least 10 of those instantly.

But that would be more for enterprise usage. I cannot imagine a personal computing usage which can justify a 10k machine.

> cannot imagine a personal computing usage which can justify a 10k machine

For me, the privacy pitch wins. I have a friend visiting, however, who spends like $2,400 with Anthropic every year. That's a solid ROI even if the thing becomes obsolete after a couple years. (I'm still on my 2020 MacBook Pro. I love it and will be sad when I have to replace it.)

In addition to privacy I’d like to be able to burn as many tokens as the hardware will let me 24/7 without getting a surprise bill at the end of the month. I don’t care if it is slower that the cloud, I’m not in a hurry.

> That's a solid ROI even if the thing becomes obsolete after a couple years.

How can that be a solid return on investment? There's no model you can run locally to have frontier model level performance. Also who spends 2.4k yearly for personal AI usage, like what's the usecase? If your friend is spending that money for his business then it's not personal computing.

That's the $200/mo subscription -- not uncommon :)

I do the $100/mo for myself, then about ~$200/mo for startup.

Do you use it for work? I can’t imagine paying this myself for personal use. I just don’t see the benefits vs. the free models available to me.

> There's no model you can run locally to have frontier model level performance

I'm betting he doesn't need a frontier model. Sonnet, today, is likely good for 80% of his tasks, which largely involve repretitive, tedious work.

> Also who spends 2.4k yearly for personal AI usage, like what's the usecase? If your friend is spending that money for his business then it's not personal computing

Combination of business and personal.

People with money and things to do. People spend $100+ a month on coffee without even blinking.

I have a friend who is a teacher and spends that much yearly for ChatGPT and Claude. It saves him many hours a year in time assembling documents and creating posters, flyers, and personalized learning materials for his students.

> I cannot imagine a personal computing usage which can justify a 10k machine.

If Apple released a machine that would let me run, say, DeepSeek V4 Pro or GLM 5.2 locally at 100 tok/s for $10k, I might hurt myself running to get my credit card.

But then, I'm also posting this sitting in my truck while my family attends an event, with a Vision Pro on my face so I can monitor 7 Claude Code sessions without constantly switching screens on my laptop.

$10,000 divided by five divided by 12 is only $166.66 a month without interest over 5 years a Mac M2 Ultra or Mac M3 Ultra are easily usable computers over five years, so are most of the medium to high-end laptops that Apple sells for one person or locally in a small company.

It’s not necessarily out of reach or unusable over the course of time, the thing I keep hearing over and over is how usable many people find Mac’s very useable over the course of time, obviously software support plays a big part of that.

On top of that, AI models are getting more useful despite their smaller size. The future is a personal computer future, not a mainframe computer one. Yes, larger computers are useful, but most people will not be using that larger computers, which will be relegated to universities and larger companies.

I just went to Apple.com and specced out the top of the line 14" Macbook Pro, and the price is $9,849.00. Well over 10K with California sales tax.

I could absolutely justify having that machine for the actual work I do, and I'm not even doing any of the really hard AI things. If I were, I might prefer a Thelio Mega workstation from System76, which is $90,383.00 fully loaded.

Alas I can not afford a 10K personal computer right now, which is not the same thing.

Apple does like to market their hardware for education and small business customers, though.

I think "buy this $10,000 box and to easily grant every Macbook Neo on your team safe, private, free AI" could be a real winner.

Apple is a premium brand with high brand loyalty. Do you not think even 1 billionaire would want something like that? Even to just say that they bought it. Apple could sell things at a price point much more than $10k.

There's only so many billionaires and at Apple's scale you would not offer such a product for public sale even if you do custom builds for the rich and famous.

Apple makes product lines with assembly lines, its not a hand fab or custom build type of place.

At the end of the day, it’s just an Apple computer, not a Ferrari or an Aston Martin. I hardly think an Apple computer can be considered as a luxury item, unless they release it as a limited edition

Bring back xServe!

Who would be the market for such a thing?

People who are good at convincing their boss.