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The Cycle of Expectation and Disappointment: Apple’s AI Dilemma and Resilience | Fatbobman’s Swift Weekly #074

The Cycle of Expectation and Disappointment: Apple’s AI Dilemma and Resilience
A few days ago, Apple announced that its “More Personalized Siri” feature would be delayed until next year. Combined with the continued absence of Swift Assist, it’s clear Apple has not fulfilled the AI vision it presented at WWDC 2024. At least in the realm of large language models, Apple has not exhibited its characteristic agility in keeping pace with industry trends.
Yet it’s premature to conclude that Apple has lost its capability to respond to this AI wave. Whether by design or not, Apple’s transition to unified memory architecture with the introduction of M-series chips has equipped its Mac lineup with remarkable capabilities for local model inference. Furthermore, with the recent Mac Studio capable of supporting up to 512GB of memory, Apple has firmly secured another foothold in this AI transformation.
While NVIDIA remains the preferred choice for model training and inference, Macs have attracted numerous users due to their high integration and energy efficiency. As more AI models become optimized for MLX, Mac performance in large-scale inference tasks is expected to…