In Apple’s first-quarter earnings, the Mac leads the way in sales growth
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Yep, unless you're working with huge amounts of stolen data a cloud solution is much cheaper. Or even just swapping to a standard gpu setup
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I've ran them on intel cpu's before. When putting a cpu with more than two memory channels and a several hundred watt power budget up to a beefed up mobile cpu, it's not a fair fight.
Second hand xeons are cheaper though
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I'm talking about running them in GPU, which favours the GPU even when the comparison is between an AMD Epyc and a mediocre GPU.
If you want to run a large version of deepseek R1 locally, with many quantized models being over 50GB, I think the cheapest Nvidia GPU that fits the bill is an A100 which you might find used for 6K.
For well under that price you can get a whole Mac Studio with those 192 GB the first poster in this thread mentioned.
I'm not saying this is for everyone, it's certainly not for me, but I don't think we can dismiss that there is a real niche where Apple has a genuine value proposition.
My old flatmate has a PhD in NLP and used to work in research, and he'd have gotten soooo much use out of >100 GB of RAM accessible to the GPU.
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I had found one for about 400 recently, a bit far away tho. I ended up going with a gpu closer by. I don't need that many gb's
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It's for running AI on the GPU. You need a really expensive PC GPU to get more than like 16 GB of RAM or whatever, so the bottleneck for large AI models is swapping in and out data from system RAM over PCIe.
The Mac has an SoE with unified memory, where the GPU can access all 192 GB at full speed, which is perfect for AI workloads where you need the GPU to access all the RAM.
APUs/Integrated GPUs on PCs also have unified memory but they always targeted the low end so aren't as useful.
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An IT supply chain management company and a northeastern medical society have been the latest of our clients to adopt more of them, mostly through attrition of Windows devices. In my prior role at a PE firm, I was responsible for kicking off the transition company-wide to Macs. They liked the lower cost of ownership, maintenance, and the “impression it gave to clients”. The CAD engineers absolutely rioted about it lol. Let me tell you, zip-tying a cheese grater Mac into a server rack is a surreal experience
.To your point, it is still largely director level and above. They are still using MS products mind you, just on Macs.
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There's absolutely no way organizations are replacing Windows computers with Macs that would be an insane thing to do.
There was very poor corporate support for Mac OS, a cheap Dell is always going to be a better proposition for large-scale deployment, people know how to use Windows computers, corporate software generally isn't cross OS compatible because traditionally that has never been a requirement, and it would require upgrading all of the server backend and rewriting all the knowledge articles.
It just straight up isn't going to happen. You have no comprehension at all of the complexities of corporate IT
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In order to run say something like deep-seek R1 the full fat version you need to stick something like eight Mac minis together.
Doesn't seem like a single device is really going to be capable long term, since it doesn't seem like it's capable right now.
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I'm not sure I could see a significant number of enterprises switching to Mac, it's just too tall of an order. My department definitely wouldn't have the bandwidth to do controls, policies, service desk retraining, and internal app rewrites.
Personally I have switched to Mac and am very happy. The performance, OS, and power efficiency of the Macs are just excellent. I'll likely never give up my Android phone.
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That’s a rather bold statement to make, especially considering I have headed one of those large-scale deployments. IBM has over 100,000 Macs, up 50% from their previous deployment goal. There are plenty of Mac deployments in the 4 and 5 digit range. I work on several a year!
Specialist industries have the most trouble switching, but legacy apps are less of a problem these days. Most are either a web app already or slated to become one, largely because mobile has made cross-compatibility a requirement. Things like CAD are the exception because they need native clients and aren’t mobile centric.
Backend changes usually aren’t the bottleneck for cross-compatibility, if their app was written with decoupling in mind (thank you Agile). Throw that out the window if it’s some ancient SOAP monolith. They have bigger problems than their choice of user OS.
Assuming your instance name implies you are in the EU, things are just different for IT over there. The cost savings from adopting Macs can’t materialize given the conditions.
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It’s not for every org or team. I often work with small IT teams to provide the expertise until they are able to gain the institutional knowledge themselves. It’s usually a slow process, with transitions on the scale of years for the large companies.
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Are costs of ownership and maintenance low enough to make the difference in initial purchase cost justified, with all the jokes about Apple's pricing?
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That'd be actually good news for anyone wishing to get Macs at some point. More attention to desktop OS - less mobile bullshit.
Maybe they are aiming for Windows' corpse, and their "premium" product-placement can be adjusted for Linux being the "cheap worse thing" (put down those pitchforks, please, I'm not on Apple's side here).
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Maybe. The average Joe looks at the price tag and make up their mind, but it’s a trap. You also have to factor in the support costs. IT staff, device insurance, breach costs, etc. A device costs much more (2x, 3x or even more) than what you pay the OEM on the PO. The biggest sink is the human costs of supporting the fleet. Macs have higher capex but lower opex. In the end I see savings between 20-40% for well fitted clients.
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For sure, that makes sense. To me, the biggest transition that I expect to see over the next few years in large enterprises will be to ARM-based Snapdragon chips from Intel and AMD. I'm sure some will also go Apple though.
