It just doesn't feel very "skate to where the puck is headed" to me. Apple is holding on for dear life to a business model that has very little momentum. Apple was ready for the AI buildout, which is what upsets me. The rackmount Mac Pro is the perfect product for Apple to sell datacenter customers, all they need to support are CUDA drivers (which are already ARM/BSD-ready) and some sort of PCIe interconnect. There was no "pivot" that was required, outside of their software policy. Maybe AI was a bubble, but missing out on that capital is a bigger problem than suffering from success a-la Nvidia. When AI hype dies down, there's going to be new markets that Apple has to be ready to capitalize on. AI and GPGPU compute have been good exercises for testing Apple's flexibility, but a lot of those advances are flushed down the toilet on hardware like the Mac Studio, which forces customers into non-scalable Thunderbolt RDMA clusters.
I'd argue the supply chain is a non-issue, too. Apple's chips are a high/low mix, and most of them go to TSMC when they really shouldn't. Apple's A-series SOCs could be manufactured by Intel or Samsung without setting them back too far on fab nodes. Mac chips could remain TSMC products, and Apple could pivot their high-memory SKUs to the Mac Pro form factor instead of forcing it into a non-scalable Studio chassis. That would give them a product that the industry could start to buy again, and they could even offer it as a consumer product if they wanted to thumb up their nose at Nvidia. The current Studio is a sad flagship to sell, reminiscent of the Trash Can form factor with even fewer hardware features.
It's Ternus' choice, and he seems to be open to new ideas. Apple isn't immune to bad decisionmaking though, and I bet that future generations will be confused why the ARM datacenter was dominated by non-entities like Ampere and Nvidia selling low-performance licensed cores.
I'd argue the supply chain is a non-issue, too. Apple's chips are a high/low mix, and most of them go to TSMC when they really shouldn't. Apple's A-series SOCs could be manufactured by Intel or Samsung without setting them back too far on fab nodes. Mac chips could remain TSMC products, and Apple could pivot their high-memory SKUs to the Mac Pro form factor instead of forcing it into a non-scalable Studio chassis. That would give them a product that the industry could start to buy again, and they could even offer it as a consumer product if they wanted to thumb up their nose at Nvidia. The current Studio is a sad flagship to sell, reminiscent of the Trash Can form factor with even fewer hardware features.
It's Ternus' choice, and he seems to be open to new ideas. Apple isn't immune to bad decisionmaking though, and I bet that future generations will be confused why the ARM datacenter was dominated by non-entities like Ampere and Nvidia selling low-performance licensed cores.