If we're being frank here, Apple's AI strategy lags behind Nvidia, AMD and even Google. Nvidia has CUDA, AMD ships CDNA, Google has the TPU family, and Apple... well, Apple discontinued the rackmount Mac Pro, forfeit the HPC ARM datacenter to Nvidia's Grace CPUs, refuses to sign CUDA drivers, and spent half a decade designing raster GPUs instead of GPGPUs.
All of their competition has real inference and training stacks. Apple ships an iGPU and a smartphone NPU, they're reliant on Nvidia and Google hardware to deliver Apple Intelligence.
Saying they are lagging assumes they are in the same race
They aren’t
Apple is a high net worth consumer technology integrator that focuses on highest coherence user experience. They pick the most efficient stable technology, integrate it and sell the package
Apple only needs to lead in precisely that they don’t need to lead in literally anything else
in fact if they tried to lead in those other things they would give up their integration capacity
But they are. Nvidia ships GPGPU ARM SOCs to consumers; why can't Apple? They're both trillion-dollar companies, surely Apple isn't lacking in engineering talent.
The vertical integration argument relies on Apple having a good architecture for AI. First it was the ANE, which everyone (mistakenly) thought would differentiate Apple Silicon from other NPU platforms. Then everyone parroted the "unified memory" talking point without checking to see if professionals actually used it. Now people are pivoting to say the next-gen Apple GPUs will finally blow the last-gen GPGPUs out of the water. Which is good, because there are 4-year-old GPUs that beat M5 Ultra in compute efficiency.
I know that "Apple is behind" is a tough pill to swallow, but they literally have no analog to CUDA, CDNA or even TPU technology. Nvidia SOCs like Tegra prove that Apple could absolutely bring GPGPU tech to low-power hardware like the iPad and iOS without giving up any real features. Apple just refuses to invest in it.
I feel like you didn’t read my original post cause you’re just repeating the original claim that they need to compete in components market instead of consumer product market
The greatest moment was Apple being the last vertical computer company left over from the 1980s, OSX second the iPhone third and Apple Silicon fourth. What saved Apple was their frugality as a company sound familiar? Not Microsoft’s measly $150 million settlement. No OSX and no iMac and Apple would’ve been doomed.
Microsoft currently is scrambling because they missed mobile and they’re currently losing in the gaming market. Microsoft is not even close to winning, because Sony and Nintendo have basically kicked their butt in gaming and now we have a new competitor in Steam, Microsoft is all in on Copilot and if it doesn’t work, Nadella and his game manager are done.
All of their competition has real inference and training stacks. Apple ships an iGPU and a smartphone NPU, they're reliant on Nvidia and Google hardware to deliver Apple Intelligence.