Apple reports fourth quarter results

Posted by mfiguiere 10/30/2025

Apple reports fourth quarter results(www.apple.com)

179 points | 309 commentspage 2

nullbyte808 10/31/2025|

No wonder they treat the Mac like a third-class citizen. Mac sales barely pay their tax bill.

trollbridge 11/1/2025|

At this point Macs have a great deal of parts in common with phones and tablets - M4 / M5 chip, flash design, and so on.

The main purpose of the Mac (for Apple) is to host the development environment that is used to create apps which sustain the iPhone ecosystem.

It does continue to baffle me just how cheap Macs are. $649 for a brand new 16GB MacBook at Best Buy with M2, more than powerful enough to do the aforementioned development. And cheaper than most iPhone models.

pjmlp 11/2/2025||

US prices, meanwhile in Portugal where minimum wage is about 800 euros bruto, it goes by a mere € 1692, meaning 1962 dollars.

https://www.worten.pt/produtos/portatil-apple-914-7662-13-6-...

Hardly a great value for Portuguese households.

It gets even worse outside southern Europe.

andy_ppp 10/30/2025|

Apple could substantially eat into Nvidia’s AI lunch if they really tried, honestly Macs are fast enough… my guess is by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. If I was them I’d already be taking orders, power requirements alone even if they aren’t as fast 2 nodes ahead would make their offering sensational.

kcb 10/31/2025||

They'll just need to start from scratch on all this. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CwyW!,f_auto,q_auto:...

I don't think some power efficient laptop SoCs gives you much competitive advantage there.

fnordpiglet 10/30/2025|||

I don’t think so. The GPU die itself isn’t the key it’s the interconnects and data center scale infra coupled with their closed software. If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple.

JKCalhoun 10/31/2025||

"If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple."

Is that true? Does cash mean nothing?

fnordpiglet 11/1/2025||

I assure you if AMD could sell a story to take even a fraction of Nvidia’s market share they could raise as much capital as they want.

reaperducer 10/30/2025|||

by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use.

I thought there were already external GPUs for Macs. Since before COVID, IIRC.

larkost 10/30/2025||

There were eGPUs for Macs, but only the Intel ones. To my knowledge there are no drivers for eGPUs for Apple Silicon. My guess is that without Apple's involvement it would be near-impossible to get graphics accelerators working.

In theory you could make things work for some sort of computational acceleration (e.g.: AI, or some OpenCL work), but I am not sure that that market is really worth all of the work it would take. For those sorts of things it is probably a lot easier to setup an external (Linux) box, and send the work over.

MaysonL 10/31/2025||

Just last week: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tiny-corp-su...

pjmlp 11/2/2025||

Metal has little value for research community.