Yes, but renting a cloud pc will be initially very cheap for consumers - that's got to be good for consum...governments.

they have not always been at odds. CUDA was even supported on MacOSX back in the day.

I used to think that.

I really don't care about most new phone features and for my laptop the M1 Max is still a really decent chip.

I do want to run local LLM agents though and I think a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra (when it comes out) is probably how I'm going to do that. I need more RAM.

I bet I'm not the only one looking at that kind of setup now that was previously happy with what they had..

But do you use any ai services like chat gpt, Claude, Gemini? If so you’re offloading your compute from a local stack to a high performance nvidia gpu stack operated by one of the big five. It’s not that you aren’t using new hardware, it’s that you shifted the load from local to centralized.

I’m not saying this is bad or anything, it’s just another iteration of the centralized vs decentralized pendulum swing that has been happening in tech since the beginning (mainframes with dumb terminals, desktops, the cloud, mobile) etc.

Apple might experience a slowdown in hardware sales because of it. Nvidia might experience a sales boom because of it. The future could very well bring a swing back. Imagine you could run a stack of Mac minis that replaced your monthly Claude code bill. Might pay for itself in 6mo (this doesn’t exist yet but it theoretically could happen)

Wonderful!

I wish I were in that situation, but I find myself able to use lots more compute than I have. And it seems like many others feel the same.

We have data, people are buying phones in aggregate about every 2.5 - 3 years. Especially in the US where almost no one pays for a phone outright

You are anecdote, not data.

Data is saying demand >>>>> supply.

"Am I the only one" posts are pure engagement farming.