Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line
bloomberg.com303 points by scrlk a day ago
303 points by scrlk a day ago
Giftlink: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/apple-to-...
also https://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/shopping/apple-to-skip-h...
768GB RAM pipe dreams make no sense to Apple. By discontinuing 256GB / 512GB M3 Ultra and raising prices $5000 -> $7000 on Macbook pro with 128GB they basically confirmed how badly RAM shortage affecting them. 768GB is 64-times of 12GB which is rumored to be amount of RAM in new iPhones. Imagine what profit margin 768GB Mac Studio gonna need in order to justify making one instead of 64 iPhones. Apple is the company that is okay about selling microfiber cloth for $100 and wheels for $700. Imagine how bad price hike for M3 Ultra 256GB / 512GB had to be in order for them to just discontinue them instead of getting free money out of desperate local AI folks. The message I’m getting is that Apple will never compromise on its healthy margins. If something becomes basically unaffordable for their target market, they’d cut the production and even discontinue the product, than take a hit on margins. Their business model is refreshingly simple. Apple is not gonna risk their iphones, as they are their flagship (aside even from giving them higher margins). My opinion is that, as we are talking about ram SHORTAGE (not just for ram price hike) they have to cut the more ram hungry models to be able to keep up with their projected production/demand (at reasonable ram prices). Getting iphones "sold out" is not a great thing for apple. Once/if the ram shortage ends, they will continue increasing the ram caps as they were already doing, because then selling ram-heavy macs will not interfere with the rest of their products. That works only if the product is the product. Iphones/tablets drive app sales/apple subscription services, if they force a user to move to android they may never return. Why do you think they sell the iPhone 17e/se? They need to maximise their user base as its ongoing recurring income stream. It's just a planned economy failing the way planned economies often do: the central planner failed to predict the demand correctly. Instead of trying to secure additional stock from the market at spot prices, they are simply waiting for the next batches they had planned for. I actually think Apple is right in increasing prices, and in fact should have increased it more. Their target market is composed of people that would pay for it nonetheless. They should have tightened the screws a bit more. They could treat the extreme spec machines separately from the prosumer ones, like they did with the Xserve. Let business customers spec up to 768GB (say) who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag, while keeping them away from the stores and usual consumer supply chains (Amazon et al). It may not be a big enough market segment for them to care about anymore, though. They can do it, but that gonna need to be different SKU not Mac Studio. Otherwise news will be full of discussions about Apple price hike from $8000 to $24,000 or who the hell knows $48,000. So yeah the only way I see them selling it is usual "call us" enterprise price tag. But since its not what Apple usually do its easier to sell 4x Mac Studio 256GB RAM boxes with interconnect for lets say $12,000 - $15,000 each. I don't think it's needs 'call us' just a separate SKU, I mean if they called it Xserve Ultra and it was just a studio in a 1u format with dual PSUs and extra RAM, it would fly off the shelves. Isn't that the same thing you can get from ordinary 2S Epyc/Xeon servers at a similar price that have 24 memory channels (when the M3 Ultra has the equivalent of 16)? And the reason people rarely use that for AI is that the enterprise GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are only moderately more expensive but are significantly faster because they use HBM instead of DDR5. Yeah kind of, I think a 24 channels DDR5 works out approx 1TB/s, but the cost is astronomical, a M5 studio would probably beat that performance for around half the cost. You also get to use the GPU/NPU cores of the mac vs CPU only on the servers.
M5 ultra studio with 128GB RAM could probably beat out a sever with a RTX 6000 pro at half the price. 24 channels of DDR5-6400 is 1.2TB/s, M3 ultra is 0.8TB/s. They both use DDR5-6400. > a M5 studio would probably beat that performance for around half the cost. A barebones 2S system with no CPUs or memory is ~$2000, a pair of 16 core CPUs another ~$1000 each, and then however much memory you want. The price seems pretty comparable. The "problem" with doing this is actually that 128GB is too little memory, because you want to populate all the channels, but even using 16GB sticks, 24x16GB is already 384GB. > You also get to use the GPU/NPU cores of the mac vs CPU only on the servers. You only need enough cores to make sure the bottleneck is memory bandwidth. M3 ultra is obviously 1-2 generations behind and new the studio is expected 'any day now. Even if this was M4 Ultra it would still be ~comparable to any EPYC system in bandwidth, but get to use the GPU for compute so potentially faster than the EPYC. Total Cost of Ownership in the Epyc is going to be WAY higher because of electricity costs, the EYPC is going to be consuming probably 5X the electricity and is probably not going to sit quietly on your desk. More RAM though, but again it's more about the ratio of RAM (size) to RAM (Memory Bandwith) to Compute and you may find a model bigger than e.g 70b suddenly is bottlenecked by the CPUs or memory bandwidth and therefore the extra RAM (size) is wasted. But maybe not, different use cases will yeild different results I guess. > A barebones 2S system with no CPUs or memory is ~$2000, a pair of 16 core CPUs another ~$1000 each, and then however much memory you want. As you say, the thing is it's not 'however much memory you want' it's 24 sticks which at $300 a stick for 16GB is $7200, then you also need at least one NVME disk so you're looking at what $13,000? > but even using 16GB sticks, 24x16GB is already 384GB. Question: you need 16GB sticks because they're the smallest doublesided ones, which you need for maximum BW, right? Otherwise why not 8G?
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