Right now 128GB MacBook is the top of the line and you could do Qwen 3.8 Flash or similar.
There is a rumor that the M7 chip can use 1.5TB of memory which would imply Apple is aiming for more memory on devices.[1]
Would that imply the entry-level MacBook will have 128GB and top of the line models could run larger reasoning models? Then the question is price and if any of this will translate to iPhone for on-phone models.
With how expensive memory is, IDK if they can pull this off but I hope they do
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ap...
Most people neither need nor want to run large LLMs locally.
The entry level MacBook Neo costs $599. Even if RAM prices revert to the pre-AI mean, the entry level models are not going to be that stacked with RAM.
Eventually we'll get to a doubling where entry level means 16GB of RAM, but most people won't be running anything more than simple models for light local work.
Have you ever tried running large LLMs on a MacBook Pro? It's hot, loud, and makes your battery level disappear at rates you didn't know were possible if you're not plugged in. It's a very niche hobby.
Whatever local LLM device comes out of this, it certainly won't be a laptop.
(I envision a black box like a router you plug into a socket and let sit in a corner of some room.)
I'm old enough to remember the time when most people neither needed nor wanted a phone with a large screen and no buttons
If Apple, in 2030 has a compute product that a worker can BYO(X) to work that has 2TB RAM, with an encrypted personalized context that can float between agents, then they will be in a very interesting place.
But the family shouldn’t be limited by that. We’re not going to see M6 Max hardware, because the M7 line is being fast-tracked and pulled forward. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see M7 capable of 1-2TB or more.
It is, at the very least, a practical limit. There are unlikely to be enough customers willing to pay $50k+ for a hypothetical 1TB RAM version to make it worth manufacturing.
i suspect that they will at least do offloading for casual usage as well. if they can ship 24GB in a homeview or appletv style product, it's game over.
I don’t think Apple can be in a position where all of the Chinese device-making companies can get memory at a significantly cheaper price from CMXT, and Apple is stuck with buying memory from the three hyenas of memory at a significantly higher price.
That’s not going to help Apple sell their devices at a competitive price worldwide over time against the Chinese computer makers (Lenovo, Asus, and Motorola) and make no mistake about it: their share of the market worldwide will get bigger because of this change in the memory market; their focus will be on the long term, while the lawyers/MBA/finance types in the West will have their heads stuck in the short term.
It’s the (Chinese companies’) opportunity, and they’re not going to let it pass; I wouldn’t. In addition, Apple is in competition with Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Meta, and indirectly with Anthropic and OpenAI (whose CEO, Sam Altman, recently declared that computer ram is wasted on low-level regular computer users), along with a whole legion of other 3D model makers on the procurement of memory.
The combination of all these elements going into the future means that if Apple wants to stay ahead, I believe Apple has no choice but to take memory in house, they have the design and engineering capability in-house, and they have the money because they didn’t burn it on AI models and data centers.
This scenario is no different than replacing Intel or Qualcomm; you can see the writing/destination and the ultimate train wreck up ahead if Apple doesn’t roll up its sleeves and get busy, the market has changed and again Apple has to change and adapt to the new conditions.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was happening already -- they plan five years ahead, after all, and they've been slowly taking other systems in-house (e.g. baseband/modem) already.
Even so, DDR5 is so high-demand that it's likely that Apple can't outbid customers like Nvidia or OpenAI when they drive the margins they do.
Probably sitting under a router, so that it can hand off bigger jobs to an Apple DC somewhere, probably with a certain number of credits based on your iCloud sub.
And with a device like this, you pay one single time to buy the product and then never have to think about paying for tokens ever again. For ordinary users that's silly, but for users or businesses chewing through lots of tokens, this means they can create their own turnkey replacement for "the cloud" where the only cost after purchasing the machine is the electricity to run it (which with these machines is very little). Mix that with the privacy benefits and suddenly it makes a lot of sense.
But on the other side, equipping data centers was never Apples main business. Their approach to markets is to design products for the individuals. They also usually have very long time plans. Look at where the Apple Silicon today is and how long a path it took. What about the day, where at least a medium sized Mac becomes a great platform for running large models locally? Very easy to use, no setup, no privacy concerns. Also never worry about "tokens". You can then use AI as you use other local resources of the hardware you own today.