$Apple(AAPL)$ Apple's new Macs are shaping up to be a direct play against Microsoft and Nvidia as the company pushes to bring down AI costs. When the new desktops start shipping Tuesday, Apple executives will make a pitch to corporate buyers that these machines are cheaper than renting data center capacity. The upgraded Mac Minis and Mac Studios, which can run close to $20,000 and handle AI workloads locally, will compete head-to-head with new desktop machines Nvidia and PC makers are rolling out. Those are expected to be a focus of a Microsoft Windows event in San Francisco next month.
The new Macs target heavier AI tasks like writing code or handling complex business work without paying for tokens from cloud providers like OpenAI or Anthropic. Apple is betting its experience squeezing performance out of battery-powered devices such as iPhones will help it chip away at Microsoft's home turf. It's a steep climb though: Apple holds about 4.6% of the enterprise desktop market versus 91.3% for Windows, according to IDC's Linn Huang. Steve Jobs was famously ambivalent about enterprise computing because end users couldn't pick their favorite products. But Apple now finds itself in a strong position for AI desktops, partly due to a long-running focus on power efficiency.
When Apple introduced its first Apple Silicon chips in 2020, it combined computing and memory, which had been separate in PCs, into a unified memory architecture for better battery life. That tight connection between compute and memory, which Nvidia and others have only recently moved toward, had the side effect of making Macs particularly capable at AI. Apple started selling out of Mac Minis as OpenClaw, an open-source agentic AI tool, gained traction in markets like China. While Mac Studios were initially aimed at content creators editing video or music, Apple has quietly added specialized AI features over the past two years, such as chip-to-chip networking called RDMA over Thunderbolt. At its launch event this month, Apple showed four Mac Studios linked together running an AI model with a trillion parameters to find and fix a graphics coding bug. Tasks like that typically require a data center, but the stack of Macs runs off a single wall outlet.
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