Why Apple is the best investment for future AI
The AI industry is moving incredibly fast. It’s almost as though you can close your eyes for ten minutes and wake to find that yet another business-friendly AI tool or service has appeared.
While refreshing, this glut of investment and innovation represents an industry in flux, meaning the most sensible purchasing decisions aren’t yet terribly clear. Which services will stand the test of time? Which will still even be around once investors call in their debt? It’s hard to say.
With one exception.
Why hardware matters
Whatever breeds, brands, and benefits of the current investment-driven AI deluge are still around in a year’s time, the one thing that remains fixed is the need to invest in the best possible kit to run AI.
Sure, you can spent tens of thousands equipping your teams with access to AI services today, but you may be far better off investing in the infrastructure you’ll need to run the AI services that make it through the current competitive glut and still exist tomorrow. It makes sense to give the market, money, and regulations time to bed in so you can make service investment decisions based on a more stable future reality.
Regardless of whether your company is experimenting with AI today or planning for future adoption, it is essential to invest in hardware that will remain capable and relevant as AI technologies evolve. Perhaps that’s why 73% of CIOs say Macs are already in use to run AI in the enterprise.
Apple, the best kit for AI
With that in mind, what is the best equipment for AI? Right now, on a cost/power/performance/TCO basis, the best kit for AI comes from Apple.
iPhones, iPad, and Macs all make use of industry leading processors, have operating systems that (aside from Liquid Glass) employees already love, require less expensive memory to deliver the same computational impact, and even offer their own on-device, private-by-design AI services to help your people get your business done.
On a TCO basis support costs are lower, usable lives longer, and once it comes time to upgrade, Apple’s products still fetch good prices in rebates or on second user markets.
Even the initial purchase price looks increasingly attractive as memory and component cost increases drive other PC brands to raise prices.
For what you and your employees get, the initial cost of Apple hardware tells its own compelling story, one that’s reflected on the ground as Mac sales continue to increase at rates exceeding the industry average.
All of these are proven by statistics, market forecasts, employee choice decisions and the grim reality of running AI on a PC. Even an iPad Air can run iterations of Google’s Gemma 3n Generative AI locally and on device with help from Locally AI.
Can that really be said for most PCs in that price range?
Massive talent
Underpinning all of this is the fact that Apple Silicon was designed with AI in mind. They chips have built-in hardware acceleration for specific tasks, boosting inference and training.
They are power efficient to handle energy-intensive AI workloads, and they have the Neural Engine which accelerates ML tasks — and all these features are supported by developer tools such as Core ML.
You just need to look at the Geekbench data to verify what this means. At 133 trillion operations per second (TOPS), the M5 chip delivers 12x the neural performance of the original M1 processor, which blew everyone away when it appeared. Apple’s systems are top of their class, and where faster processors do exist, they tend to be vampiric, consuming of vast quantities of energy and money to feed their computational output.
You don’t really need an AI to draw inferences from any of the above. Any business purchaser thinking about how to capitalize on the evolving future of AI should recognize that today is the time to invest in the hardware that will run tomorrow’s AI services — particularly as the operating system in play is already positioned as a do-it-all application layer from which to run all manner of models.
Apple, the AI platform
What this means, at least from my perch, is that all of these arguments seem to coalesce into an Apple purchasing decision. A decision which, for professional users, at least, may see another big boost next week, when many anticipate new pro Macs may ship along with a new suite of pro apps. If — or, let’s face it, when — they do, these Macs will deliver such extreme computational performance that most PCs will have nothing left to do but grab a guitar and gently weep.
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