M4 Macs, iPhone 16, and more: What Apple has planned for the rest of 2024

22july2013 said:
Implementing AI on the HomePod may require less RAM than AI on a laptop, since it's mostly limited to processing audio.

Clearly Apple has the engineering expertise to stick Apple Silicon and other required hardware to support Apple Intelligence on HomePod. The problem is whether or not the additional cost is worth it. Naturally the extra cost would be passed off to the consumer and HomePod isn't exactly the cheapest device in this product category.

Remember that HomePod like Apple TV mostly does nothing during media playback. So if you interact with your HomePod once or twice an hour, that's really a wasted resource.

My guess is that Apple will eventually try to run HomePod's AI computations on nearby hardware (like a Mac or maybe an iPad Pro) that's paired to the speaker. That would be a more efficient allocation of computing resources rather than sticking a high-specced Apple Silicon SoC and 6GB+ of RAM in a device that doesn't need it 99% of the time.

It's probably a similar situation with the Apple TV set-top box. We already have seen that Apple has balked at turning it into the a full fledged videogame console due to the large NAND storage requirements of today's AAA videogame titles (which are easily require 50-100GB or more in storage space). As a set-top video streamer, it doesn't need much more than a couple of gigabytes for the OS and a media content buffer.

Again AI would be handled by a local Mac.

At some point when the silicon is cheaper and the AI models are more efficient, it may make more sense to bring them locally to HomePod and Apple TV but my guess is we are 4-5 years away from that. Neither device is a big revenue driver at the moment, so clearly Apple has not made it a top priority. I think they will remain on the back burner for a while.

One thing we do know is that Apple will not eat the increased costs themselves and take a lower gross margin on HomePod and Apple TV.