Episode 4 of the Techramble Roundup is here. Alex and Jordan close the local-AI triangle we started in episode one — the Mac mini and Mac Studio as local AI machines — after a week when Apple, AMD, GlobalFoundries, and Arm all reported earnings within about 72 hours and all blamed the same thing: memory. About 30 minutes.
In this episode:
- Earnings week, one bottleneck: Apple fiscal Q4 — $114.5B revenue, EPS $2.10 (including a $0.05 tariff-refund benefit), iPhone $57.6B, Mac $10.8B up 24% — but the December-quarter margin guide drops to 45–46% on memory costs, and new CEO John Ternus called the memory situation "unprecedented." AMD Q3 — $13.38B, up 45%, Data Center a record $8.55B, up 97%, Q4 guide ~$17B. GlobalFoundries and Arm reported the same week with the same story: the data-center side booms, the phone side feels the memory squeeze.
- The deep dive — the Mac as a local AI PC: a Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra and 512GB of unified memory runs gpt-oss-120b at 62.6 tokens a second, measured, beating the DGX Spark (56.8) and Strix Halo (52) on the same model. On 70B dense models it's 25–30 tok/s against roughly 5 for both rivals. Decode is bandwidth-bound, and the Mac has 819 GB/s against 273 and 256 — bandwidth is destiny.
- The 512GB superpower: Qwen3.5-397B at 33 tok/s and DeepSeek R1 671B at 6–18 tok/s on the 512GB M3 Ultra — models that simply don't load anywhere else at consumer prices — running silently under 200W on a desk.
- The taxes, honestly: Apple memory pricing is brutal at the spec that matters most, the 64GB M4 Max cap left no mid-tier 70B-comfortable Mac until the M5 Max restored 128GB, there's no CUDA, and at small models the Mac's lead evaporates (M4 mini does ~21 tok/s on 8B vs Strix Halo's ~70). Who should buy the Mac — and who shouldn't.
- Close to home: Austin finally gets a Micro Center — it opens Friday, November 13, at 12707 N Mopac Expy, in the old Fry's building. Walk the memory aisle first: the DDR5 shelf price is the most honest number in this whole episode.
🎧 Download the episode: MP3