Lessons learned on the Lisa were applied to the Mac for less money to sell to more people. I suspect the same thing will happen with their VR/AR/XR headset.
They only got a second crack at it because they were floating on sales of the Apple II. If the Lisa had been their first product, we'd be saying "Apple who?"
The Vision is a whole different universe… with their cash and position they could (and may) take 10 cracks at it.
Doesn't make the tactic any more or less relevant...let the people with money and motivation become the first real-world usability testers, then optimize for the rest of the population.
$15k for a box with 144 GB GPU RAM is not bad, but I'm not clear on how they're going to run that from a single 1600W PSU. That would be 6x 24GB GPUs, and I'm pretty sure you'd need 2x 1600W PSUs and two separate 15amp circuits to run such a thing at home (in the US).
With Nvidia this is (typically) setting the power limit[0]. Even with the default power limits of my RTX 4090s (480 watts)I don't think I've ever seen an ML workload get close to that and as the referenced article demonstrates you can more-or-less set your power limit to somewhere around 75% of max without losing much if any performance depending on workload.
It doesn't take much testing to come up with the ideal power limit for your given workload(s).
But realistically, the 2x PSU case was a common crypto mining setup and yeah, you have your electrician install two circuits right next to each other. Or use a 240V PSU.
That's exactly what I imagine would need to happen, I'm just surprised that the specs are claiming all of that with a single 1600W PSU. It's the kind of thing that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that someone has thought through the details of what they are claiming to sell as part of this pre-order.
Nitpick - almost all modern power supplies are auto-ranging between 100-240V. In 240V locales at 80% constant load on a 15amp circuit this is 2880 watts. In the US you would (ideally) drop a 240V circuit from the panel and make sure you have sufficient supply amperage from the utility provider.
