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Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

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Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

#11

Post by ZaoLahma »

sublinear wrote: post #2

> "The speed of AI development right now is just crazy," Brooks said. "I can't imagine where we're going to be a year from now, three months from now, or even a month from now," he added. I don't think I'm taking this out of context when I say this is unintentionally correct. Apple still doesn't know what to do about AI. Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't…

> Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't using AI apart from google search.

This is... a view.

Maybe I live in a strange sphere of strange ("normie"-ish) people, but the people around me are for sure using AI. Mostly chatgpt to be fair. They use it to compare products that they intend to buy, identify plants in nature, create travel plans, find interesting places to visit nearby, give movie suggestions based on what they have previously enjoyed and so on and so forth. AI is becoming a very integrated part of their reality. To "google" something and digging through the search results manually is very rapidly being replaced by asking chatgpt, for better or worse.

Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

#12

Post by Aperocky »

majestik wrote: post #8

Ok, I didn’t want to take the bait but this one’s just too much. > “He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud – a move motivated by privacy, security, and the rising cost of inference as agents consume more tokens.” Classic Apple. No more just beating the “security and privacy” drum, now its “tokens are expensive!” Cloud scary. Cloud expensive. Mac good. Buy Mac! > “He also singled…

But why should apple invest in developing their own models? Why would it be correct?

Or phrase it in a very similar ask, why don't they invest in power plants? The model space is truly crowded, what do they gain or recover suppose they are SOTA? Across the Pacific they are pumping out free models that are only 6-12 months behind. What business sense does it make for Apple to develop their own models?

Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

#13

Post by camillomiller »

majestik wrote: post #8

Ok, I didn’t want to take the bait but this one’s just too much. > “He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud – a move motivated by privacy, security, and the rising cost of inference as agents consume more tokens.” Classic Apple. No more just beating the “security and privacy” drum, now its “tokens are expensive!” Cloud scary. Cloud expensive. Mac good. Buy Mac! > “He also singled…

They don’t believe in this model and never had. You sound like the people who screamed that Apple was dying because they were not making a netbook style Mac in 2009. Apple is the only big tech company with a non existent financial exposure to the current capex bubble. Let big dogs bark at the moon. They are the loud ones, at least until the moon implodes.

Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

#14

Post by camillomiller »

sublinear wrote: post #2

> "The speed of AI development right now is just crazy," Brooks said. "I can't imagine where we're going to be a year from now, three months from now, or even a month from now," he added. I don't think I'm taking this out of context when I say this is unintentionally correct. Apple still doesn't know what to do about AI. Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't…

Nobody does what to do, they are just throwing trillions at it betting they’ll figure out. If they don’t they’ll be screwed, if they do Apple will quickly catch up with a better and more refined product, as they’ve always done.

Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

#15

Post by kamranjon »

onion2k wrote: post #7

Running models on-device on a Mac is immensely annoying though. Figuring out what will work out of BF16, FP8, BF16+FP8, NVFP4, INT8, GGUF ... the list goes on ... is 'non-obvious' at best. Apple do little to support with tooling. There's MLX, but unless you're happy to transform a model to that format yourself you'll be lagging a long way behind. Apps like LMStudio, Ollama, Draw Things, etc do a great job of simplify…

I dunno I use LMStudio pretty regularly and the MLX folks and the community usually have MLX versions of new model releases up within a day or two.

Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

#16

Post by Den_VR »

znnajdla wrote: post #9

It’s not for the AI inference, it’s for the tool calls and desktop GUI app workloads and browser. There aren’t any on-device models capable enough of real work that can run on lower end Mac Minis. But for running a few browsers and GUI apps, you’re much better off buying a Mac Mini than paying for a more expensive and worse-performing container in the cloud. Browsers were not designed to run in Linux containers but t…

At their original price points, a set of four were a great solution for my requirements in tokens/second/$.

Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

#17

Post by com2kid »

ZaoLahma wrote: post #11
sublinear wrote: post #2

> "The speed of AI development right now is just crazy," Brooks said. "I can't imagine where we're going to be a year from now, three months from now, or even a month from now," he added. I don't think I'm taking this out of context when I say this is unintentionally correct. Apple still doesn't know what to do about AI. Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't…

> Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't using AI apart from google search. This is... a view. Maybe I live in a strange sphere of strange ("normie"-ish) people, but the people around me are for sure using AI. Mostly chatgpt to be fair. They use it to compare products that they intend to buy, identify plants in nature, create travel plans, find interesting pla…

Chatgpt is so damn good for cooking it is unbelievable. It will learn your family's tastes over time, you can tell it what pantry staples you keep is stock, and you can take any recipe you find online and ask for stuff like "find a way to make this preparable in 45 minutes instead of 2 hours, what trade offs will I be making?"

Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

#18

Post by onion2k »

kamranjon wrote: post #15
onion2k wrote: post #7

Running models on-device on a Mac is immensely annoying though. Figuring out what will work out of BF16, FP8, BF16+FP8, NVFP4, INT8, GGUF ... the list goes on ... is 'non-obvious' at best. Apple do little to support with tooling. There's MLX, but unless you're happy to transform a model to that format yourself you'll be lagging a long way behind. Apps like LMStudio, Ollama, Draw Things, etc do a great job of simplify…

I dunno I use LMStudio pretty regularly and the MLX folks and the community usually have MLX versions of new model releases up within a day or two.

For some models like the popular coding and chat models, things move faster. For things like images, voice, sound etc they definitely lag a long way behind.

Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

#19

Post by sandspar »

com2kid wrote: post #17
ZaoLahma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't using AI apart from google search. This is... a view. Maybe I live in a strange sphere of strange ("normie"-ish) people, but the people around me are for sure using AI. Mostly chatgpt to be fair. They use it to compare products that they intend to buy, identify plants in nature, create travel plans, find interesting pla…

Chatgpt is so damn good for cooking it is unbelievable. It will learn your family's tastes over time, you can tell it what pantry staples you keep is stock, and you can take any recipe you find online and ask for stuff like "find a way to make this preparable in 45 minutes instead of 2 hours, what trade offs will I be making?"

I agree! I think it's because there's so much cooking material in its training data. I wonder what proportion of the internet is food blogs and recipes... Probably a lot!

Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

#20

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Apple could probably sell a machine starting at $10,000 if they architected it as the sole place one’s Private Cloud Compute [1] ran.

It would need a path to a $2,500 machine, I think. But this is a niche I don’t think another consumer-facing brand could do like Apple.

[1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

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