Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by petesergeant » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:58 AM UTC

blitzar wrote: post #70

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #20

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/

Apples on stage use cases for their hardware and software makes me wonder if they actually use computers over there, or what a "job" at apple entails. I am unsure that apple themselves understand why their hardware (top end & bottom end) has been so successful, without this understanding leaning into these use cases isn't really going to be possible.

> I am unsure that apple themselves understand why their hardware ... has been so successful [like I do]

You have a bold career as a technical journalist ahead of you!

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

#82

Post by throw1234567891 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:59 AM UTC

thephyber wrote: post #26

mmoustafa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The out-of-stock $6000 M3 Ultra Mac Studios with 800GB+ memory bandwidth are going for $24,000 on eBay, so yes definitely

I don’t think we should use current prices as landmarks for large scale demand. That Studio’s current prices is inflated because of a (presumably) short term supply crunch, not because the average user is willing to pay $24k for a home AI inference device. It assumes that RAM remains supply constrained and that none of the existing RAM contracts are cut short. But Meta and xAI putting A TON of AI compute onto the mar…

512GB M3 Ultra is out of stock, not coming back, and there’s nothing like it on the consumer market. That’s the reason they go for so much.

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

#83

Post by esskay » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 10:00 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #63

> Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio have become the machines of choice for running AI agents, according to Doug Brooks, Apple's senior product manager of Apple silicon. This is mostly an US phenomenon, no Mac mini nor Mac Studio around here. Only Thinkpads and Macbooks laptops talking to hyperscalers.

Around where? They're pretty popular for it in the UK right now given our obscene energy pricing as they end up being one of the best low power options for local llm. If you're not in the local llm space you obviously wouldn't see it. It's like saying Tennis isnt popular around here then admitting you dont frequent a tennis court so wouldn't even know.

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

#84

Post by throw1234567891 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 10:01 AM UTC

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…

Converting a model to mlx is literally a git clone and mlx_lm.convert. 5 minute operation after clone.

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

#85

Post by throw1234567891 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 10:03 AM UTC

boredatoms wrote: post #28

Aperocky wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing the mac mini/studio with some facelift.

Yeah but like running linux hopefully

so you have invent unified memory for linux first because that’s the limitation today

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

#86

Post by throw1234567891 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 10:05 AM UTC

musha68k wrote: post #79

huragok wrote: post #24

If I had the capital I’d make an household inference appliance. No peripherals except Ethernet, integrated compute (cpu+gpu+mem) and secondary storage (+mobo, psu). No accoutrements, just the minimum amount of hardware to run a model as a utility. Even the appliance faceplate would be a display showing stats like an old HiFi stereo. Edit: something like a series of modules consisting of a RISC-V CPU + Vortex GPGPU +…

Yes, just a big cool Cerebras wafer for the closet please.

A single wafer comes with 44GB RAM, the reason why Cerebras is so interesting is because the architecture scales up to 1.6PB RAM.

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

#87

Post by esskay » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 10:06 AM UTC

chvid wrote: post #35

I don’t understand why they are not reintroducing the Apple Xserve?

whos going to buy one? You cant trust them not to kill it within a few years and cease all software updates AND make it impossible to install a different OS to keep it going. Until they stop being dicks about what you can do with the hardware you own it's a non starter.

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

#88

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 10:06 AM UTC

fsuts wrote: post #47

Apple doesn’t have an ads business, and it is inevitable that Google/openai/Anthropic are going to seek to monetise consumer ai via ads. So the ad free Apple on device experience will be welcome.

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by Sebastian_09 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 10:07 AM UTC

What I’m not sure to understand is that if you want to just run Claude code or openclaw type software with llm apis or subscriptions (and not run local models) to benefit from a local file system and always-on capability for ‘second brain’ type of workflows, I guess you don’t need a Mac mini but can run it on a raspberry pi or an old laptop ? Does anyone have experience with that ?

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

#90

Post by esskay » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 10:08 AM UTC

pantulis wrote: post #41

Being a Mac switcher since 2003 I am as much of a fanboy as anybody else but this quote from the article caught my attention, and smells like PR. > Many AI tools are also Mac-first or Mac-only I fail to recall AI tools Mac-only general purpose AI or agentic tools. Most of the claws, harnesses, studios and inference engines seem to be multiplatform. You can say you can run then in a Mac with a nicer UI wrapper or what…

oMLX[1] is the only one that comes to mind but it's not exactly unique to mac, it just runs MLX models and provides a nice gui. It does have the whole paged SSD KV cache thing, not sure if thats working on other platforms.

[1] https://omlx.ai/