Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Central heating / thinking.
Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
171–180 of 327 posts
Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
#172Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
#173People bought diesel cars as miles per gallon was higher than petrol. People are buying apple unified as electricity costs in many countries are very high, so cheaper to run than Nvidia setup. As non-apple unified memory options increase, many people will have more choose those
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Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
#174Apple 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/
But that would be more for enterprise usage. I cannot imagine a personal computing usage which can justify a 10k machine.
Apple does like to market their hardware for education and small business customers, though.
I think "buy this $10,000 box and to easily grant every Macbook Neo on your team safe, private, free AI" could be a real winner.
Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
#175What 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 ?
it's only because you can send texts via imessage on a macmini. that's it.
Not even. It's literally "yeah bro, you gotta get a Mac Mini".
Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
#176Apple 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/
Bring back xServe!
Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
The remote access story for macOS is absolute sadness, without Jump Desktop there would be zero performant ways to access that “system under my control”. And all of that because Tim Apple fears any feature that could mean people could have less than one iDevice per person.
I'm curious what you mean. I have been accessing Macs remotely over SSH and VNC for like 20 years and it's always been easy and as performant as the network would allow.
The built in high rez screen sharing between Macs works well too. Through Tailscale I’ve accessed my main Mac from both the opposite coast of the US and from the other side of the Pacific and it works great.
Host resolution automatically matches that of client, image quality is great, framerate is decent, latency is minimal. The host creates virtual screens for the connection so connected screens don’t light up and the machine remains locked to anybody accessing it physically too, which is a nice privacy assurance.
Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
#178Running 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…
How is it a pain exactly? It’s just learning and only takes a day or two to get up to speed. We seem to have forgotten that for the past fifty years doing all kinds of tasks on computers has been tedious and involved and time consuming to even get working. My first computer had 48kb of RAM and to play a game you had to load it off cassette for five minutes. That was annoying. Having LM Studio download a model and loa…
Not to mention you can just ask Codex or Claude Code to set up a local LLM for you. Use one tool to set up the other.
Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
#179Apple 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/
The out-of-stock $6000 M3 Ultra Mac Studios with 800GB+ memory bandwidth are going for $24,000 on eBay, so yes definitely
How much did Apple sell them for?
Re: Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
#180What 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 ?
Correct. You do benefit from some headroom for things like launching browsers etc but refurbs or mini PCs (with at least 16gb; ideally 32gb of memory) from the likes of Minisforum or GMKTec work well enough if you're wanting to spend a little bit of money.