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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

#201

Post by smallmancontrov »

swader999 wrote: post #158
IsTom wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If demand doesn't fall down or current manufacturers supply go up, somebody (presumably in China) will spin up fabs. Apple wanted to use blacklisted Chinese RAM already.

It's the euv machines that are the bottleneck. Pretty hard to ramp those up any faster in the next few years.

DDR5 is still mostly made with DUV (remember Intel 14+++++++++?), and even though manufacturers have slowly been moving a few layers to EUV the advantage is at the margin. Lack of EUV at scale will not prevent China from ramping useful RAM into this market.

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

#203

Post by brandensilva »

throw1234567891 wrote: post #82
thephyber wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But there will be and his point is they cut off supply to make room for the new M5 ultra which I hope has 768GB or more of memory.

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

#204

Post by egorfine »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #199
egorfine wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please point me out which current Mac model has enough storage for full feature video editing job? Thanks.

I dunno. It's not my bailiwick. I do know lots of pro editors use Macs, but I think they use DaVinci Resolve (not Final Cut Pro). I'm interested in finding out what you use for it. I've been using Macs for all kinds of stuff, since 1986, so I can definitely state they get work done.

I'm being sarcastic here.

But I still strongly believe that Apple hates pro users because they don't make as much money and because they get in the way of serving laymen. The Aperture fiasco, the Final Cut Saga, the Xcode war of attrition and the never ending chain of failures with MacPro - all suggest that I'm right.

(Developer of a major plugin for DaVinci here)

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

#205

Post by pstoll »

Except that Mac ultra M3 they talk about is now only being sold in the 96 GB configuration. It’s no longer being sold in larger Ram configurations by Apple Apple because of the global RAM shortage. And you can not add memory after purchase because it’s integrated/soldered on.

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

#206

Post by skybrian »

Sebastian_09 wrote: post #89

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 ?

You don’t need a Mac Mini just for that, but they’re fairly inexpensive (or were anyway) and quality is very good. The people who buy them may never use all the performance available, but they’re more interested in convenience than getting the cheapest thing possible.

You can sort of justify it by assuming it will last a long time and they’ll use it for other things, too.

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

#207

Post by jdc0589 »

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 +…

I'm keeping an eye on Tenstorrent for this. Pricing seems like its going to end up being in between a super memory dense unified memory platform, and a purpose built GPU.

Definitely on the edge of what would make sense at home, but its interesting.

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

#208

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

egorfine wrote: post #204
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. It's not my bailiwick. I do know lots of pro editors use Macs, but I think they use DaVinci Resolve (not Final Cut Pro). I'm interested in finding out what you use for it. I've been using Macs for all kinds of stuff, since 1986, so I can definitely state they get work done.

I'm being sarcastic here. But I still strongly believe that Apple hates pro users because they don't make as much money and because they get in the way of serving laymen. The Aperture fiasco, the Final Cut Saga, the Xcode war of attrition and the never ending chain of failures with MacPro - all suggest that I'm right. (Developer of a major plugin for DaVinci here)

Good on ya. I'm not interested in fighting about this stuff. I've had people hating on me for using Apple since the 1980s. It gets a bit old. Sort of like high school popularity contests.

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

#209

Post by tl »

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/

I asked an Apple (via a sales rep who visited our company to showcase in internal iPad healthcare app) to please do this for iCloud when iCloud Drive was in-development. We would have easily paid $50,000 for a rack-able Mac Pro you could point "managed" devices at.

Apple simply cannot comprehend the ask.

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

#210

Post by blitzar »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #185
blitzar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having worked at Apple for over a couple of decades, I can attest there are some very (very) capable and intelligent people there. I trust they know more about their business model than some rando on the internet, sorry.

Those of us that are less capable and less intelligent must just be holding it wrong.
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