331–340 of 1001 posts
Apple Studio with maxed out M5 Ultra, 256GB RAM and 16TB storage is 18,299$. The 512GB RAM version apparently is coming in October, considering that the difference between 96GB and 256GB is priced at 4000$, the 512GB upgrade must be eye watering. So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$. The fully maxed out Apple Stud…
Leasing now an option, only $50/month (cheaper than inference subscription?), so even cash-poor can go the amortized-investment route. I've often felt there is tremendous value locked up in underutilized old computers. It would be interesting to see Apple in 3 years offering compute as a service using lease returns (or more likely, partnering with someone else to operate it (perhaps exclusively in secondary markets l…
Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value, and Mac Minis/Studios have the least depreciation of them all. I understand the benefits to both taxes and cash flow, but boy is Apple winning big on those lease offers for Studios.
I know, this is a bit of a meaningless comment, but it's funny in a way. Feels like late 90s again: - Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance. - Apple: *Meep Meep...*
The 512GB Ultra is amazing, sure. But who is it for exactly? VC funded big spender founders? In that case why would they need local AI? The ultra rich enthusiast? But there can't be too many of those. So who actually buys these?
If I can get Sol level capabilities on a $20k machine, then it is well worth it for my employer to buy me that machine for work as a workstation. When you start paying in tokens vs subscription costs due to enterprise agreements, you really start to see how much cash utilizing frontier models at the frontier costs (and I'm efficiently using luna and other models where possible!)
Even using multiple windows in parallel for as many as 5-10 hours per day, I find that I am not fully using my claude max (20x) and chatgpt pro (20x) accounts. I can for sure use up the claude max account, but chatgpt either gives me a free reset before I run out of tokens or I just fail to use the full quota. The quota for Sol seems like 10x that of Claude Opus at the same level, and forget Fable, you can use a 5 hour quota in 20 minutes.
But lets do the math:
Lets say a 20k workstation can run 1 inference at a time at the same speed you get with Sol hosted by openai (big assumption) and run an equally capable model (big assumption).
Each month this gives you about 100-170 inference hours on a Sol 20x Pro account, and 720 hours (if you utilize 24/7) on the workstation.
Assuming a 36 month amortization before the workstation has to be replaced due to no longer being able to run frontier models or is too inefficient due to electrical costs or what have you:
The monthly workstation cost is about $550 capex and $150 electricity -> $700/month
You would need about 6 Pro accounts to reach that capacity, which would cost you $1200 a month.
But this fails because:
- You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day.
- During work hours you are capable of utilizing more than 1 concurrent session. 6 Sol accounts would support as many as 20-30 during working hours, not all the time but if you could burst to that many (don't forget sub-agents and agent directed parallel agent workloads).
- In 1 year the cost of Sol level models is likely to cost a fraction of what it does now.
this leads to:
Workstation 1 Sol Pro 2 Sol Pro
Monthly cost $700 $200 $400
Raw capacity (hrs) 720 120 240
Usable capacity (hrs) 100-130 120 240
Concurrent sessions 1 3-5 6-10
$ per usable hour ~$6.00 $1.67 $1.67
Usable hours per $700 ~115 ~420 ~420Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than the iPod. The Apple exec was just “yup, you’re probably right” and then soon after the iPhone dropped
Zune was probably a better player. It was too late, and arrived when MS didn't much care. There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.
In some ways, anyway. Never owned a Zune myself, but a university classmate did and I was shocked by how poorly it handled non-Latin languages… she had a ton of Japanese and Korean songs loaded onto it, and their metadata all displayed as "missing character" blocks. She used it a lot like one might use an iPod Shuffle despite it having a nice screen because the only way to tell what was playing was by hearing it play.
By contrast my 4th gen B&W iPod which was about 5-6 years older handled unicode just fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's some mental inertia around what a computer is and what it's worth. This thing can build custom software for you, mostly autonomously. It can monitor things happening on the internet that are relevant to you, in a holistic and flexible way. We have one crawling the web for local events we'll like, and it judges them based on what it knows about us, and it tells us about the best matches every weekend,…
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For the M5 Ultra, I suspect it would be valuable for someone who wants to achieve all the above and more, but with local AI due to data privacy concerns, and also not regulated data that comes with lots of other requirements solved by more traditional approaches.
Three possibilities:
1. The type of person who deals with lots of intellectual property using expensive Mac-only desktop applications that aren't meant for servers, whose mind has formed positive associations with the term "Apple Intelligence", whose values overlap with Apple's lawyer's values, who actually stands to profit from having a Mac that's more powerful than anyone else's Mac, whose long-term goals are not impacted by planned obsolecense on a piece of computer hardware costing over $25k ($50k after 1TB SSD add-on).
2. Trust fund beneficiary who wants to show off, LARP as #1, prime target for Apple's marketing.
3. 2026 kit for billionare-class iPad babies. All brain rot content is 100% local AI-generated. Never have to speak to your children again. A true "we have dead internet theory at home" machine.
Rumors say that Apple will only release M6 base variant and skips M6 Pro, M6 Max and M6 Ultra variants to concentrate all efforts to create a good AI capable M7: "According to reports from Bloomberg, Apple will be skipping its M6 Pro, M6 Max, and M6 Ultra chips to accelerate development of the M7 chip. That means the only chip to be released from the M6 family will be the base M6. The reason for this break with tradi…
I know, this is a bit of a meaningless comment, but it's funny in a way. Feels like late 90s again: - Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance. - Apple: *Meep Meep...*
It's been really weird reading laptop reviews over the last few months. I've seen a bunch of reviews where they have their usual bar graphs comparing a bunch of laptops, and the laptop that is at the bottom is an Apple. It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops. I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a…
Of course you can beat the entry level MacBook Neo by comparing it to larger, more powerful, more expensive laptops.
The M5 is an entire family with a range of performance. Intel/AMD have done a lot to improve performance but they’re not beating the high end M5 chips on performance or battery life yet.
The 512GB Ultra is amazing, sure. But who is it for exactly? VC funded big spender founders? In that case why would they need local AI? The ultra rich enthusiast? But there can't be too many of those. So who actually buys these?
I think there's some mental inertia around what a computer is and what it's worth. This thing can build custom software for you, mostly autonomously. It can monitor things happening on the internet that are relevant to you, in a holistic and flexible way. We have one crawling the web for local events we'll like, and it judges them based on what it knows about us, and it tells us about the best matches every weekend,…
What makes this expensive & sell well is it's not very fungible at the moment. Where else are you going to get 512 GB of high speed memory with a well supported accelerator attached that you can throw in the corner of anyone's home and not really have them notice? There are plenty of lesser options, plenty of noiser/power hungry options, plenty of harder to support options, but not really something in direct competition at the moment. Even the next rounds of the integrated AMD/Nvidia solutions are only targeting 196 GB of much slower memory and compute.