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Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

macrumors.com

21–30 of 638 posts

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#21

I wish they sold something that could go in a colo - redundant power supplies, lights out management, etc. you know they have them internally...

They did. Now think they feel a stack on Minis or Studios fills the reduce needs better. The multiple machines one gets software redundancy in addition to everything else.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#22
post #10

I wish they sold something that could go in a colo - redundant power supplies, lights out management, etc. you know they have them internally...

> you know they have them internally... What makes you think that? There's a lot of data centers that sell you access to colocated Mac Mini's, they have added FileVault unlock via SSH in the boot process which also makes things easier. There's not that many reasons to run a Mac in the cloud unless you have some very specific Mac related workload.

At this point it’s a well known secret that Apple has real rack mount servers for their internal processes. They actually have officially released video of their servers in the WSJ report on their chip supply chain.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/photos-of-apples-own-ne...

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#23
post #14

It's fun to see that even an extremely large company can find unexpected product market fit [0]. Per this article, "The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy." That sounds insane in retrospect, but I think there's just inherent uncertainty in what people actually need and will use things for.…

Maybe a bit of hindsight bias / the outside view here, but I feel like they're completely asleep if they didn't anticipate strong demand for this specific use case.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#24
post #14

It's fun to see that even an extremely large company can find unexpected product market fit [0]. Per this article, "The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy." That sounds insane in retrospect, but I think there's just inherent uncertainty in what people actually need and will use things for.…

Was this the case in the past?

My vibes were that Apple wound down the “actual work” side of their operations (including machines like Xserve), because Ives couldn’t handle the unsexiness and unpredictability of business requirements in hardware.

He was self-indulgent and only wanted to work on things that “vibed” with him, rather than what the customers needed. It’s easy to be creative when you get to do what you want to do, it’s hard when you have hard constraints.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#25

I’m curious to know if these local AI setups are legitimately useful compared to cloud. I’ve struggled a lot to get something useful out of the hardware I have. I realize I’m somewhat limited (16GB RX 9070), but still, it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me. Any tips anyone might have are appreciated! I’d love to be local first and would be willing to buy hardw…

> it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me.

The $20/month subs are much stronger than the local models you can run, even with how far local models have advanced lately.

The appeal of local models is that the data never leaves your network so you can feel safer putting sensitive content into it. It also feels “free” to use when you’ve already paid for the hardware.

But it doesn’t perform better and if you do the math you’re probably not saving money either. It’s helpful for things that you can’t or don’t want to outsource to a 3rd party.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#26
Apple has a huge opportunity here to lead the market for machines to run local models if they step into it. Their stuff is already better than what nVidia is offering with stuff like the DGX Spark.

It's a niche market but it's a market that overlaps heavily with professionals in the AI space and lead developers, so it's a market that gets them customers in those roles.

If I were running Apple I'd call the RAM price bubble for what it is and temporarily eat some margin to offer machines with more RAM than competitors, especially these models that are great for edge AI, and capture market share.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#27
post #14

It's fun to see that even an extremely large company can find unexpected product market fit [0]. Per this article, "The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy." That sounds insane in retrospect, but I think there's just inherent uncertainty in what people actually need and will use things for.…

It's also fun to see how many people here believed this was all some clear deliberate strategy in the first place rather than an accident.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#28

I’m curious to know if these local AI setups are legitimately useful compared to cloud. I’ve struggled a lot to get something useful out of the hardware I have. I realize I’m somewhat limited (16GB RX 9070), but still, it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me. Any tips anyone might have are appreciated! I’d love to be local first and would be willing to buy hardw…

Local setups aren't going to make sense purely from a cost perspective, and definitely not when you are buying Apple hardware. AI subscriptions are too highly subsidized right now.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#29
post #14

It's fun to see that even an extremely large company can find unexpected product market fit [0]. Per this article, "The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy." That sounds insane in retrospect, but I think there's just inherent uncertainty in what people actually need and will use things for.…

Maybe a bit of hindsight bias / the outside view here, but I feel like they're completely asleep if they didn't anticipate strong demand for this specific use case.

I don’t understand how that’s possible. They should have had a better idea of what was happening in the memory markets than pretty much any other entity.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#30
If I had to pick a product, I'd say an affordable 32GB mac would be the sweet spot for running local models that function well like Qwen 3.8.

It's true, most people don't run models, but being the default platform for running open weights seems like it has plenty of advantages right now. Just like sales benefited from developers defaulting to MacOS for most open source languages like Ruby, Go, Rust, and TypeScript.

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