Now if only they hadn't discontinued the Mac Pro. Could be quite the AI machine with multiple compute GPUs at higher bandwidth than an external Thunderbolt enclosure.
Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
51–60 of 635 posts
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#52If 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.
32GB is not enough, it's unified/shared memory, you need to have space for usual system and user apps/services.
64GB+ or dedicated 48GB (2x24 on GPUs) is IMHO absolute minimum.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#53I’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…
16GB VRAM could load a small quantised qwen 27B model but it would be a ways away from a frontier cloud model.
Though keep in mind not being beholden to shenanigans from said cloud companies (and interference from government entities!) is definitely worth something intangible.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#54I am missing something in the article. From what I am reading, AI companies are so desperate for memory they are buying Apple Systems and other hardware and striping them for RAM and maybe other components. Is that what others read ?
Apple hardware uses a unified architecture. That means the CPU and RAM are integrated together: it is very difficult/impossible to strip the RAM from these systems.
This unified architecture makes Apple hardware very good for AI work, where latency between RAM and CPU is very important
Even the SSDs (which are normally more strippable) use a proprietary hardware form factor.
I think the article mentioned the real draw:
> Apple noticeably promoted the ability to link multiple Mac Studios together into a single, more capable system for running large frontier AI models, a feature aimed at business and developer customers rather than everyday consumers.
(Couldn't read the source cited, might have more info: The Information)
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Uncensored models are also popular reasons, although it’s more of a niche.
Aren't those also commonly available from cloud providers?
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#56I’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…
I was getting semi-useful results from a 128GB M4 Max. That was a few months ago, and the models have improved (quite a bit) since then, but now I'm happy to send my $20/month to get Claude code. It's still frustrating as hell to come down in the morning, having given it a list of tasks to do overnight, with tests to pass before they're "done" and find that it worked for about 20 minutes after I went to bed, and deci…
> "not do significant work this at this late hour"
Is this Claude code? Or your local? I assume Claude? I'm more than a little staggered by this, like, it makes no sense! It doesn't even serve Anthropic's interests (surely better for them if it burns your token quota so you have to buy more the next morning.) The LLM just... decided? I'd be so mad.
WTF indeed. Can one even file bugs?
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think your last point is exactly why I'm so interested in local models. The current landscape doesn't feel sustainable. The last few months we've seen the big providers (OpenAI, Anthropic) start to play with usage limits, resets, banked resets, pulling models, etc. I think local models are close to the point where, with a sufficiently well-architected harness, you can get results that are on par with the experience…
> local models are close to the point where, with a sufficiently well-architected harness, you can get results that are on par with the experience you'd have with cloud inference
In my opinion, 98% of the work most devs would send to an AI can be capably achieved with a local model and a frontier-level model is overkill.
The goalpost moving feeds right into Anthropic and OpenAI's interests.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#58I 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.
Apple has to have significant build infrastructure to support internal iOS development, surely? They can't just be using whatever is at the developers' desk, or a big pile of Mac minis in a closet. That's far too pedestrian for Apple internal works.
Plus they did sell rackmount servers for some time.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#59I’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…
I've been experimenting with local models on an M5 Max MBP w/ 128GB of RAM since March of this year. Generally I've had very good results. Where things were lacking initially was with tool calling and the need to rely on tool calling for functionality like web search, which is otherwise well integrated in the cloud models. There is also a lot more work required on the harness side, however at this point (August 2026) there is not only much better tool calling in local models, but community supported projects have built good harnesses. Pi.dev and OpenCode + a SOTA local model is /very/ /very/ capable these days. Using LM Studio's built-in chat with a decent system prompt and proper tuning with local models is /very/ capable these days. Cloud models are still better, but it's the "harness" (not in the desktop app, but in the backend) that makes it so for the most part.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#60I’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…
The article implies the demand is for running locally. I’m not convinced, at least with a mac minis. Most people I know and myself buy the mini as it is always on, easy to setup, and isolated from my main computer which is a laptop. The mini is driving the use of the $20/month subscriptions.
As a thin client to access cloud models this is an astounding waste of money.