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

macrumors.com

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

#61

Post by scrumper »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #46

Mac Mini's were really nice HTPC candidates, too, before the AI boom. Like all things genuinely useful and affordable, they were snatched from the hands of normal consumers by a bunch of schmucks chasing the latest gold rush.

I need a new little Mac for my music studio, currently an M2 MacBook Pro. I thought I'd be fun to experiment with some local models as well. Well, let's price up an M5 Pro. $3,019 with 64GB RAM and a 1TB HD. Three thousand American dollars for a Mac Mini. Beefy spec for sure but not comically so.

Frankly even the entry price is a bit high - I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model.

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

#62

Post by htrp »

monatron wrote: post #44
paxys wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

yes, you have to unfortunately adopt a 2025 mindset when working with smaller local models because that's where they are compared to the frontier.

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

#63

Post by inventor7777 »

Grombobulous wrote: post #19

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…

One use case I find cost effective is using it as a voice assistant for Home Assistant. API pricing on models is very weird compared to the normal chats, so I use Qwen/GPT-OSS on my Mac Studio via llama.cpp server.

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

#64

Post by digitalsushi »

xnx wrote: post #55
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uncensored models are also popular reasons, although it’s more of a niche.

Aren't those also commonly available from cloud providers?

i'd say 'with' instead of 'from', the cloud provider rents you the hardware, what you run on it, is whatever you show up with

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

#65

Post by Nevermark »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #29
SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their universal RAM strategy is so obviously helpful for AI. (1) GPU/NPU CPU RAM copies eliminated. (2) All (most) RAM available for GPU/Neural, when local models are typically kneecapped by limited GPU RAM sizes vs. the much larger RAM options for M/Max/Pro/Ultras.

They have been taking NPU's seriously on their phones, tablets and laptops since the M1.

Then they enabled fully-connected RDMA for 4 x 512GB MacStudio's = 2TB RAM. Perfect for a large Mixture-of-Experts model.

It would be very strange if they didn't notice their product line had landed in a new sweet spot.

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #28
Grombobulous wrote: post #19

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.

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by xienze »

scrumper wrote: post #56
spacedcowboy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.)

Parent mentioned their $20/month subscription. It's definitely in Anthropic's interests for you to not use it.

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

#68

Post by jasode »

Grombobulous wrote: post #19

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…

>I realize I’m somewhat limited (16GB RTX 9070), but still, it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me.

I just ordered a new Mac Studio M5 Max 128GB $5899 ($6400 with tax) to be able to run the bigger "consumer size" models in the 70B parameter range (~96 GB). That said, I have no illusions that this expensive setup with a Qwen Flash coding LLM will be comparable to a $20/month subscription. Even upgrading to an even more expensive Mac Ultra 256GB for $10000 to hold a bigger model still won't be comparable. Apple hasn't shipped my Mac yet and I'm still considering cancelling it and downgrading to a smaller 64GB RAM config ($4299) to save $1600.

Why did I initially spend the extra $1600 if I knew ahead of time that it wasn't as good as cloud AI? Because I thought I could use some local LLM for the easy tasks or when I hit cloud rate limits. No issues with privacy so that wasn't part of the motivation at all. I just wanted some local AI capability to augment a subscription. I've not totally convinced myself of the cost/benefit of this.

Based on today's consumer hardware landscape, you're paying very high prices for crippled capability compared to the cloud AI subscriptions. We're also in a transition period where the next iteration of hardware improvements have some compelling features for local AI. Apple's upcoming M7 (2027 or 2028) is anticipated to have better GPU and neural engine to help with prefill TTFT. AMD Strix Halo is about to release 192GB system which is a big upgrade to their current 128GB ai pc. Maybe apply my $1600 savings towards those newer products. Those future products will still be very expensive but maybe the cost/benefit will be better.

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

#69

Post by villish »

fisle wrote: post #34
Grombobulous wrote: post #19

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…

Could you elaborate on your experience with local models on your card? I've been thinking of upgrading to 9070 XT, and was thinking the 16GB would be okay-ish to at least run something usable locally, no?

If you have been using cloud hosted models, you will be severely disappointed with what you’d be able to run on 16GB VRAM. You will spend most of your time fighting with the model to fix its mistakes.

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

#70

Post by yardie »

setgree wrote: 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.…

You should listen to the podcast Acquired, specifically Nvidia and then Jensen Huang. They basically lucked into AI. Some researcher was using Nvidia gaming cards, and reached out to them about questions on CUDA. That email eventually turned them into a trillion dollar question.
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