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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

#101

Post by throwaway314155 »

anslopic wrote: post #97
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…

[flagged]

> You have good enough hardware to run good models comparable with Gemini and ChatGPT.

That is at best misleading and at worst outright misinformation.

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

#102

Post by stetrain »

imagetic wrote: post #91

No they weren’t.

The part where people starting buying Mac minis just to run OpenClaw was a pretty sudden movement in the market. These computers aren't powerful enough to run big local LLMs but are still being purchased for AI workflows.

A year ago you could get an M4 Mac mini for $399 on sale and now the same one used goes for over $700. The general AI RAM/SSD spike is part of that but there was also a huge demand spike for small, powerful, desktop machines that could be easily configured with these workflow tools.

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

#103

Post by chis »

anslopic wrote: post #97
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…

[flagged]

what are you smoking

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

#104

Post by hhh »

anslopic wrote: post #97
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…

[flagged]

this is insanely misleading, you can't run anything close to current chatgpt or gemini on local hardware

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

#105

Post by mixdup »

Whatarethese wrote: post #81

There are so many used M4 Mac Minis for sale on marketplace for $600+ now that the people I guess got bored of the local models and decided to see if they could make their money back as they probably bought them when they were $399 on sale earlier this year. I lowball them every time.

When the M6 Minis were announced I pre-ordered and Apple gave me $480 trade-in on my entry level M4 Mini that I paid $499 for about 14 months ago

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

#106

Post by Sir_Twist »

catoc wrote: post #75
paxys wrote: post #11

I really hope with Ternus taking the helm Apple starts to remember that it has products outside of iPhone.

I wish they would stop with the new-iPhone-every-year nonsense and refocus on quality, fix some bugs… but yeah, not gonna happen

I feel like iOS 27 is a step in this direction, in terms of sanding off the rough edges of iOS 26.

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

#107

Post by chung8123 »

Whatarethese wrote: post #81

There are so many used M4 Mac Minis for sale on marketplace for $600+ now that the people I guess got bored of the local models and decided to see if they could make their money back as they probably bought them when they were $399 on sale earlier this year. I lowball them every time.

Have you been successful with the lowball offers? That would help indicate where the supply/demand for them are.

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

#108

Post by adastra22 »

anslopic wrote: post #97
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…

[flagged]

That’s… not how any of this works. Five paragraphs and literally every one is wrong.

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

#110

Post by tylerflick »

drusepth wrote: post #94
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…

A huge benefit of local setups at our studio is that a lot of our software can't run headless, so when we're having agents work in Blender or in Unity etc with MCP that'd otherwise eat up our normal computer use. (Try to have two people try to work in the same Unity editor at once... then try ten!) We also built some QA agents that are always playing our games from the same builds a player would and flagging things t…

> A huge benefit of local setups at our studio is that a lot of our software can't run headless, so when we're having agents work in Blender or in Unity etc with MCP that'd otherwise eat up our normal computer use

I'm curious about your setup. I've been tinkering with the idea of setting up Blender (cli use) in a container to allow agents to verify the scripts they are generating compile at a minimum. One thing I've found extremely helpful was generating a RAG of the current version of Blender.

For anyone wondering, I'm running Gemma4 26b A4B on a mini PC with 32 GB of DD4 and a Vega 7 iGPU (llama.cpp w/ Vulkan).

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