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

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

#141

Post by cyanydeez »

TechSquidTV wrote: post #130
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…

In my limited experience, not quite yet but we are damn close. Qwen 3.8 27b is it. If I could run this as a decent speed, I would no longer need cloud models at all. I'm actually currently trying it out in the cloud to pay for the inference speed but the model is fully runnable at home. I realistically costs $5-10k to replicate a ChatGPT like agent. And it doesn't scale. That's still really close. And models and quan…

Qwen 3.8 at 27b, 4bit MTP, Full context, in 72GB blackwell is 2-3x agents.

If you have a real product and can actually sell it, youre taking a largish risk relying on the cloud.

From model changes, alignment, to enshittification and the natural cognitive offloading, you could be one day removed and ROI tanked.

Think of AI like a mafia boss who helpfully supports you untill they need a favor. Thats all cloud AI is in America.

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

#142

Post by codazoda »

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…

In my experience they work well for some jobs.

I recently built a minimal Dark Software Factory out of an N150 Mini PC. It uses three models; Sonnit, Sol, and Gemma.

But, I have a LOT of instructions about how I prefer the software it builds. Gemma doesn’t handle all my instructions very well. But it’s close!

I’m running gemma-4-12b because I have limited RAM and larger models were too slow.

I do two types of jobs: planning and prototyping. It has done fine at some of my planning rounds.

I still consider it experimental and don’t use it a lot but I think we’re getting there.

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

#143

Post by shagie »

Xeoncross wrote: post #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.

> 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.

https://www.canirun.ai (five months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363754 377 comments)

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

#144

Post by tiahura »

mcotton wrote: post #117
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 simple example. I have an older M2 Mac mini that does the OCR and visual description of all my screenshots. Screenshots are stored on my NAS. I like to screenshot things as a quick way to remember. They are things that I would not be comfortable sending a cloud provider (customer data, prototype screenshots, bank dispute details). It runs Qwen3.5:9b and glm5.2-ocr with Ollama and uses about 10GB of RAM. It automati…

A new base model mac mini is $900. That is 45 month of Gemini. Gemini 4.7 Flash will give better OCR results that Qwen or GLM w/ 10GB.

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

#145

Post by sharms »

hhh wrote: post #104
anslopic wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

I am running GLM 5.3 across 2x DGX Sparks and was doing comparisons and it absolutely can beat Gemini. Yesterday it corrected a poor Fable 5 response even

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

#146

Post by tiahura »

Aurornis wrote: post #25
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…

> 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…

Banks, Biglaw, and the Pentagon all do it in the cloud. What could an individual be working on that is so secretive?

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

#147

Post by nrmitchi »

tiahura wrote: post #144
mcotton wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple example. I have an older M2 Mac mini that does the OCR and visual description of all my screenshots. Screenshots are stored on my NAS. I like to screenshot things as a quick way to remember. They are things that I would not be comfortable sending a cloud provider (customer data, prototype screenshots, bank dispute details). It runs Qwen3.5:9b and glm5.2-ocr with Ollama and uses about 10GB of RAM. It automati…

A new base model mac mini is $900. That is 45 month of Gemini. Gemini 4.7 Flash will give better OCR results that Qwen or GLM w/ 10GB.

...

> They are things that I would not be comfortable sending a cloud provider

It's also an old machine that the commenter already has; it's intellectually dishonest to compare it to the price of a brand new, 4-iteration-newer machine.

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

#148

Post by Jeremy1026 »

tiahura wrote: post #144
mcotton wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple example. I have an older M2 Mac mini that does the OCR and visual description of all my screenshots. Screenshots are stored on my NAS. I like to screenshot things as a quick way to remember. They are things that I would not be comfortable sending a cloud provider (customer data, prototype screenshots, bank dispute details). It runs Qwen3.5:9b and glm5.2-ocr with Ollama and uses about 10GB of RAM. It automati…

A new base model mac mini is $900. That is 45 month of Gemini. Gemini 4.7 Flash will give better OCR results that Qwen or GLM w/ 10GB.

That doesn't help with the not wanting to send confidential information to a cloud though. No amount of cost savings can negate that.

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

#149

Post by mbreese »

tiahura wrote: post #146
Aurornis wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

Banks, Biglaw, and the Pentagon all do it in the cloud. What could an individual be working on that is so secretive?

Those companies also have data sharing/use agreements that they can get from Cloud AI providers due to their size and spend. The secrecy and data protection is largely what they are paying for. Those types of agreements just aren’t available to individual customers. It’s only when you’re spending $$$ that it becomes worth it for the provider.

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

#150

Post by 0x457 »

adastra22 wrote: post #113
apparent wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI subscriptions are too highly subsidized right now I've been running into annoying limits with Claude recently. It gives me like 5 questions over the course of 15 mins and then tells me to wait 5 hours. When companies can change things up to make the base subscription nearly useless (the last question always gets messed up, too), then you realize the value of owning your own infrastructure.

On the $200/mo plan I have never hit a five hour limit, and I struggle to use my full credits each week. $200/month is vastly cheaper than owning and operating comparable hardware.

> On the $200/mo plan I have never hit a five hour limit, and I struggle to use my full credits each week.

I started tasking fable with huge projects over the weekend and now I hit at very least fable limit by monday.

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