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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

#151

Post by adolph »

adastra22 wrote: post #131
caycep wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to their credit, there was a lot of work behind "luck". Jensen showed up in person in 2017 in NEURIPS and he and likely a lot of his top brass basically sat down and read the entire conference proceedings/abstracts; there was likely a lot of work behind the scenes to behind the ML research pivot.

Yeah, The NVIDIA Way goes into a lot of detail on how and why the pivot from graphics to AI happened. This is a prime example of “you make your own luck.” Jensen engineered an organization that was primed to recognize and pounce on the next big thing, and it ended up being AI. But they saw it coming WAY in advance (like 2011/2012, not 2017) because they were explicitly on the lookout.

> an organization that was primed to recognize and pounce on the next big thing

e.g.: previous crypto hype-cycle

https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-cmp-graphics-card-availabilit...

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

#152

Post by PaulStatezny »

spacephysics wrote: post #118
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…

Also, the $20/month subscriptions are HEAVILY subsidized, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison really

For the amount of tokens you get, based on your comment, ALL subscriptions are heavily subsidized, and the most expensive ones are the most subsidized.

For OpenAI and Anthropic, the $100 subscriptions cost 5x the $20 subscriptions and give you 5x the tokens. And the $200 subscriptions are 10x the cost for 20x the tokens. (Tokens cost 50% as much.)

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

#153

Post by ThreeFinger »

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.

Isn’t a Mac mini annoying to use as an HTPC? You have to deal with a remote, software, and a full OS, compared with an Apple TV, which has a good remote and is optimized for TV use.

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

#154

Post by Someone »

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?

> Banks, Biglaw, and the Pentagon all do it in the cloud.

In _a_ cloud: their own virtual private cloud. They also have enough power to negotiate contracts with strong privacy provisions.

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

#155

Post by pletnes »

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’d be curious to use them on larger data sets. Log files, for instance. High volume, might be low value per line but not much cost per token if you already have a gpu to interpret them using a LLM.

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

#156

Post by homarp »

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.

except

a) model I pick will not 'suddenly' go away

b) I am sure my data stays where I want it

c) my inference mac can run other things if I need to

I pay for that.

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

#157

Post by mlboss »

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…

Data privacy and "unsafe" models are pretty valid reasons to use local models. If I want to generate violent images/text you cannot do that using cloud models.

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

#158

Post by catoc »

Sir_Twist wrote: post #106
catoc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wish they would sand off liquid glass

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

#159

Post by jmalicki »

Someone wrote: post #154
tiahura wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Banks, Biglaw, and the Pentagon all do it in the cloud. In _a_ cloud: their own virtual private cloud. They also have enough power to negotiate contracts with strong privacy provisions.

> They also have enough power to negotiate contracts with strong privacy provisions.

What privacy provisions would you want to add to AWS? Most of the reasonable strong privacy provisions you'd want are already there and/or available if you want to sign up for it, even including US Govt Top Secret data if you meet some approval.

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

#160

Post by flyingshelf »

scrumper wrote: post #61
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 h…

Kinda sad that in 2026 1TB and 62GB of RAM is considered "beefy". We had 1TB iPhones for 5 years.

The only reason for this huge speedbump is that chip makers have been dragging their feet for the last 10 years with "just enough" memory.

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