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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

#171

Post by wilkystyle »

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.

This is such a tired argument and it seems to be parroted every single time someone talks about local models on hacker news.

Yes, of course the most economical path is to hand over all your data and become fully dependent on a cloud provider who is already operating as scale, hoping that they won't change/remove models, hamstring capabilities, or raise prices.

If this were a thread about hosting your own email or blog or cloud photos, you'd have plenty of people out here telling you how easy it is to do it yourself instead of relying on Gmail for email or WordPress/Medium/Substack for blogging, or iCloud for cloud photos.

And yet, without fail, every single thread about self hosting local models seems to have some copy/paste form of this cost-savings argument.

Where is the appreciation for this cool thing GP built? Where is the appreciation for the desire to figure out how to host your own version of the incredible capabilities that were not available merely a few years ago? And why, on this site of all places, would someone advocate trading all of the knowledge and independence gained from learning how to host something like this ourselves in favor of throwing it all over the wall to Google?

Come on.

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

#172

Post by alasdair_ »

There is a lot of "AI demand" that isn't just running inference on an LLM whose weights you downloaded.

I'm training a model using reinforcement learning with self-play. I can and do use vast.ai when scaling but for experiments it's far faster, and cheaper, to run it locally until the bugs are all figured out. Just provisioning a new instance and copying the relevant checkpoints and things can take 25 minutes. It's zero locally.

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

#173

Post by m4rtink »

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.

Do you believe Gemini will costs the same in 45 months or even exist, given Google track record ?

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

#174

Post by jtbaker »

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.

having a 64GB mac mini m4 pro the last few years with some increasingly capable usefulness has kept me interested in this stuff in a way that using a paid platform wouldn't have. Similar to running K8s in a homelab, something about interacting with the hardware makes it more engaging/interesting, for me at least.

In general, I'm a big believer in doing more with fewer resources, within reason, and think having local setups really helps me be mindful with what's happening under the hood with these systems and managing context efficiently to get high quality results.

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

#175

Post by nomel »

pizza234 wrote: post #127
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…

There are a few use cases that are (somewhat) surprisingly unsuited for cloud providers: - translations: cloud providers can bowdlerize (censor) bad words/content; also, if you want to do a translation for personal use of copyrighted materials, cloud providers may block it - image generation: generating drawings with a style that even just resembles a copyrighted one (ie. Disney) may be blocked by cloud providers - f…

Cloud does not mean censored. You can rent gpu time and run whatever model you want, with your data kept as private as any other cloud instance you personally run. Cloud is location, with (for some work) wayyyy cheaper access.

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

#176

Post by c0nsumer »

Kirby64 wrote: post #163
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…

> I have an older M2 Mac mini that does the OCR and visual description of all my screenshots. Screenshots are stored on my NAS. Doesn't Apple do this already within it's OS all locally? It certainly does it for OCR and categorization. EDIT: Also, no reason to use a generic LLM for this. This functionality exists in something like Immich (both OCR and 'context categorization'), and doesn't tie you into the Apple ecosy…

I personally use Apple Photos for this. It stores the original, plus makes them nicely searchable, so I have a Hazel action that takes screenshots from the desktop (and from my NAS where mobile devices back them up) and imports them.

Works out really well.

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

#177

Post by pmontra »

compounding_it wrote: post #5

More customers is generally a good problem to have in most businesses. Just that the situation is very paradoxical given the supply shortages.

If those customers are in the market you want to develop. If they are not, money is money but if it comes from the wrong people it might slow you down.

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

#178

Post by reaperducer »

ThreeFinger wrote: post #153
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.

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.

I've been using one for about a decade as a media server.

It just sits in the cabinet happily running the macOS TV program with the video files on an external hard drive. Playback on the TV is handled by the AppleTV's built-in Computer app. Works beautifully.

I have more movies and TV shows on that box than I could watch in my lifetime — a combination of ripped DVDs (Netflix, public library, and purchased) and OTA recordings.

When the cable goes out in my neighborhood (frequently), or a big storm screws up satellite reception (seasonally), I just don't care because I'm all localhost. As long as the lights stay on, everything is fine.

No ads. No privacy violation. No fees. No bandwidth congestion. No buffering. No subscription rate increases. All I pay for is electricity.

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

#179

Post by Aurornis »

m4rtink wrote: post #173
tiahura wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you believe Gemini will costs the same in 45 months or even exist, given Google track record ?

The options available across the board are getting cheaper and better all the time.

There is no reason to believe that equivalent level model output will be more expensive in 12 months, let alone almost 4 years from now.

Of all the good reasons to use local AI (privacy, etc), worrying about not having access to cheap models in 4 years is not one of them.

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

#180

Post by FireBeyond »

SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #23
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.…

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.

Tim Cook has been touted as the greatest supply chain logistics person on the planet and revolutionizing Apple's product delivery, securing exclusive contracts years in advance, etc., etc.

But "oops, we missed that people are interested in AI work on our machines" seems like a really fucking big myopia. But then again, Tim's off to retire on a bed made of cash this week, so...

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