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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

#251

Post by jmalicki »

wat10000 wrote: post #244
jmalicki wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's quite shocking to me how many experienced, tech-savvy people, who used to care about cookies and ad tracking - are now willingly sending their business strategies, highly confidential contracts, and intimate personal issues to a cloud provider because "it is only $0.0x per million tokens!". Because there are more privacy guarantees there, depending on the provider. "But what if they violate their contract!" is…

I'm not sure about the tin-foil-hattedness of worrying about them violating their contract. But that's by-the-by. It is definitely not tin-foil-hat to worry about the data being taken in a breach.

It's no different than generally using AWS.

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

#252

Post by hawk_ »

redox99 wrote: post #193
mirekrusin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

32GB is not enough, it's unified/shared memory, you need to have space for usual system and user apps/services. 64GB+ or dedicated 48GB (2x24 on GPUs) is IMHO absolute minimum.

32GB of fast unified memory is enough for Qwen 3.8 27B. - 16GB for the weights at Q4 - 9GB for the full 256K context at Q8 - 7GB spare for overhead and system. The problem is that these Macs have 32GB of slow unified memory. Edit: I'm thinking of a headless Mac mini, if you meant running it on the same machine you're using of course you'll need more memory, but LLMs are best served from a headless server so that's wh…

Is this for setup for agentic coding? Why not also run the IDE compiler etc... on the same machine to use those CPU cores as well?

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

#253

Post by ghostly_s »

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.…

> "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"

This is clearly a mis-statement, they have a whole annual conference for developers. Maybe they mean specifically AI devs.

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

#254

Post by randomblock1 »

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's not that far off anymore. On my 7900 XTX 24GB, I can run Qwen3.8 27B with 131K context at Q4_K_M (55 tok/s with MTP). Excluding hardware cost, it's about $0.02 tok/M in and $0.40 tok/M out (cached in $0.0001). On OpenRouter, that would cost more than 10x what it actually costs me.

Of course, 131k context at 4-bit quant is a trade off, but even then, it's VERY capable. It doesn't feel that far behind something like GPT 5.6 Luna.

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

#257

Post by jckahn »

tristor wrote: post #134
Xeoncross wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mistaken. I'm running Qwen 3.7 28B 4bit (MLX) with a 200k context window and everything total is 32GB RSS. Is this the best? No. That's why I said the sweet spot. Getting from 16GB macs to 32GB is perhaps possible. Jumping to 64GB or 128GB as the default is simply unreasonable right now.

I assume you mean Qwen 3.8-27B? Yes, you can run this in 32GB of RAM, but it's very context limited. With KV cache compression and other techniques, it's better now than in the past, but I'd still want more RAM, personally. EDIT to add that you need to reserve 8GB for the system if you don't want to cause problems on macOS, which means 32GB RAM = 24GB max for model + context. It takes 18-19GB to load a 4-bit quant of…

I run Qwen 3.8 27B just fine on my Mac mini M4 24GB. I use Unsloth's Q3 XXS with 128k context. It successfully completes long horizon tasks with OpenCode.

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

#258

Post by embedding-shape »

alasdair_ wrote: post #184
scrumper wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I bought a 5090 a year an a half ago for $2000. The same card, now a year and a half older, is $4000. Then there is the RAM - I bought 96GB, wishing it was 128, and now the price on my old RAM has doubled. Stuff is crazy expensive.

> Then there is the RAM - I bought 96GB, wishing it was 128, and now the price on my old RAM has doubled.

I also bought 96GB some while ago but after the initial increases, thinking I'll wait it out. Now 128GB is far more expensive than it was when I first looked. Luck has it I want DDR5 RDIMM as well, which seems the hardest hit when it comes to RAM prices, fun stuff.

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

#259

Post by wilkystyle »

Aurornis wrote: post #179
m4rtink wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely you cannot possibly believe there is no reason.

Don't get me wrong: I hope you are right, and I am generally optimistic about the future of AI.

But do you really think, in a world filled with examples of big software companies repeatedly taking away or hamstringing capabilities we've taken for granted, that you can just count on a big tech company hosting cheap inference on incredibly powerful models forever? Surely we have learned by now that these companies do not exist to provide a public service to us, and the government cannot always be counted on to have the best interests of the citizens in mind.

I mean, how many times have we seen this in just the past decade or two?

- Consistent attempts to pass legislation weakening or banning the use of encryption

- Exorbitant Reddit API pricing (still salty about the death of the amazing Apollo app)

- Google fighting against sideloading on android

- US gov't issuing export control directive to suspend access to Fable/Mythos

- US lawmakers considering ways to regulate adoption of open weight models

- Chinese officials considering restricting overseas access to their most advanced models

I can absolutely see a much more restricted, closed down, and expensive future due to a combination of government regulations (regardless of which nation is doing it) and big companies rug-pulling as the check comes due on all the billions of dollars spent to get here.

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