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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

#281

Post by [deleted] »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #240
Aurornis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The big providers are losing on average tens of billions a year on these services, so yes prices must go up. Even Moore’s won’t help in the medium-term due to shortages and difficulty/reluctance to vastly increase capacity.

[deleted]

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

#282

Post by cma »

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…

Isn't OP complaining that the price went up because people want them for AI use? I guess it also went up because of cloud AI use increasing component costs, but those local models you want to run probably were trained in the cloud..

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

#283

Post by qeternity »

hananova wrote: post #265
neverrroot wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just so incredibly disrespectful to so many people.

Yes, sociopathic tech bros making everything insanely expensive for regular people is indeed incredibly disrespectful!

You're not entitled to this stuff any more than they are.

What planet do you live on?

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

#284

Post by qeternity »

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…

> 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 what I'd recommend.

What? LLMs are best served from a massive PD disaggregated cluster of B300s connected via NVLink.

If you're running LLMs on a Mac Mini, it's because you want to run local, not because it's the best setup.

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

#285

Post by firecall »

varispeed wrote: post #275
kridsdale1 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise. I have a huge demand personally to run AI noise-filtering models on many TB per month of raw video files. It takes about 3 days per file. Apples ProRes codec is only licensed to run in high quality mode on a Mac, and so my Nvidia PC can’t do what I need. Thus, I own the beefiest Mac Studio you can currently buy. I would pay more for more TFlops. I have done local LLM on there but it wasn’t interesting. Far…

Out of curiosity, how would you transfer many TB to cloud and back if such service was available?

My guess is that it wouldn’t be TB sized files.

It’s probably files that, over the course of a month, add up to multiple TBs.

Which would suggest that a 1Gbit fibre connection would be adequate. For serious commercial usage, multi Gbit fibre is available in many places around the world.

Although being video files, they could easily be in the TB range. In which case, it would be interesting to know!

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

#286

Post by vardalab »

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…

Good 60-70 tg and 2K pp Qwen 3.8 27B FP8 can be had for about 5-6K (2xR9700 + PC) Gives about 3-4 concurrent sessions with full 262K

Fast 150+ tg and 2-8K pp Qwen 3.8 27B nvfp4 is about 8K (5090 +PC) Gives really only one concurrent session that flies because kv caching is not perfect for ninfer https://github.com/Neroued/ninfer

both are very serviceable, I prefer FP8 on 2xR9700

But, yes it doesn't scale that well but in 5 years the same hardware should still be very capable of running some great MoE models, for example Qwen 3.6 35BA3B on 5090 can fly at 600 tg

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

#287

Post by jaggederest »

firecall wrote: post #285
varispeed wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how would you transfer many TB to cloud and back if such service was available?

My guess is that it wouldn’t be TB sized files. It’s probably files that, over the course of a month, add up to multiple TBs. Which would suggest that a 1Gbit fibre connection would be adequate. For serious commercial usage, multi Gbit fibre is available in many places around the world. Although being video files, they could easily be in the TB range. In which case, it would be interesting to know!

10mbps constant = ~3TiB a month, which is close to what I assume they're doing to acquire the video (that's about what a few SD x264 streams would run). So you don't even need a fast connection, per se.

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

#290

Post by bahmboo »

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.

Yes but I also get a full fledged computer in the deal. I can sell it later. I can use it for all sorts of things like games and browsing and video editing. Paying for Gemini for other tasks is also in the mix but at the end of 4 years I get...nothing.
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