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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

#341

Post by chacham15 »

HDBaseT wrote: post #309

Apple was also allegedly "caught off guard" by the Macbook Neo demand. I don't really see how they couldn't see the Local AI demand or demand for a cheaper Macbooks. This just reads like marketing imo.

the machines arent optimized for it is why. the main driving factor is large unified memory which makes large(r) models possible, but there isnt the gpu horsepower to back it up. essentially, it fits the corner of the market that wants large models and is ok with running them slowly which doesnt sound like it would be a large market.

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

#342

Post by segmondy »

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…

glm5.3 is matching fable in lots of places and beating it after more than 1 pass in many. now of course when i say this, folks would claim that it's not local, but it can be. if you happen to own a mac studio 512gb, you could run it.

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

#343

Post by hx8 »

CrimsonCape wrote: post #334
InterviewFrog wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a strong suspicion its because of openclaw mania that happened like 3 to 4 months ago. Basically you can have your own 24/7 AI Employee. At-least thats the appeal and folks were buying mac minis massively. Just my gut feel. Everybody moved on from that now. But it was a big deal back then.

If you use OpenClaw now can you tell us how it's going?

I've been using it since about February, still using it. It's running on my old M1 MBP. I have a lot of automations on OpenClaw, things like "Every week summarize this data and send me a message about it" or "check when a new version of an NPM package comes out and submit a PR to update it."

It's quite expensive from a value per token perspective. It's quite cheap from a "send one message from my phone and it does something probably productive" perspective. No major security breaches yet.

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

#344

Post by Danox »

bel8 wrote: post #214
GeekyBear wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Classic monopoly move: Control the user base, then control hardware Classic monopoly move by who? Apple created MLX as an open source framework to allow users to run any open model locally.

just to clarify, models already ran locally without MLX years before it existed, on non-Apple environments. MLX was just Apple's bridge to what already ran in other hardware.

Apple Pay is a bridge too because at the time the other pay services didn’t care about doing anything for the Mac, and over the years that’s the way it’s been that’s the way it goes when you’re the last vertical computer company left from the 1980s, the Apple Watch and Apple Maps is also a bridge for the same reason…

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

#345

Post by MaxikCZ »

jubilanti wrote: post #226
jmyeet wrote: post #119

So for people who don't understand, there are two markets for Apple hardware in this space: 1. Running an agent like OpenClaude. The $599 Mac Mini was an insanely good deal for this. I happened to buy a M5 Pro Mac Mini for $999 last year for other reasons. The equivalent is now almost $2000; and 2. Hardware for running inference on local models. This to me is the far more interesting market because Apple has a real o…

> 1. Running an agent like OpenClaude. The $599 Mac Mini was an insanely good deal for this. I still have zero clue how "Buy a $599 Mac Mini to have a sandboxed LLM API caller" became the default. If you're not doing local inference and don't need to inject into iMessage or iCloud, all you need to run openclaw-style harnesses that call external APIs is a Raspberry Pi 4B, an N100, an HTPC, or that 10 year old laptop s…

People bought the mac mini and then spent more money to have someone install openclaw for them, it was wild.

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

#346

Post by newsclues »

bigyabai wrote: post #86
api wrote: post #26

Apple has a huge opportunity here to lead the market for machines to run local models if they step into it. Their stuff is already better than what nVidia is offering with stuff like the DGX Spark. It's a niche market but it's a market that overlaps heavily with professionals in the AI space and lead developers, so it's a market that gets them customers in those roles. If I were running Apple I'd call the RAM price b…

Apple doesn't design GPUs on-par with Nvidia's efficiency yet. They need an architectural overhaul to be a serious competitor, which is what I'm expecting is queued up for M7. Nvidia has CUDA, AMD has CDNA, and Apple has... compute shaders, I guess?

Apple has metal and mlx

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

#347

Post by wolvoleo »

jmalicki wrote: post #162
spacephysics wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is a completely reasonable comparison for me as a consumer, since they're the costs and benefits that I'll actually get.

For now yes. But don't count on it staying that way. Even month to month the actual allowances change.

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

#348

Post by bojangleslover »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #249
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'm using a Mac to do bulk diarized transcription (STT). Most services run in the $.05-1.00+ per hour of transcribed audio. My Mac can do ~200x realtime (1 hour takes 20s or so). I can do several thousand hours per day. Its pretty incredible Not sure how much that qualifies as AI vs LLM usage, but it seems to work pretty good

What are you using for this? We tried this a few years back, could simply not find a good diarization engine.

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

#349

Post by Danox »

dhosek wrote: post #296
esotericsean wrote: post #288

Imagine if Apple truly went the route of local AI and every Mac came with a fully local, open weight Siri. They could put Anthropic and OpenAI out of business.

Presumably this is on their roadmap. The Jobs-era thing would be to come in with something that people on HN would say, “yeah, I could do this myself with open source tools” but in practice falls into the category of “I could build this $30 thing for $15 for parts and then another $15 for the parts I had to replace because I screwed up the build the first time and then $30 to just buy the damn thing” that would reall…

Apple is almost certainly building the software end of it to go along with the computers that they currently sell to the public they have the time to do it right because their biggest competition in that area would be Microsoft, but Microsoft is currently listing at sea with Copilot, Xbox, and the Surface line of computers.

Memory probably is the biggest holdup/obstacle at this moment.

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

#350

Post by wolvoleo »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #72
Nevermark wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their universal RAM strategy is so obviously helpful for AI. (1) GPU/NPU CPU RAM copies eliminated. (2) All (most) RAM available for GPU/Neural, when local models are typically kneecapped by limited GPU RAM sizes vs. the much larger RAM options for M/Max/Pro/Ultras. They have been taking NPU's seriously on their phones, tablets and laptops since the M1. Then they enabled fully-connected RDMA for 4 x 512GB MacStudio's…

I am curious about the corporate disconnect from the frontline to the generals. While the company I am in is embracing AI the disconnect and delay between what is available and possible versus what is approved and permitted is a three month window. The State employees I speak to are just now getting around to writing their usage policies for internal AI usage.

Same here. For every little use of AI we have to fill out a 3 page proposal to get a PoC for 3 weeks in copilot studio (the worst AI builder around but due to MS lobby the others are banned). Then we have to find a business sponsor to decide it's useful, find 2 financial controllers to underwrite its token cost (even if very little), go through rounds of lifecycle and governance approvals. Then we can move to preprod but nooo we're not there yet. Now comes the security review and DPIA. That's another hugely complicated process that takes months. Eventually when both are done we can go the the deployment team and go through their process which I haven't even seen yet because most of our projects got cut off beforehand.

All the while the top of the company is of course praising AI and saying we should do everything with it right away.

It's a joke really. We had to go through all this rigmarole just for an agent that does some preliminaries on a service support ticket (making sure all data was filled in correctly and contacting the requester of not) before sending it to a human for final review. It couldn't action anything, not a single thing. Just assist with the prerequisites.

And yet they call our company 'innovative'. We're certainly innovative at inventing bureaucracy.

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