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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

#351

Post by Danox »

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 isn’t the company that eats margins but they are company that would design around the problem and I think that’s what they will do after all, they have the design and engineering and plenty of money because they didn’t burn it on AI models or data centers.

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

#352

Post by nullbio »

I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple. When this started spreading a day or two ago, it was all from no-name spam media sites that are paid to publish articles. They all claimed "a source" is where they got the intel, without specifying the source. It was spreading like wildfire on socials.

The same thing happened with Mac Mini's and OpenClaw. Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple marketing bots (you could tell by looking at their post history, where they would drop "Mac Mini" into every conversation they could across all different subreddits and unrelated topics). Then it became fairly common.

So Apple's marketing department is seemingly using the same strategy again. Because still, it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim.

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

#353

Post by jonchurch_ »

InterviewFrog wrote: post #340
CrimsonCape wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I used it initially. It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high.. Now, I use claude code directly on my machine with the remote control flag.. so its like open claw exactly. I can be outside and give commands to it via mobile app

caffeinate -is -t 7200 claude --remote-control

then Control + Command + Q ftw

(keep system from sleeping if plugged in, keep system from going idle even if not plugged in, for 2 hours, start claude code w/ remote control enabled, lock my mac w/ the keyboard shutcut)

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

#354

Post by try-working »

jasode wrote: post #68
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 realize I’m somewhat limited (16GB RTX 9070), but still, it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me. I just ordered a new Mac Studio M5 Max 128GB $5899 ($6400 with tax) to be able to run the bigger "consumer size" models in the 70B parameter range (~96 GB). That said, I have no illusions that this expensive setup with a Qwen Flash coding LLM will be comparable t…

I think the M5U Ultra 96gb is the sweetspot in that price range. It has more compute and bandwidth so you get to run models better sized to its hardware. I believe the Max would be too slow; personally I'm getting this SKU because I think it'd suck to get the 128gb Max and then discover it's too slow, and end up just using cloud providers anyway.

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

#355

Post by Danox »

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?

Probably two generations away. I’m more interested in how much uplift/speed and more importantly what is the power usage is required for the new computers Apple is shipping particularly for the Studio versions.

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

#356

Post by SamInTheShell »

vardalab wrote: post #295
unsnap_biceps wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you actually using the local model? I've played with Qwen 3.8 27b on ollama and the coding harnesses (Claude Code and OpenCode) seem to fail way more often then using the cloud models. And by fail, I mean the edits don't apply cleanly, it goes to add python code, but doesn't indent it properly, or the edit doesn't apply and so it tries again and again and eventually wipes out a different function then it "int…

try using pi harness, hae not encountered these sort of problem myself also yuou can ask codex to look at the transcript and figure out the solutions to tool call failures that way

I should have mentioned in my prior comment, I didn't have any issues in Pi either.

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

#357

Post by tassadarforaiur »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #197
alasdair_ wrote: post #172

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 z…

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…

Have you looked into those tinycorp nvidia drivers for thunderbolt egpus on Mac?

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

#358

Post by giantrobot »

xattt wrote: post #24
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.…

Was this the case in the past? My vibes were that Apple wound down the “actual work” side of their operations (including machines like Xserve), because Ives couldn’t handle the unsexiness and unpredictability of business requirements in hardware. He was self-indulgent and only wanted to work on things that “vibed” with him, rather than what the customers needed. It’s easy to be creative when you get to do what you wa…

Apple has not in the past three decades really courted the capital E Enterprise market. They'll definitely sell to Enterprise customers and have Enterprise sales teams for big customers. But they're not and never have been Dell or HP.

Enterprise sales sucks. There's infinite amounts of politicking and glad handing and buyers will get all sorts of sweet brib..."sales dinners" then go with the cheapest option. Margins on hardware sucks and the only money is in support contracts. Apple instead invests in consumer sales/support primarily and all the other channels are side businesses.

Stuff like the Xserve existed mostly for Apple internal purposes and ended up being sold externally to goose the scale enough to make them not a huge loss. At one point a large percentage of the offices on Bubb road were packed with Xserves running portions of the iTunes Music Store and the Apple online store. More offices were packed with Xserves doing media ingest and encoding for iTMS. Just about every building had racks of them as build and file servers.

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

#360

Post by nullbio »

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…

Apple has a huge marketing budget, and evidently, they are not beyond using unethical tactics to sell their products. That's how it started.
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