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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

#371

Post by socalgal2 »

wilkystyle wrote: post #171
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.

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 blo…

I think the price is beyond that though. AFAICT, there's not competitively fast image or video generation on Mac. To buy it will cost me $4000-$12000. So I rent.

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

#372

Post by dwaite »

vikramkr wrote: post #326
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.

I don't think you need the scare quotes. product lifecycles can take years and the actual neo demand was actually pretty insane. They were using it to soak up demand for binned a18 chips and it would have been irresponsible to forecast that they'd have the demand they did when there's another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. this article's also about enterprise d…

> another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped.

The target audience didn't evaluate that as a limitation - the majority of the market for Apple devices does trust that they will not produce and sell a computer incapable of support their use.

Professionals know there are tasks that a baseline computer cannot handle, and even common tasks that a more powerful computer does better, but those people weren't really the target demo for the laptop.

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

#373

Post by Gigachad »

vikramkr wrote: post #326
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.

I don't think you need the scare quotes. product lifecycles can take years and the actual neo demand was actually pretty insane. They were using it to soak up demand for binned a18 chips and it would have been irresponsible to forecast that they'd have the demand they did when there's another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. this article's also about enterprise d…

I think people just hate subscriptions so much they are willing to make an obviously worse financial choice to buy upfront.

I’d be willing to pay more to own vs subscribe, but the gap is currently far too large where buying a Mac Studio for AI is a straight up terrible investment.

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

#374

Post by Gigachad »

hx8 wrote: post #343
CrimsonCape wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

All of the use cases I see seem like stuff that’s better performed by normal software. Dependabot will watch for new versions and submit a PR for free.

AI for developing software that runs predictably seems more useful than AI performing actions like a program would.

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

#375

Post by pertymcpert »

rglover wrote: post #306
Danox wrote: post #298

What’s going on isn’t Apple behind in AI model building I thought I read that somewhere on the MacRumors site in the last two years, that Apple is behind its tech peers and Apple might as well just close the doors. I always thought Apple was in a good position because unlike their peers they didn’t burn billions of dollars trying to build an AI model that has no financial moat around it. I still think they’re in a go…

They're making the smartest possible move: let others burn insane amounts of capital and time finding the quirks and once they see a viable lane, execute. It's old Steve Jobs logic. Works backwards from the customer experience to the technology (they're the only big player I see doing this).

I feel like they failed upwards into the right strategy. I doubt it was deliberate and not because of the failure of their foundation models to decent.

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

#376

Post by ipsum2 »

nullbio wrote: post #352

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 Ope…

Apple's marketing isn't that smart. They're very traditional. You give them way too much credit.

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

#377

Post by try-working »

kristianp wrote: post #368
try-working wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree about getting the Ultra if you're interested in AI (LLM) inference speed. I'm a little perplexed as to why there isn't a RAM option in between 96GB and 256GB, though. For instance, I believe Deepseek v4 flash runs a lot faster on ( https://github.com/antirez/ds4 ) with 128GB than 96. I assume the higher SKUs have low enough sales that Apple doesn't want to be manufacturing too many different RAM configs as th…

It's the upsell ladder. This is how they get you to buy a more expensive tier or two. At first I was only going to look at 64gb or 128gb Max, but ended up here.

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

#378

Post by corndoge »

ipsum2 wrote: post #376
nullbio wrote: post #352

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 Ope…

Apple's marketing isn't that smart. They're very traditional. You give them way too much credit.

Any justification for this claim?
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