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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

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Well it's not just text to text. It's text to code, text to images, research. For me 200 is too much but my 20€ sub yeah I do find that worth it. If I actually made money with it (I don't and I don't want to) the 200 one probably would start making sense. If I were using it all day I'm sure it would save me more than that 200 by simply being able to do more work.

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

#384

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.

What is useful marketing in saying "we could have made more money but accidentally didn't"?

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

#385

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…

Additional source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpqGf0m5FaQ

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

#386
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> 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.

Well, kinda the point. We know this to be fully true in retrospect (and many people correctly predicted it) but decent arguments existed against it at time of release.

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

#387
post #273

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.

Two thoughts. A $20/month Gemini subscription is truly all you need, then yeah, sure.... obviously a homelab setup is a ridiculous alternative on a pure cost basis. For most people doing "real" work with LLMs 40+ hours per week, a more apt comparison would be one or multiple $200/month subscriptions. At which point the break-even point of a homelab is much sooner. However, most people running homelabs are doing it fo…

I love this quote from a homelab reddit:

- Is that even worth the electricity price compared to api? - We don't ask that here

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

#388

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…

It's not. This article is weirdly light on details. The original source article from The Information apparently mentions that companies like OpenAI are buying them up to run RL. So it's yet another case of AI companies buying all the compute.

* I say apparently because The Information wants you to sign up for access to the article, but I found this mentioned in multiple summaries of the article like this one [1].

[1]: https://tech-insider.org/openai-mac-buying-apple-supply-shor...

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

#390

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…

This may be your experience

For mine I was on the fence - waited an hour or so and the delivery date went from early oct to 10-12 weeks so i decided to wait on the 512gb version

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