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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

#391

Post by bensyverson »

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…

People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.

People really were talking about and buying Minis due to OpenClaw, because they wanted something that was on all the time and had access to all their stuff in macOS. Occam’s Razor.

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

#392

Post by mixmastamyk »

Aurornis wrote: post #317
mixmastamyk wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can buy tokens on OpenRouter right now from companies who serve tokens as a business and who are not selling at a loss. The frontier labs have very high prices for inference. The prices are actually going down, not up.

I thought the discussion was about "frontier labs" in the cloud versus open at home.

Others running open models in the cloud is a nice third alternative, but not a solution for those that need frontier models, which I believe continue to need training as well as inference. These are currently heavily subsidized and hardware constrained several years out.

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

#393

Post by fortran77 »

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…

Agreed. It’s also nonsense. You need an NVidia gpu to do any serious work.

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

#394

Post by Grombobulous »

try-working wrote: post #377
kristianp wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also think it’s possible that it may be best to continue waiting on the Mac side of the house despite the increasing prices.

I think that some of the hardware design folks have been blindsided by AI demand and we haven’t really gotten that next generation AI hardware yet, to the point where buying M5 isn’t going to make sense in a couple of years.

Rumors seem to be that the M7 is the generation that Apple is looking to push AI performance much further.

I’m not sure that Apple anticipated this specific route that computer hardware has gone and I don’t think M5 and previous iterations were really specifically architected for local AI performance, more like they happened to be pretty good at it.

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

#395

Post by dghlsakjg »

bojangleslover wrote: post #348
dghlsakjg wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Parakeet for transcription and senior for diarization.

Check out the fluid-ml library which packages this up for ANE very nicely.

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

#396

Post by jtbaker »

socalgal2 wrote: post #369
jtbaker wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having a 64GB mac mini m4 pro the last few years with some increasingly capable usefulness has kept me interested in this stuff in a way that using a paid platform wouldn't have. Similar to running K8s in a homelab, something about interacting with the hardware makes it more engaging/interesting, for me at least. In general, I'm a big believer in doing more with fewer resources, within reason, and think having local…

I guess it depends on what you're trying to do. I've run a few LLMs on my 64gig Mac but anything image or video related is ridiculously slow compared to even old NVidia on my PC.

Have you been using an MTP setup? I've been having pretty good luck with the Qwen models with the built in MTP heads via https://mtplx.com at around Q4. My main driver rig is an M5 Max MBP work got for me a few weeks ago. Hitting 1000-1200 TPS prefill on Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next there.

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

#397

Post by fsckboy »

bensyverson wrote: post #391
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…

People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone. People really were talking about and buying Minis due to OpenClaw, because they wanted something that was on all the time and h…

[flagged]

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

#398

Post by Grombobulous »

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…

I could believe that especially with some of the chips playing catch-up.

E.g., the M7 chip is rumored to be the one where Apple has poured really serious effort into local AI performance where previous generations seem to have mostly been coincidentally good at it.

Maybe this is an incorrect opinion but I don’t personally think that the M1-M3 or maybe M4 or even M5 chips were designed with LLM inference in mind at all. These were designed with things like video rendering, image/video ML, and rasterization performance in mind.

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

#399

Post by mixmastamyk »

corndoge wrote: post #378
ipsum2 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Any justification for this claim?

It's not surprising marketing for a large corporation leans toward the bland. This is not the scrappy Apple from the turn of the century.

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

#400

Post by [deleted] »

odo1242 wrote: post #386
dwaite wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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