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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

#431

Post by vikramkr »

RossBencina wrote: post #412
vikramkr wrote: post #326

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…

> It's competing with a $200/mo subscription or renting server gpu time Not if you're an enterprise that wants or requires on-prem inference.

if you're one of those enterprises it's perfectly reasonable to assume you're more likely to go have your procurement and legal teams negotiate with google for one of those weird boxes to run gemini on prem (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/r...) or other enterprise-y nonsense vs buying consumer hardware to run a chinese large language model in your network. I do not envy the person at a company having to get approval model by model because of weird open source licensing terms dealing with the "how do we know chinese models are safe" question (hopefully they're at least getting asked in the context of hooking it into an agent harness so there's some sort of plausible risk that necessitates the conversation - i can very much imagine it getting shut down to even run in a sandbox because chinese model + people being scared after the huggingface stuff). There's a lot of reasons to assume enterprise wouldn't be interested, and it's very very cool that they are IMO. Anthropic cut claude code rate limits - they dont seem to be see open source llms as a market threat (rhtetoric to the white house aside) yet but enterprises being willing to run consumer hardware to run local models could make things a bit more tangible

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

#432

Post by pjmlp »

Only in North America market, and a few similar economies, as many countries buying Apple hardware is only for a select few on top tier society levels.

Everyone else keeps buying PCs as always, even more so that Apple doesn't have any proper desktops any longer.

Also if there is demand for something, are CUDA cards, being used from Windows and Linux distributions.

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

#433

Post by resonious »

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.

Marketing that makes them look like they have their heads in the sand.

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

#434

Post by alsetmusic »

20k wrote: post #424
bensyverson wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These companies absolutely do have people who's job it is to sit on social media and promote these products, its marketing 101

> who's job it is to sit on social media and promote these products

Oh shit, I didn't know Marketing exists! Different thing from what OP described.

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

#435

Post by AdieuToLogic »

eptcyka wrote: post #425
brookst wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation. If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider: 1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but…

[flagged]

> I am convinced that there are paid posters on here.

Maybe. More likely is there are AI bots used to proliferate messages much cheaper than "paid posters."

> Why would anyone defend a billion dollar corporation so vehemently and not earn a single dime?

Because some like the products made by said billion dollar corporation?

Because others like to be contrarian?

Because not everyone is motivated by being paid?

Maybe, just maybe, people are different and have differing motivations not easily reduced into being "am I getting paid for this or not."

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

#436

Post by pjmlp »

resonious wrote: post #433
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.

Marketing that makes them look like they have their heads in the sand.

There has been demand for Mac at PC prices since the Mac Classic was announced to the world.

The first time around they almost went broke because people no longer were paying Apple tax, and they did not had any other product to save them.

Nowadays they have the iPhone piggy bank.

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

#437

Post by pjmlp »

api wrote: post #362
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.

There are probably people in Apple who think desktop is dead or pro-only and didn’t think many people would want a lower end cheaper Mac. Why wouldn’t they just get an iPad?

Of there are, otherwise they would not have killed the few really desktop hardware, by what are now consumer electronics devices.

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

#438

Post by rustystump »

jchw wrote: post #423
brookst wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation. If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider: 1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but…

To be fair, the very reasonable take is that if there was guerilla marketing campaigns, they are most likely being handled by external agencies and not Apple directly. And, this isn't making them look particularly dumb. It is making them look dumb the way that most people make themselves look "bad" when they list their biggest weakness in a job interview. Silly Apple, not seeing how fantastically great their product…

do people on here not know that things like forbes 30 under 30 are a pay to play game? do they not know that 90% of car influencer reviews are carefully curated by mrketing agencies? and yes apple is notoriously controlling about it too which is the reason to why it is unlikely to be apple driving this.

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

#439

Post by addag »

brookst wrote: post #420
bloppe wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies that ignore everything besides their legacy cash cow tend to go downhill. I'm sure there are at least a few people at Apple who's main concern is marketing the Mac mini, and those people are highly definitely trying to cook up new marketing strategies all the time

Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation. If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider: 1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but…

Tbh, I won't be surprised that 1 is true; it does not look that far fetched. Organizing scarcity is already a well-established strategy in the marketing playbook; there are examples of other big organization playing a way longer game to conquer a market (see for instance how Japan became a coffee nation https://www.thetakeout.com/how-nestle-brought-coffee-to-japa...)

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

#440

Post by pjmlp »

vikramkr wrote: post #428
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 majority of the market for Apple devices does trust that they will not produce and sell a computer incapable of support their use" the problem with that argument is that the vision pro exists, where they clearly overestimated demand, and where even among people with interest in VR and disposable income, the compromises on battery life and weight were actually too much to bear. Forecasting is just hard and you a…

They also irritated plenty of devs, who aren't shelling out 3500 for what is in practical purposes a toy device, and then having Apple congratulate themselves the devs are the ones that should be happy they are allowed to play on Apple's kingdom in first place.
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