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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

#441

Post by rustystump »

btown wrote: post #316
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…

A C-level executive I know is getting a top-of-the-line new Mac simply to function as a personal build server and host for agentic coding instances - they are able to orchestrate so many parallel projects that they're hitting RAM limits from sessions and the builds and local test runs they're kicking off (largly unsupervised). Before AI, they'd only had a MacBook Air; this completely changes their workflows. They tal…

ram? coding instances? i suspect this is not doing any inference on the machine and i also suspect the ram use is due to a bagilion node/python processes running.

nothing like 600mb of for type check server another 500 for webpack and another 600 for the inevitable electron wrapper you didnt know about. python isnt as bad but still not great.

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

#443

Post by scottyah »

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]

Why would anyone attack a billion dollar corporation so vehemently and not earn a single dime? Billion dollar companies also hire hundreds of thousands of employees, paying them a lot. They create products that millions enjoy.

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

#444

Post by pepperoni_pizza »

rustystump wrote: post #438
jchw wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

30 under 30 is mostly just scammers (see how many end up in prison) so that tracks.

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

#445

Post by dofm »

Gigachad wrote: post #373
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…

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.

I am also willing to overpay to not be reliant on cloud things, to have control of local hardware.

My biggest problem with buying a Mac Studio is that even in the case of the M5 Max models, I can’t think of any non-AI macOS applications in my creative life that have anywhere near that level of hardware requirements, and nor can I forecast that I would within its ordinary supported lifespan as a macOS machine. These machines left high-end stills and most video work behind generations ago, for example.

So while I would like a local machine that I can leave running in a way that I wouldn’t want to do with my old secondhand M1 Max laptop, it’s going to have to be something a little more pragmatic. Probably based around the Radeon R9700, since the AMD/Nvidia gap for LLMs is beginning to close, and even a single R9700 runs the main models I am interested in at speeds that are acceptably faster than what I have here.

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

#446

Post by com2kid »

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

Having worked at multiple large companies more often than not the truth is there are 5 levels of approval for every tweet that goes out and writing a single blog post can take months.

The smart companies out source their gorilla marketing to a third party, having realized their own inadequacies.

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

#447

Post by stymaar »

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…

> a complicated psyop

It's not a “complicated psy-op”, promoting viral stories is the basics of marketing in the age of social media…

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

#448

Post by etchalon »

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…

It's just hilarious the degree to which people see a thing happen sometimes and begin to believe, despite not just evidence but plenty of counterfactuals, that it's happening every time.

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

#449

Post by shuwix »

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…

There are usual Apple sheeps ... and then it's you.

WOW, this is some remarkable (would rather use different word starting with R) desperate attempt to somehow turn the reality upside-down,of Apple being overpriced unrepairable unupgrade-able junk sold through pure marketing of exploiting insecurities of losers by selling them something that makes them feel "elite".

Unsolicitated "send via iPhone" SMS footer is perfect example.

> Which is more likely? I’ll cheerfully stipulate Apple is pure evil, serves cooked babies in their cafeterias, whatever it takes to discuss based on reason rather than big-evil-corpos

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

#450

Post by victorbjorklund »

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…

It’s not complicated psyops. It’s basic marketing.

”Oh wow our product is so amazing we can’t keep up with demand you better buy before we run out”

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