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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

#471

Post by OliverGuy »

vardalab wrote: post #277
jnwatson wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M5 Ultra has 4-5x the memory bandwidth of both. 1.2 TB/s memory bandwidth opens up good performance on relatively large models.

you can get 4xGB10 for <20K so that gets you about the same tg and pp will be probably better. Power consumption though will be something like 200W idle so that's a bummer. And you get VLLM and SGLANG unlike them mac where one has to use oMLX (nice but not the same concurrency or cache performance) I have 128GB M5 Max laptop and sill prefer to run things on other boxes in basement because its no fun to have the prima…

4XGB10 is in quite a different price bracket than a single M5 128GB Mac Studio...

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

#473

Post by skohan »

chacham15 wrote: post #341
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.

the machines arent optimized for it is why. the main driving factor is large unified memory which makes large(r) models possible, but there isnt the gpu horsepower to back it up. essentially, it fits the corner of the market that wants large models and is ok with running them slowly which doesnt sound like it would be a large market.

For decode, memory bandwidth is the main bottleneck, so these machines will likely perform well even without a ton of GPU horsepower. Not as well as Blackwell, but I expect they will be a reasonable choice in terms of price/performance if you want to run large models with a lot of context.

The main place they are a bit behind is in the number formats they support natively. Iirc M5 doesn't have native FP8 support, so you will take a speed penalty on quants where other architectures get better acceleration.

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

#474

Post by skohan »

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…

16GB VRAM is probably not quite enough. With 32GB, or maybe even 24GB, you can do serious coding work with local models.

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

#475

Post by ExoticPearTree »

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 defend a billion dollar corporation so vehemently and not earn a single dime?

Because I like some of their products very much. They don't need to pay me to defend hardware quality when everyone else sells cheap plastic stuff.

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

#476

Post by rc1 »

julianlam wrote: post #60
rc1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article implies the demand is for running locally. I’m not convinced, at least with a mac minis. Most people I know and myself buy the mini as it is always on, easy to setup, and isolated from my main computer which is a laptop. The mini is driving the use of the $20/month subscriptions.

As a thin client to access cloud models this is an astounding waste of money.

I think you miss the point and value add. The always on computer isn’t to run the client only, it is to run all the things a user would normally. The laptop becomes a terminal for a computer that can do anything your laptop can. If you don’t have the need or desire for that, then yes, use a rpi or whatever.

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

#477

Post by Foofoobar12345 »

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…

Also many startups and companies are now building racks of Minis and Studios to automate build pipelines, testing, do local inference, run agents etc. I've personally seen this in at least 3 companies out of the half a dozen I've interacted with. The demand is certainly there.

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

#478

Post by ShadowOfThePit »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #465
ChickeNES wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because caring about factual accuracy isn’t “defending a corporation.” A claim doesn’t become true (or false!) just because it concerns a "billion dollar corporation". Besides, Apple isn't a "billion dollar corporation", it's a multi-trillion dollar corporation.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/if-its-worth-your-time-to-l... elucidates this argument very clearly: > People don’t like nitpickers. “He literally did the WELL AKTUALLY!” If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal? > Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it. > I…

Damn, the racism example is really good.

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

#479

Post by swiftcoder »

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…

> Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw

This is rather revisionist. A lot of the early OpenClaw publicity was about connecting it to iMessage (which was really only possible on Mac hardware at the time)

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

#480

Post by ustad »

manmal wrote: post #427
jonchurch_ wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

caffeinate -is -t 7200 claude --remote-control then Control + Command + Q ftw (keep system from sleeping if plugged in, keep system from going idle even if not plugged in, for 2 hours, start claude code w/ remote control enabled, lock my mac w/ the keyboard shutcut)

The Amphetamine app from the App Store keeps a MacBook awake even with the lid closed.

You need an app for that?
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