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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

#511

Post by aa-jv »

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…

I have a friend at Apple, working in retail front lines. He was tasked by his stores' management to put his personal Mac Mini to use with OpenClaw in order to familiarize himself with what can be done with it, and then use that experience to inform his direct recommendations to customers. He even had an internal checklist to fill out once he'd done his own installation.

I think you're radically misunderestimating the power of the retail front lines. Folks leave the Guru Bar with what they see as 'bleeding edge ways to use Apple tech', and Apple know it ..

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

#512

Post by reliabilityguy »

simiones wrote: post #501
reliabilityguy wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no factual accuracy at all, only speculation and empty claims. Do you have a proof that Apple has bot farms to push its narrative?

Do you have proof Apple is facing unexpected demand for the Mac Mini because of AI? Do these news sites?

I am not the one making claims here.

You can’t claim A, and then when someone asks you for a proof reply with “prove that it’s not A”.

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

#513

Post by jasonvorhe »

com2kid wrote: post #446
20k wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Different ballpark. Original comment is about shadier methods of marketing not official stuff landing on the primary domain of Apple. I have 1st knowledge of a travel tech company laying off their entire marketing team during COVID that then got hired by a brand new company to find different and riskier approaches on how to keep the funnel alive despite the travel restrictions without direct risk of exposure for the brand.

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

#514

Post by reliabilityguy »

jchw wrote: post #422
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…

You're suggesting there is no chance that Apple is engaging in guerilla marketing, which you discredit by referring to as a "psyop" when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice, because they sell a lot of iPhones? I mean, it's pretty much just blind conjecture that they may be marketing in stealth in the first place, so really who knows on that front. But you gotta be smoking something to think Ap…

> when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice

Practiced by Apple? Just because someone is doing it doesn’t mean that every company does it.

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

#515

Post by mapt »

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…

Whether it not it takes the precise form that each person here is imagining in their respective heads?

Every large corporation has a psyops division. It's called a marketing department.

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

#516

Post by haskman »

api wrote: post #26

Apple has a huge opportunity here to lead the market for machines to run local models if they step into it. Their stuff is already better than what nVidia is offering with stuff like the DGX Spark. It's a niche market but it's a market that overlaps heavily with professionals in the AI space and lead developers, so it's a market that gets them customers in those roles. If I were running Apple I'd call the RAM price b…

A Mac Mini with M5 Pro, half the memory of a DGX Spark, half the disk of DGX Spark, and no CUDA, is already more expensive than a spark. The Spark runs Linux natively, has a tiny form factor, and is usable as a general purpose computer.

I use a DGX Spark with NixOS on it as my daily driver and it's fantastic.

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

#517

Post by kakacik »

com2kid wrote: post #446
20k wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah and why they outsource that? First is effectiveness of reach as you mention. Second is the ability to have a clean official record.

Wake me up when an extremely capitalistic company, in the past caught with dirty hands on numerous topics, will reject increasing massively a legal revenue stream with no strings attached. Right, exactly how to become a trillion dollar company and keep it.

I grok that specifically for apple their echo chambers do majority of certain work themselves, but claiming with 100% confidence thats all is a bit of a stretch. If I was a personal close friend with their head of marketing, I would maybe believe that. In any other case, hard logic prevails over anonymous online claims.

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

#518

Post by jchw »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #514
jchw wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're suggesting there is no chance that Apple is engaging in guerilla marketing, which you discredit by referring to as a "psyop" when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice, because they sell a lot of iPhones? I mean, it's pretty much just blind conjecture that they may be marketing in stealth in the first place, so really who knows on that front. But you gotta be smoking something to think Ap…

> when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice Practiced by Apple? Just because someone is doing it doesn’t mean that every company does it.

Or an agency on their behalf, but either way, there's really no way for us to really know, due to the stealthy nature of this sort of advertising.

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

#519

Post by lwkl »

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.

This isn't marketing this is just how the media decided to spin this story. Saying "Apple was caught off guard" makes the story more engaging than just saying Mac minis are sold out for 4 - 12 weeks after launch.

We don't know if Apple misjudged the demand or couldn't source enough parts to match the initial demand. Another explanation could be that they decided it wasn't worth it to increase the production capacity to match the higher demand at launch because that capacity would go unused later down the line.

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

#520

Post by haskman »

adastra22 wrote: post #112
jasode wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I realize I’m somewhat limited (16GB RTX 9070), but still, it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me. I just ordered a new Mac Studio M5 Max 128GB $5899 ($6400 with tax) to be able to run the bigger "consumer size" models in the 70B parameter range (~96 GB). That said, I have no illusions that this expensive setup with a Qwen Flash coding LLM will be comparable t…

Serious question: why not run DGX Spark or Framework Desktop, at 30%-50% lower cost?

A DGX spark is cheaper than a mac mini m5 with half the memory, half the disk, and no cuda, and no Linux. Why not indeed!
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