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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

#551

Post by pdpi »

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.

You can see that there is demand for a product (and, therefore, make that product), while misestimating the scale for that demand. It's what leads to failed products (when you overestimate the demand), and Apple has had a few of those. Why is it so weird that they would also underestimate the demand for other products?

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

#552

Post by PaulHoule »

pepperoni_pizza wrote: post #444
rustystump wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I had gotten into 30 under 30 I might have sued.

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

#553

Post by okokko »

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.

Tbf comment you replied to never said they were direct hires. Outsourced workers sitting around is possible. You seem to have customized their more general statement

Can confirm though, being acquainted with PR people in the field for >20 years; everything on TV is scripted these days.

Chatted with some of my PR friends coworkers over the years at Christmas parties and the like. They claimed stunts during MTV specials, other "candid" moments from the last 20-25 well known to pop culture were actually organized by a PR company they worked at (never that they worked on that project; such work was reserved for whatever PR rockstar PR firm hired)

But all this too could be PR sales pitch to impress; society is full of hearsay to titillate

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

#554

Post by matroxmemories »

la_oveja wrote: post #498
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…

> 8 gigs was too much of a compromise i come from a ultrabook with 2 gigs of ram and the neo takes 2 vscode instances, one antigravity and firefox while keeping telegram and whatsapp on the background. that device can be used as a workhorse, pagination is very good. can even run ios/android emulators but then you have to only have that project open, which is a non-issue for me. and the battery literally keeps working…

If the latest apple hardware could run Linux I would be buying a good amount. But I just hate the idea of being at the whims of macOS timelines. But I guess when you’re selling more than you can produce it doesn’t really matter.

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

#556

Post by pc86 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #550
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 just reads like marketing imo." You could be right, but I don't see being caught off guard as the kind of praise you seem to think it fosters for Apple. If I were in marketing I would be looking for a message that showed Apple in more of a leading, not following, position.

"oh my garsh this asinine $900 thing is so good at local AI even we didn't expect it! I bet it'll be sold out any moment!"

The way you get people to believe a lie is to put just a bit of truth in it. The way you get people to accept marketing as not-marketing is to put just enough not-marketing in it.

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

#558

Post by jjtheblunt »

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…

> it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim

can you approximate plausibility by the wait time for a maxed-out config?

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

#559

Post by scrumper »

happyopossum wrote: post #116
scrumper wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need a new little Mac for my music studio, currently an M2 MacBook Pro. I thought I'd be fun to experiment with some local models as well. Well, let's price up an M5 Pro. $3,019 with 64GB RAM and a 1TB HD. Three thousand American dollars for a Mac Mini. Beefy spec for sure but not comically so. Frankly even the entry price is a bit high - I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few h…

> I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model. The base price of a mini has only gone up $200 from $699 in 2020 to $899 today, and for $699 you only got 8GB of RAM instead of 16. Yeah the price has gone up but not nearly as much as you seem to be remembering... [0] https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Mac_mini_(M1,_2020)

I guess I felt richer in 2020.

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

#560

Post by booty »

gessha wrote: post #387
booty wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two thoughts. A $20/month Gemini subscription is truly all you need, then yeah, sure.... obviously a homelab setup is a ridiculous alternative on a pure cost basis. For most people doing "real" work with LLMs 40+ hours per week, a more apt comparison would be one or multiple $200/month subscriptions. At which point the break-even point of a homelab is much sooner. However, most people running homelabs are doing it fo…

I love this quote from a homelab reddit: - Is that even worth the electricity price compared to api? - We don't ask that here

Hahaha. It's an excellent question, though!

I have not spun up my own homelab, but, I have researched it and the electricity costs can be mitigated to a large extent.

One... the GPUs can be massively clocked down during idle state, to the point where the fans can be shut off as well. The machines themselves can be shut down and wait for a magic wake-on-LAN packet if needed.

Two... even under load, the GPU cores can be significantly underclocked with very little performance loss. The GPU and VRAM/HBM clocks are independent, and the GPU is largely bottlenecked on VRAM/HBM so you can just drop the GPU speed. A commonly reported figure I saw was, basically, 350W nominal cards being underclocked to consume "only" 200W under load with ~5-10% perf loss.

This all assumes you're using discrete GPUs and not AIO systems like a Mac Studio which is going to be pretty efficient just by design; they idle at 35W or so and in practice max out at a few hundred watts. I believe DGX Spark and Strix Halo are similar.

I must stress that this is second-hand anecdata here, admittedly, but my understanding is that it can be pretty manageable.

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