Earlier quoted context omitted.
They literally announced the products early and profiting on this coverage.
So is the news outlet that is speculating for clicks.
For sure... Just that wasn't the argument.
Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
571–580 of 636 posts
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem with outsourcing your gorilla marketing is that it can cost big bananas with a hard to quantify return
I remember talking to a person who worked in marketing Kingsford, which at the time had like over 90% of the marketshare for USA charcoal. They had a marketing budget that was willing to spend money on any ol' stupid idea because they had already won & just wanted to stay on top by getting their name out there.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah i think the deterministic part (sending email, submit PR) is usually done by a normale script/software, agents are useful for summarizing text in a smart way, expecially if you need to aggregate text from multiple sources and it's natural language (not structured data)
This still feels like made up work. We are using AI to inflate a prompt in to a full email to send, and then the receiver is using AI to summarize it back down.
in that particular scenario, is certanly a made up work. but sometimes you are aggregating text from lets say 5/10 different inputs, and summarizing those into a single email with AI is pretty niche and efficient.
obviously not everything needs an hammer to be solved
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#574Now if only they hadn't discontinued the Mac Pro. Could be quite the AI machine with multiple compute GPUs at higher bandwidth than an external Thunderbolt enclosure.
Thunderbolt eGPUs haven't been able to be used on Apple Silicon machines, and the Mac Pro has the same limitation
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am using Mac studios for local inference, but not for openclaw. It was simply the best bang for the buck at the time, and the software side of things has gotten even better since then. I haven’t run the pricing comparison but I have a feeling with the direction they’re heading that it’s better to hold off for m6 as it may assuage various bottlenecks if you are latency sensitive.
Reportedly, the M6 will not get pro, max or ultra editions. Instead Apple will go straight to M7 for these.
The Pro, Max, and Ultra chips boil down to different combinations of their "Super", performance, and efficiency cores along with the number of GPU cores. The Max is two Pros bolted together. Thus far they've skipped generations of Ultra chips but Pro and Max versions of all the M-series chips have been released.
I can see them not releasing an M6 Ultra but no reason not to see Pro and Max versions of the M6.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#576Earlier 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.
[deleted]
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple. I'm not. I have an M4 Mac Mini running 24/7 so I can use it as my Claude Code machine when I'm on the go. Why would they do a guerilla marketing campaign now if their Macs are generally sold out despite nearly doubling the Mac Mini price in the last few months?
I don’t get it. You don’t need a Mac mini to use Claude Code on the go, any home server with stable internet is enough. Was it the marketing?
I develop using a Macbook primarily. Having a Mac Mini keeps the environment the same when I'm on the go. Plus, any home server would not be as efficient or fast as a Mini with an M4.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#578There 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…
> Just provisioning a new instance and copying the relevant checkpoints and things can take 25 minutes. Modal significantly improves this. Highly recommend.
Looks very useful - thank you!
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#579I'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…
Obviously they do not, the same way Amazon isn't treating their drivers poorly, it is just third party contractors "surprisingly" not doing their job well.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#580Earlier 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.
It's Guerrilla Marketing. It comes from guerrilla warfare, not gorillas the large ape.