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

macrumors.com

581–590 of 636 posts

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

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using a Mac to do bulk diarized transcription (STT). Most services run in the $.05-1.00+ per hour of transcribed audio. My Mac can do ~200x realtime (1 hour takes 20s or so). I can do several thousand hours per day. Its pretty incredible Not sure how much that qualifies as AI vs LLM usage, but it seems to work pretty good

What are you using for this? We tried this a few years back, could simply not find a good diarization engine.

[flagged]

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

#582
post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with outsourcing your gorilla marketing is that it can cost big bananas with a hard to quantify return

Guerilla marketing, but never mind, worth it for the bananas joke.

The original comment had the typo.

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

#583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parakeet for transcription and senior for diarization. Check out the fluid-ml library which packages this up for ANE very nicely.

senior is meant to be seiko.

Senko. Fucks sake apple autocorrect

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

#584
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like it's worth waiting for M7 anyways, no point investing too much right now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676795

At least wait until someone gets one in hand and post a review, and if it does work decently well there probably is going to be a long backlog.

Is Apple still doing the extended return window for items receiving around the holiday? I know sometimes they allow items received near the end of November to be returned in January, so in theory if you time your early order right you can use it, test it, and even have some time to play with it before you return it.

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

#585

Earlier 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.

It's Guerrilla Marketing. It comes from guerrilla warfare, not gorillas the large ape.

It was a joke referencing the typo in the message they responded to.

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

#586
It's a massive bummer for me because I'm on an old 2015 iMac and was looking to upgrade soon but buy a fairly heafty machine, but the combined Ram price increases and the fact these still sell like hotcakes has made me reconsider.

I like to buy high end and then keep it for a long time. I'd love local AI But even with a fairly large spend, these machines won't run that much local AI well and that's now, I'm not sure if in the future I'd want even more RAM, seems to be it is better to budget for an AI sub + a less insane machine.

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

#587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me. The $20/month subs are much stronger than the local models you can run, even with how far local models have advanced lately. The appeal of local models is that the data never leaves your network so you can feel safer putting sensitive content into it. It also feels “free” to use when you’ve already paid for the hardware…

Banks, Biglaw, and the Pentagon all do it in the cloud. What could an individual be working on that is so secretive?

The two issues I have with relying on the cloud for intelligence is:

- I don't trust them with my data

- I don't trust the data they send back to me

The first is about my privacy, the second is about not being manipulated by what is considered the politically correct answer to my questions.

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

#588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about the tin-foil-hattedness of worrying about them violating their contract. But that's by-the-by. It is definitely not tin-foil-hat to worry about the data being taken in a breach.

It's no different than generally using AWS.

Depends on how you use it. You can use AWS in a way that protects your data even if Amazon is compromised. You can even run LLM inference that way, but it doesn't seem at all common.

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

#590
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you mean Qwen 3.8-27B? Yes, you can run this in 32GB of RAM, but it's very context limited. With KV cache compression and other techniques, it's better now than in the past, but I'd still want more RAM, personally. EDIT to add that you need to reserve 8GB for the system if you don't want to cause problems on macOS, which means 32GB RAM = 24GB max for model + context. It takes 18-19GB to load a 4-bit quant of…

I run Qwen 3.8 27B just fine on my Mac mini M4 24GB. I use Unsloth's Q3 XXS with 128k context. It successfully completes long horizon tasks with OpenCode.

Yes, Q3 = 3bit quant, so that's not comparable to a 4-bit quant.
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