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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

#591

Post by aurareturn »

adolph wrote: post #151
adastra22 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, The NVIDIA Way goes into a lot of detail on how and why the pivot from graphics to AI happened. This is a prime example of “you make your own luck.” Jensen engineered an organization that was primed to recognize and pounce on the next big thing, and it ended up being AI. But they saw it coming WAY in advance (like 2011/2012, not 2017) because they were explicitly on the lookout.

> an organization that was primed to recognize and pounce on the next big thing e.g.: previous crypto hype-cycle https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-cmp-graphics-card-availabilit...

They didn't make their GPUs for crypto. Crypto companies just bought a lot of their GPUs.

If they had a choice, they would have sold every GPU to gamers instead because a crypto boom was always followed by a crash which flooded the market with used GPUs and crashed Nvidia's stock price.

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

#592

Post by bensyverson »

commandersaki wrote: post #561
jchw wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care so much that this is a totally realistic argument? You don't personally have to like it, it's not about how it makes you feel as a fan of Apple.

Because it is ludicrous and the tin foilers should be called out.

Yes, basically. [0]

[0]: Obligatory https://xkcd.com/386/

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

#593

Post by aurareturn »

magicmicah85 wrote: post #414

Caught off guard has been used a lot this year. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/30/apple-unexpected-mac-mi... https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/01/apple-was-caught-off-gu... https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/29/apple-on-airpods-pro-3-... Recent work in this space has got me looking at using local models for daily use. I’m waiting for people to start dumping some of the previous generation minis on Facebook marketpl…

Two of those links were Macs. No surprise. Macbooks selling like hotcakes due to AI. Not just local LLMs but also just really efficient *nix machines that AI agents love to use for productivity.

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

#594

Post by akeck »

I don't think they were caught off guard. It's clear that Apple is the cheapest option, or even the only option in many cases, for running larger local models, especially with the RAM crunch. With the standard "PC design model" you have to buy RAM twice - once for the system to load the GPU and again in the GPU itself. For Apple, and a few other options like DGX Spark and some laptops, you only need to buy it once. I think the Apple/DGX Spark "unified RAM design model" is maybe the only way forward because of RAM pricing/availability over the next few years.

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

#595

Post by iAMkenough »

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…

Apple has a history of feeding rumors sites fake information to weed out leaks. They take it very seriously.

Wouldn’t put it past them to pay strategic influencers to feed social media fake information to generate hype. As a way to make the leak ecosystem work in benefit of the marketing department (or psyops division if you want to call it that).

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

#596

Post by nowittyusername »

paxys wrote: post #28
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…

Local setups aren't going to make sense purely from a cost perspective, and definitely not when you are buying Apple hardware. AI subscriptions are too highly subsidized right now.

Yep, main reason I ordered my Mac studio was because of privacy and control. I know no one will see the work being done on that machine and also the model will never be silently swapped out for a different lower quality model like anthropic does or a lower quant like openAI does with their models. Also having the inference engine has huge benefits because of speculative re-generation capabilities for voice agents. Anyways people who care about cost are simply bad at math if they think thell be saving any money running locally versus cloud providers.

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

#597

Post by TallGuyShort »

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…

> Apple does not have a psyops division

No, but they have marketing people, and marketing people in my experience (even in "big" corporate America) have personal (anonymized, but just created themselves) accounts they do stuff like this on all the time.

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

#598

Post by TallGuyShort »

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.

For every Tweet that goes out on the company account and every blog on the company blog. But that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about vague sources like low-impact social media snippets getting cited on low-reputation blogs until someone more reputable comments on the apparent trend. There are absolutely marketing people who do that "unofficially".

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

#599

Post by dolmen »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #528
reactordev wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, AI labs and scalers are buying up all the mac mini's and mac studios.

There are also all the companies building iOS apps that need mac mini compute clusters for CI/CD because of dumb Apple requirements (ask me how I know..).

But this isn't a new use or a significant market share. Running models is both.

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

#600

Post by hliyan »

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…

Might not be in the particular case, but what are your thoughts on the following (just to name a few recent examples): Cambridge Analytica, Net Neutrality, DMCA?
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