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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

#601

Post by nullbio »

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…

Occam's Razor would be that the tens of thousands of marketers that Apple hires (contractors or otherwise) utilize the most obvious and effective strategy for making sales: Spamming the internet and manipulating perceptions. Their marketing personnel don't sit there thinking "well I'm only hired to market the low-margin Macs, so I guess I'll do nothing today."

Your argument is basically: Why would they try and make more money when they can just sit back and get rich off iPhone's.

That's certainly not a tenable position.

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

#602

Post by nullbio »

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.

That only applies to tweets that are published on behalf of the company, not tweets from sockpuppet accounts that have no direct connection to the company and are made to look like a regular consumer.

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

#603

Post by pwthornton »

bloppe wrote: post #403
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…

Companies that ignore everything besides their legacy cash cow tend to go downhill. I'm sure there are at least a few people at Apple who's main concern is marketing the Mac mini, and those people are highly definitely trying to cook up new marketing strategies all the time

I'm sure there are people dedicated to marketing the Mac Mini, but seeing as Apple has had trouble keeping it in stock from demand, I doubt they spend too much on it. And considering Apple is supply constrained, there is no benefit to trying to increase demand above supply levels.

I think the Mac Mini is legit popular and is actually being used for local AI use cases, especially Open Claw.

Beyond that, Apple is at capacity for SoCs and ram, and the Mac Mini is going to have a ceiling of how much of Apple's allotment they are willing to give it.

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

#604

Post by Lord_Zero »

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…

Oh sweet summer child. These marketing firms(the ones Apple hires) in 2026 are beyond devious.

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

#605

Post by gwerbin »

20k wrote: post #424
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…

These companies absolutely do have people who's job it is to sit on social media and promote these products, its marketing 101

Or they hire an agency and the agency does all the gray-hat stuff, and apart from the marketing person who hired the agency most of the company probably has no idea what the agency is up to.

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

#606

Post by jchw »

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.

It absolutely isn't. It is only ludicrous if you hold Apple to some weird standard of ethics that they absolutely do not deserve. If you think this practice isn't common, that's purely a matter of ignorance on your part.

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

#607

Post by gwerbin »

f055 wrote: post #563
aurareturn wrote: post #543

Earlier 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?

Either they're running Claude Code with a local LLM (technically possible via dev tools albeit unsupported), or they genuinely have no idea why the Mac is good for AI and just bought it because they were told it was good for AI.

The former honestly sounds like a nightmare because the Mac Mini can run some big models but not that big, and Claude Code will guaranteed stuff your context with 35k tokens, and all the Anthropic proprietary tool-deferral and tool-search stuff is meant to be handled inside the inference engine in a way that I don't think any open-source engine like vLLM can support right now (much as I wish it did). So you have a huge context on startup, broken functionality, and an underpowered LLM struggling through it all. Not to mention I have no idea how any of the sidecar LLM stuff is meant to work in that context (e.g. auto-mode classifier and even things like dynamic session naming). Am I missing something?

I don't want to assume it's the latter, I want to be charitable to other people. But.

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

#608

Post by benatkin »

shwaj wrote: post #585
saberience wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not in this thread, the joke is in an aunt comment.

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

#609

Post by nullbio »

brookst wrote: post #420
bloppe wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies that ignore everything besides their legacy cash cow tend to go downhill. I'm sure there are at least a few people at Apple who's main concern is marketing the Mac mini, and those people are highly definitely trying to cook up new marketing strategies all the time

Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation. If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider: 1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but…

There's nothing masterful or careful about it. If it were, no one would notice it. This is as obvious and sloppy as it gets. No different to startup founders paying social media marketing companies $10-20k to promote their slop products all over X and Reddit with their army of AI generated blogs and news sites and social media accounts. This happens on the daily, and it is not a secret - every founder knows it, and most founders use it at some point. So to think this doesn't happen at larger scales with bigger companies is pure naivety.

It has nothing to do with "big-evil-corpo", it happens at all levels. For some reason you're trying to claim that "big-evil-corpo" are the rare exception, which is ridiculous.

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

#610

Post by mixmastamyk »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #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…

Maybe something used to keep you running for a few more years.
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