11–20 of 133 posts
I guess the sudden demand is due to OpenClaw? But most people will still use cloud LLMs, right? Anything particular with the Mac Mini that non-Mac lack?
Apple got so bad with its products, so bad indeed that they took a bet on the low price sector with the Neo and abandoned the powerhouses. It is so funny, because due to the high profit margin as a relative share of the price Apple earns more by selling a few top models than with dozens of Neos. Tim Cook, the supply chain master leaves house the moment the very reason why he got hired in the first place is in dire st…
I guess the sudden demand is due to OpenClaw? But most people will still use cloud LLMs, right? Anything particular with the Mac Mini that non-Mac lack?
The take away is that some of the Apple hardware hits a sweet spot for performance and price which may change in the future but for now it's causing a lot of demand so people can run inference without GPUs.
Also Macs keep a lot of their resale value so you can use them for a while and then sell them for sometimes 80% of their original value.
I guess the sudden demand is due to OpenClaw? But most people will still use cloud LLMs, right? Anything particular with the Mac Mini that non-Mac lack?
An M4 mini is overkill just to run OpenClaw. I'm running it on a Pentium J5005 and it's running 20 other services in Docker. I think the main thing was many wanted it to be able to access iMessage. I think people dream of also using the mac to run the LLM but the 16gb ones don't have enough ram.
What annoys me most isn't the Mac Studio and Mini. It is the Neo. Someone must have done a poor job in demand planing. ( As well as pricing ). Only 5M unit till the end of the year when they are now increasing it to 10M. And it will likely miss this education's year cycle in the summer.
Hopefully they do better with A19 Pro Neo. Mac could reach up to 400M to 500M usage share. Roughly 25% of PC market.
Apple got so bad with its products, so bad indeed that they took a bet on the low price sector with the Neo and abandoned the powerhouses. It is so funny, because due to the high profit margin as a relative share of the price Apple earns more by selling a few top models than with dozens of Neos. Tim Cook, the supply chain master leaves house the moment the very reason why he got hired in the first place is in dire st…
The Neo isn't just a bet on low prices - it's a machine that convinces people they can get away with less RAM. In the middle of a pricing crunch, why wouldn't you ship an 8GB machine like the Neo?
Its a win-win, Apple gets to ship a brand new SKU in volume despite the RAM crunch, and they get to punch into a previously untouched market.
The Neo as well, I just need a Mac to test with and finding one is ridiculous. Hackintoshes are hell to setup and run like crap. I tried https://www.macincloud.com/ and that was a waste of time. Someone take my money.
I remember 4 years ago I was able to setup MacOS in a virtual machine. Maybe you can setup an Intel copy of MacOS on a qemu/kvm virtual machine?
The Neo as well, I just need a Mac to test with and finding one is ridiculous. Hackintoshes are hell to setup and run like crap. I tried https://www.macincloud.com/ and that was a waste of time. Someone take my money.
Not sure what happened to you with macincloud, but I used scaleway hosted Mac mini M1 a couple years ago for a self hosted CI server, and it was working very nicely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ever considered second hand slightly older gens? Even M1 is still great for many use cases. E.g. often corps are selling them on Ebay, in pretty good condition.
Indeed, ton's of refurbished for $250-$300