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

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

#221

Post by BeetleB »

yardie wrote: post #70
setgree wrote: post #14

It's fun to see that even an extremely large company can find unexpected product market fit [0]. Per this article, "The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy." That sounds insane in retrospect, but I think there's just inherent uncertainty in what people actually need and will use things for.…

You should listen to the podcast Acquired, specifically Nvidia and then Jensen Huang. They basically lucked into AI. Some researcher was using Nvidia gaming cards, and reached out to them about questions on CUDA. That email eventually turned them into a trillion dollar question.

What year are you talking about? When I was in grad school, around 2007, Nvidia was aggressively marketing GPUs for high performance computing. They would go to campuses, talk to professors, etc.

Yes, the whole Deep Learning thing was luck, but as with most lucky things, they ensured they were positioned to capitalize on it.

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

#222

Post by ozim »

tiahura wrote: post #146
Aurornis wrote: post #25

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?

I like to buy specific brand of soap. I don't want them to know that, it is my right and so is running local LLM "wasting" money on local inference to keep track of my stack of soap.

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

#223

Post by kridsdale1 »

catoc wrote: post #158
Sir_Twist wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like iOS 27 is a step in this direction, in terms of sanding off the rough edges of iOS 26.

Wish they would sand off liquid glass

That would make it frosted glass.

Incidentally ios27 has a user control slider for glass frostiness.

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

#224

Post by scosman »

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…

Right now sweet spot is voice transcription. Meeting recording apps are genuinely better locally than in cloud. Can run on an M1 easily. Latency matters. I built https://github.com/scosman/Biscotti and see zero reason to use cloud ever again.

LLMs are harder: not much useful below 12B, and the 700B+ ones are really much better. Models like Qwen 3.8 27b show promise: in a few years pretty good local AI should be in reach for anyone willing to buy a $1000 computer (but who knows what your $20 sub buys you then).

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

#225

Post by jmalicki »

alasdair_ wrote: post #172

There 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…

Are you training something so big you need that much unified RAM though?

If you can fit it on a GPU, and especially for training, it is so much quicker than a Mac.

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

#226

Post by jubilanti »

jmyeet wrote: post #119

So for people who don't understand, there are two markets for Apple hardware in this space: 1. Running an agent like OpenClaude. The $599 Mac Mini was an insanely good deal for this. I happened to buy a M5 Pro Mac Mini for $999 last year for other reasons. The equivalent is now almost $2000; and 2. Hardware for running inference on local models. This to me is the far more interesting market because Apple has a real o…

> 1. Running an agent like OpenClaude. The $599 Mac Mini was an insanely good deal for this.

I still have zero clue how "Buy a $599 Mac Mini to have a sandboxed LLM API caller" became the default. If you're not doing local inference and don't need to inject into iMessage or iCloud, all you need to run openclaw-style harnesses that call external APIs is a Raspberry Pi 4B, an N100, an HTPC, or that 10 year old laptop sitting in your desk.

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

#228

Post by scosman »

SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #23
setgree wrote: post #14

It's fun to see that even an extremely large company can find unexpected product market fit [0]. Per this article, "The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy." That sounds insane in retrospect, but I think there's just inherent uncertainty in what people actually need and will use things for.…

Maybe a bit of hindsight bias / the outside view here, but I feel like they're completely asleep if they didn't anticipate strong demand for this specific use case.

They were investing in ANE and Metal before everyone in consumer. Hardly asleep. They just underestimated the market size, as pretty much everyone did.

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

#229

Post by mcotton »

jwx48 wrote: post #135
mcotton wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple example. I have an older M2 Mac mini that does the OCR and visual description of all my screenshots. Screenshots are stored on my NAS. I like to screenshot things as a quick way to remember. They are things that I would not be comfortable sending a cloud provider (customer data, prototype screenshots, bank dispute details). It runs Qwen3.5:9b and glm5.2-ocr with Ollama and uses about 10GB of RAM. It automati…

What is your M2's total memory? I find this application really interesting.

It is the base M2 with 24GB RAM

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

#230

Post by jmalicki »

mv4 wrote: post #218
wilkystyle wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a tired argument and it seems to be parroted every single time someone talks about local models on hacker news. Yes, of course the most economical path is to hand over all your data and become fully dependent on a cloud provider who is already operating as scale, hoping that they won't change/remove models, hamstring capabilities, or raise prices. If this were a thread about hosting your own email or blo…

It's quite shocking to me how many experienced, tech-savvy people, who used to care about cookies and ad tracking - are now willingly sending their business strategies, highly confidential contracts, and intimate personal issues to a cloud provider because "it is only $0.0x per million tokens!".

> It's quite shocking to me how many experienced, tech-savvy people, who used to care about cookies and ad tracking - are now willingly sending their business strategies, highly confidential contracts, and intimate personal issues to a cloud provider because "it is only $0.0x per million tokens!".

Because there are more privacy guarantees there, depending on the provider. "But what if they violate their contract!" is some pretty tin-foil hat stuff.

How is this any different than a business running their website out of the cloud, assuming you are using a provider with appropriate contractual terms?

You can care about tracking and ads but still be comfortable storing your backups in the cloud, and many have been for quite awhile, even sometimes without encryption - that is totally different than e.g. Meta actively trying to track you and understand your relationship graph and your purchases etc.

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