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

Post by alasdair_ » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 3:18 AM UTC

ashish01 wrote: post #216

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…

What are you training on using self play? Like alpha go? Curious what your setup is like .

Post by mplewis » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 3:23 AM UTC

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…

Post by pylotlight » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 3:31 AM UTC

bredren wrote: post #401

srslack wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using Mac studios for local inference, but not for openclaw. It was simply the best bang for the buck at the time, and the software side of things has gotten even better since then. I haven’t run the pricing comparison but I have a feeling with the direction they’re heading that it’s better to hold off for m6 as it may assuage various bottlenecks if you are latency sensitive.

Reportedly, the M6 will not get pro, max or ultra editions. Instead Apple will go straight to M7 for these.

Post by mwcampbell » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 3:33 AM UTC

api wrote: post #26

Apple has a huge opportunity here to lead the market for machines to run local models if they step into it. Their stuff is already better than what nVidia is offering with stuff like the DGX Spark. It's a niche market but it's a market that overlaps heavily with professionals in the AI space and lead developers, so it's a market that gets them customers in those roles. If I were running Apple I'd call the RAM price b…

Post by ygytt » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 3:39 AM UTC

transcriptase wrote: post #405

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…

The openclaw crowd were just former cryptobros onto their next grift: performative posts about AI that would generate enough views/engagement/ad revenue to pay for the hardware… assuming they were even telling the truth about having it at all. None shipped anything of value. Same with anyone claiming to be running dozens or hundreds of agents 24/4.