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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

#521

Post by anon373839 »

chacham15 wrote: post #341
HDBaseT wrote: post #309

Apple was also allegedly "caught off guard" by the Macbook Neo demand. I don't really see how they couldn't see the Local AI demand or demand for a cheaper Macbooks. This just reads like marketing imo.

the machines arent optimized for it is why. the main driving factor is large unified memory which makes large(r) models possible, but there isnt the gpu horsepower to back it up. essentially, it fits the corner of the market that wants large models and is ok with running them slowly which doesnt sound like it would be a large market.

Macs have excellent generation speed, and the new Ultra will positively smash that at 1.2TB/sec of bandwidth. For example, that new 176B parameter Qwen model would generate tokens at ~200 tokens/sec.

Macs don’t have very good prefill, though. So it’s important to use a model serving stack that has excellent prompt caching and use a harness that won’t bust the cache.

I’m cross-shopping DGX Sparks and M5 Studios, and having a hard time deciding because they have exactly opposite characteristics for prefill and decode.

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

#522

Post by reactordev »

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…

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

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

#523

Post by api »

Danox wrote: post #351
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…

Apple isn’t the company that eats margins but they are company that would design around the problem and I think that’s what they will do after all, they have the design and engineering and plenty of money because they didn’t burn it on AI models or data centers.

With AI Apple is doing their classic strategy I guess: wait and then follow with something that learns all the lessons the pioneers learned.

They're letting everyone else pay for model training, with the obvious end of the road being open weights.

They're letting everyone else overspend on first-generation AI data centers before the chip industry has truly optimized for today's AI designs (which will reduce data center footprint).

They're letting everyone else play with and pioneer UI ideas.

Meanwhile all they've done is put a few toes in the water: "Apple Intelligence" which is barely anything, and adding AI acceleration to their GPUs and doing a bit of up-market marketing to AI.

So yeah they'll probably follow with a second generation Apple Intelligence that incorporates everything everyone else pioneered that worked, and an M7 or M8 line of chips with a GPU augmented with whatever approaches the other chip companies found worked best for running models... and built around the state of the art model architecture the industry finally converges on. By then RAM will probably be cheap again, so you'll get a 14" MacBook Pro with an M8 with a tensor-GPU and 512GiB of RAM.

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

#524

Post by randallsquared »

easyThrowaway wrote: post #508
brookst wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Complicated psyop? It's called "Personas" and a few of my coworkers wrote a few of them just this morning. You simply promote or finance marketing materials (blog posts, podcasts, youtube videos) with a clear idea of the kind of people you want to reach, and if your "Persona" (that is, ideal customer or evangelist) model is accurate enough, they will talk endlessly about your product for free without having to direct…

That's very different from faking a bunch of excited chatter and making up happy customers, which is what the original comment was about:

> Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple [...]

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

#525

Post by gcanyon »

To all those claiming it makes no sense that Apple wouldn't foresee this, think about the lower demand than Apple expected for the Apple Vision and the iPhone Air. If they can get caught off guard by low sales, they can get caught off guard by high sales too.

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

#527

Post by logifail »

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…

[dead]

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

#528

Post by b40d-48b2-979e »

reactordev wrote: post #522
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…

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..).

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

#529

Post by abanana »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #450
brookst wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s not complicated psyops. It’s basic marketing. ”Oh wow our product is so amazing we can’t keep up with demand you better buy before we run out”

Exactly, I'm amazed at the naivety on display here.

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

#530

Post by bensyverson »

beAbU wrote: post #484
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…

> Apple does not have a psyops division This sounds exactly like the kind thing that someone running a psyop for Apple would say.

This is exactly the kind of paranoid conspiracy thinking I was talking about. If you see red yarn between everything, you're impervious to reality.

Honestly, I'm an Apple user since 1988 and shareholder. I use my full-ass name on hn. I wish they'd give me money to promote the brand, but in reality they have something even more valuable than paid shitposting: authentic word of mouth and devoted users. That comes out of the product, not the marketing department, and it takes years.

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