Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

[germanbeer007]

i want this bubble to burst so bad

if you think we're even close to bursting the bubble, boy do i have news for you.

AI doesn't do my laundry/clean my toilets/wash my dishes yet.

 

[klasma]

I keep wondering when some company - a new start-up, perhaps? - comes out with a product/device that allows one to use dramatically less RAM while getting even better performance than we do now and costing dramatically less than we pay now.

The amount of RAM needed is dictated by the applications first and foremost, much less by the operating system and hardware. If you want to process high-resolution images/video/audio or run modern web apps in your browser (or, quite frequent as well, in a web view within a “native” app), there’s little a computer manufacturer can do to reduce the RAM required.

 

[Siliconguy]

When will this lunacy end.

2028 if history echoes as is laid out here. AI companies will either have the revenue to service their debt (or take or pay contracts), or they won't.

The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall

Trillions in compute commitments come due in 2027–2028. The Reset Wall reveals how the AI boom breaks, and when.

www.groundbrkr.com

 

[Siliconguy]

if you think we're even close to bursting the bubble, boy do i have news for you.

AI doesn't do my laundry/clean my toilets/wash my dishes yet.

It never will. AI will take your nice indoor air-conditioned job shuffling paper and flipping bytes though. Corporate AIs will send compliance reports to the government's AIs with stunning speed and efficiency as long as efficiency is not measured by electric power consumption.

 

[Omega Mac]

Isn't the attraction of the mini's for enterprise is the cost of ownership will be far less than the Ai token bloat costs. YOu're at the whim of that service provider.

Does this mean in part or all of the new prices are really corporate prices, not just inflation, that would make even more sense of the prices.

A mac mini NEO slotted into the space between 0 - Entry MM Price, would help a lot.

 

[mittencuh]

i want this bubble to burst so bad

My parents gave me their 2020 iMac, which is in excellent condition but base spec. I priced out a small SSD and upgrading the RAM and it would have cost me close to $500USD. For it to still be pretty low spec. Absolute insanity.

 

[redheeler]

Yup and we were caught off guard by the massive price increase. From $599-$899 in a few months.

I missed the announcement but just went to the Apple website to spec it out. $900 for a 256 GB SSD is diabolical.

 

[ProTruckDriver]

Enough of this AI BS! I'm having nightmares of AI coming to get me! 😳🤣

 

[Jakol]

2028 if history echoes as is laid out here. AI companies will either have the revenue to service their debt (or take or pay contracts), or they won't.

The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall

Trillions in compute commitments come due in 2027–2028. The Reset Wall reveals how the AI boom breaks, and when.

www.groundbrkr.com

And then all these POS hardware companies turn to regular users, but Pepperidge farm remembers.

 

[MacTwick]

AI has its uses; but using it for damn everything is starting to really annoy me. It promotes laziness. I am glad I only have 10 or more years left of working before retiring and not having to deal with this BS.

10 years in the current situation. 3-4 years realistically lol

 

[Corefile]

AI doesn't do my laundry/clean my toilets/wash my dishes yet.

AI is smart.

 

[Jarman74]

Apple's unusually timed announcement of new Mac mini and Mac Studio models this week was driven by unexpectedly strong enterprise appetite for AI hardware, according to The Information.

Making Apple look like the company is still clueless about AI years after Federighi toyed with GitHub Copilot at the end of 2022 isn't even remotely believable anymore. It's more likely this is some strategy to boost Ternus' profile by distancing him from out-of-touch leadership.

 

[ronno]

Makes sense as companies are realizing Private compute is a better option than sending all their companies secrets off to OpenAI for processing. And alleviating the need for paying skyrocketing prices for tokens.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Making Apple look like the company is still clueless about AI years after Federighi toyed with GitHub Copilot at the end of 2022 isn't even remotely believable anymore. It's more likely this is some strategy to boost Ternus' profile by distancing him from out-of-touch leadership.

100% -- we are fully in the "narratives Apple wants pushed" zone here.

 

[ronno]

Yeah I’m using cloud AI agents to run things on my local minis. I can’t see spending tens of thousands to run local AI that’s still not as good as what’s in the cloud. But maybe in a few years it will make sense

How much are you spending on tokens? And how much of your data is being shared with OpenAI and the rest of these data scraping companies?

 

[anakin44011]

Look, congratulations Apple for having a product where demand far exceeds supply (and will continue doing so well into next year).

But the 'caught off guard' comment is a little disingenuous...like the CEO of Anthropic always claiming that the new model is "too dangerous" for humanity, which he's been doing with every model since he worked at OpenAI. That's marketing hype...and the news media (and socials) just eat it up.

Apple knows darn well what the demand is for these ENTERPRISE-level computers. They also know darn well that Local AI is one of the few real-world applications that requires the latest and greatest. It is hard to convince even a video editor that the latest Macs are truly a game-changer for typical workloads. The vast majority of users are well served by the consumer-level Macs

...but Apple might have backed into this craze the same way a video-game card manufacturer backed into AI. Sometimes, you are just lucky.

And before one thinks that NVIDIA is just going to crush this local market as well, just consider this...the NVIDIA Spark is good for just one thing - local AI. The Mac Studio is still a Mac, meaning it do be A LOT more than AI, thus it will not be obsolete for many, many years...even without a local AI workload.

So yeah - I'll be ordering one in October...but there's almost no way I will see it before Christmas.

And for those wishing for the AI bubble to pop, be careful what you wish for. The crash is going to bring nearly everyone down.

So many people are capitalist on the way up (mine, mine, mine) and Socialist on the way down (we are all in this together). Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

[norbinhouston]

That's great news, it should keep the new Houston Mac mini factory busy. You AI haters sounded like the PC haters back in the 70s/80s. lol, I guess history does repeat itself. Computers revolutionized our world, hopefully AI will do the same.

 

[turbineseaplane]

That's great news, it should keep the new Houston Mac mini factory busy. You AI haters sounded like the PC haters back in the 70s/80s. lol, I guess history does repeat itself. Computers revolutionized our world, hopefully AI will do the same.

Let's check back in a year my friend.

 

[Biro]

The amount of RAM needed is dictated by the applications first and foremost, much less by the operating system and hardware. If you want to process high-resolution images/video/audio or run modern web apps in your browser (or, quite frequent as well, in a web view within a “native” app), there’s little a computer manufacturer can do to reduce the RAM required.

Then maybe the solution comes from the developer side. And maybe AI will allow it to happen, ironically. Don’t think in terms of why it can’t happen. Determine what is needed or where the choke point is (as you are kind of doing) and go from there.

 

[ericinboston]

If this report is accurate, Apple may have stumbled into a very profitable AI niche with both the Mac mini and Mac Studio. NVIDIA is still much faster for AI, but large amounts of VRAM are extremely expensive, while Apple can offer a lot of unified memory in compact, power-efficient machines.
That makes both Macs attractive for local AI workloads, and Apple clearly seems to have noticed that enterprise customers are willing to pay serious money for them. The downside is that Mac mini and Mac Studio pricing is starting to look increasingly enterprise-focused too.

I think the upcoming issue is that Apple essentially increased the price of the Mini by 50%. Sure, companies that had already spent time this summer figuring out if/how they can use Minis for AI are already locked in to buy. But any company now and in the future is now going to ask themselves if buying the Mini, at its new price points, has any real competitive edge over Brand X.

 

[TheLunaPark]

I’ll stick to using my own real intelligence, thanks.

 

[seek3r]

Even so, enterprise's rush toward powerful desktop Macs more broadly took Apple by surprise. 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.

Maybe they shouldnt have nuked the mac pro 🤔 (and maybe they should bring back the xserve)

 

[HadrianQ]

Sounds like Businesses don’t trust cloud AI either. They want the power in their hands. All these datacenters are wasted investments: The People what private power.

 

[Jakol]

My brain does wonders on 600 kcal when it has to.

 

[mannyvel]

Macs are now the cheapest and best way to run LLMs locally. The problem with cloud providers is privacy, an issue that doesn't exist with local LLMs. And they've gotten really good; you don't need frontier models to do the basic stuff like summarize your emails, build a website, or analyze a financial statement using a set of criteria.

The field is really crazy, and improvements to efficiency and throughput are everywhere. Keeping track of everything is well-neigh impossible.

But local LLMs? They're great.