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

[mozumder]

The 512 GB Mac Studio is perfect for on-premise corporate LLM servers.

The economics really favor these Mac Studios for enterprise customers.

Token costs are really expensive, and corporations can split a single server for a hundred employees.

A single $200/month individual Claude Code Pro Max 20x subscription might actually cost $2000/month in tokens at API token prices that enterprise accounts have to pay, since Anthropic doesn't let corporations use individual plans. So already it might pay for itself over year or 2.

And that $200 Claude Pro Max 20x subscription has 5 hour and weekly limits that an on-premise server isn't going to have, and it can be shared across multiple users. So it's REALLY favorable for enterprises.

 

[Westside guy]

Warning: Alternative explanation anecdote ahead...

My group (I'm an IT staffer at a university STEM department) has typically purchased Windows laptops - but, this year, we're likely buying Macs. Why? Because 1) for the type of work our staff is doing, the OS doesn't really matter; 2) despite the Apple price increase, the Mac laptops we're buying are cheaper than the Dells we would normally buy, which went up even more; and 3) we've had good end-user outcomes with the staff who've already switched to Mac in the past. But it has zero to do with AI other than the price increases at both Dell and Apple are AI-related.

Side note: I'm mostly not involved in this decision or its implementation... I've just been part of the discussion.

 

[norbinhouston]

You guys must be too young to remember how the PC scared the crap out of white collar workers back in the 70s and 80s. They wanted to type everything out with carbon paper, or hand write into their ledgers. They were so scared because they didn't understand it, looks like the AI haters are just the same. Can you imagine not having Excel or Word to use? That's what the 70s and 80s workers wanted. Now AI is helping cure cancer, but yea, keep hating on it.

 

[Jakol]

You guys must be too young to remember how the PC scared the crap out of white collar workers back in the 70s and 80s. They wanted to type everything out with carbon paper, or hand write into their ledgers. They were so scared because they didn't understand it, looks like the AI haters are just the same. Can you imagine not having Excel or Word to use? That's what the 70s and 80s workers wanted. Now AI is helping cure cancer, but yea, keep hating on it.

At least people could write in cursive.

 

[MacBH928]

I don't get it. Why would you pay like $20K to build a handicapped local AI machine when you can pay like $25/month and get to use the highest tier models?

 

[Jakol]

I don't get it. Why would you pay like $20K to build a handicapped local AI machine when you can pay like $25/month and get to use the highest tier models?

Privacy, more freedom customising the model etc and the most important reason of all BECAUSE WE CAN.

 

[Black_Mage]

I find it interesting that Apple saw the benefit of unified RAM years before LLMs and A.I. became popular. Was Apple able to predict what would be in demand, or was it just an interesting coincidence? 🤔

 

[Performa 6300]

i want this bubble to burst so bad

Hate to be that dude....you're going to be waiting a long time 2-5 years and even then it might not be a big pop and the whole reason is simple, its applications are that of electricity, this isn't the infancy of internet that was blown way out of proportion's because it needed a bigger time spread for its applications to be made/used/refined so speculators drove up prices but it was always going to be a slow road there or homes where we built a ton of them off a system that was allowing people with bad credit to buy them and in some cases lots of them. Which in turn allowed lenders/banks/etc to package that debt and then sell it, etc,etc, we all know the story.

Efficiency Gaines will drive growth with AI even when consumers/business won't or won't be at the same rate, as this is prefect situation for Governments to take over at that point helping the build out continue and saving resources and taxpayer dollars making our systems and our programs better. That should always be the long term goal for our species, nobody believes in a bloated/inefficient Government expect those that profit from it, the rest of us hate it.

Memory prices will come down though so that's good how much is the real Q atm, that's not going to pop anything, in fact it will just mean a faster adoption rate. Watched a great video the other day, it was about how through time when gains in Efficiency happen humans don't use less of it, they use it more and consume more of it.

AI is different, the past will not be the same as the future. As always prepare for the worst of course but expect that you might have to shift gears a little here with this train of thought and the road might lead a different way this time.

/cheers

 

[norbinhouston]

They wanted their phones to be more efficient, that's why.

 

[fatTribble]

At least people could write in cursive.

You mean with lots of “damn” and “hell”? 🤭
(it’s from The Simpsons)

 

[vantelimus]

"Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio" – Utter ********.

 

[Spooner83]

"strong enterprise appetite for AI hardware"

These corporations really want to take human jobs and bring in the robots. Terrible. I can't wait til' millions of people are unemployed because of this. It's the corporations' fault, not the employee.

 

[ChrisA]

Apple should’ve rebuilt everything, not just processor and modem but memory too. Then got behind that so by the time a shortage like this happen, Apple would be so proprietary that it wouldn’t even matter, it would still be Apples to Oranges.

This is already the case. Apple uses LPDDR RAM. This kind of RAM is not used in AI data centers. The data center computers use RAM that is both “registered" and ECC. It is not at all interchangeable.

What creates the shortage is that the same semiconductor manufacturing equipment is used to make both kinds. The bottleneck that creates the shortage is "space in the factory". It takes many years to create more factory space, and the shortage rolls all the way back to a company in the Netherlands that makes the equipment used to make the chips. In other words, you have to wait in line to build the factory because the machines that make the RAM are sold out.

But the RAM itself is already very different.

 

[Smartuser]

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

Right, those sold so well and would make so much sense now.

 

[klasma]

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.

If you want to edit a high-resolution photo (or similar), there simply is no good alternative. For those applications, you do want the memory.

For cases where memory usage is not related to the size of the data, it is often caused by using web technology. This can’t be changed without also changing the web and changing browsers. The technology is being used because it means developers can use the same technology cross-platform. If a platform denies that option, most developers will simply not develop for it.

 

[klasma]

I don't get it. Why would you pay like $20K to build a handicapped local AI machine when you can pay like $25/month and get to use the highest tier models?

Because you don’t want to divulge the whole of your life to big tech.

 

[Smartuser]

Talk of a bubble just shows that someone is either not old enough to remember the video game crash of 1983 and the dot com bubble bust of 2000/2001 or too uniformed on them. In both cases it was the end of those whole industries forever according to breathless news coverage, only for everything to come back a short time later and still being around today.

AI isn't going to go anywhere. Ignorant people equate AI with LLMs when there's so much more, and LLMs with frontier models run by awful companies in awful data centers.

Like others here, I sure hope that some of the worst excesses (component prices, data centers) will end soon. I remember a time from 1992 to 1996 when RAM prices stagnated and increased slightly and people were stuck at 4 or 8 MB. Then very suddenly the bottom fell out. This has always happened.

 

[hybrid_x]

Caught off guard?

Does Apple not employ product forecasting specialists? If they do, those people should be looking for work elsewhere.

 

[acconda81]

End Ai for good!

 

[vantelimus]

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.

According to energy consumption tables at published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (eia.gov), a staff of 5 people working for one week pulling together and formatting compliance reports will use approximately 5x133=665 kWh of electricity at work. According to Figure 2.1 in Energy and AI, a report published by the International Energy Agency (iea.org), a moderate agentic task consumes about 50Wh of electricity. Taking these figures as rough orders of magnitude, rounding up to the nearest power of ten for the agentic query (100Wh) and down for the humans (100kWh), we see the humans will burn about 1,000 times the electricity doing this job than the AI agent. So, what were you saying about the efficiency of electric-power usage?

 

[Zwhaler]

When will this lunacy end.

When it ends, the new prices will remain.

 

[svish]

Mac mini is a great computer. Love my M4 mini. Looks like there will be high demand throughout the year!

 

[Smartuser]

End Ai for good!

Childish.

 

[Smartuser]

When it ends, the new prices will remain.

Totally. History is full of examples where prices never came down after a bust, yeah right.

 

[G5isAlive]

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. Yes, I’m sure keepers of the status quo will say that’s impossible. But almost nothing really is impossible. I mean, if the market is grossly distorted and isn’t providing us with what we need now, then history tells us something is likely to come along to change that situation. I’ll bet the answer is simpler than we might think.

Mmmm. So perhaps the greatest inventor of all time is Mother Nature. And if we know anything about brains and the hierarchy in the animal kingdom it is in general (repeat in general let's not split hairs here), more neurons (ram), more intelligence. I think your dream of a competent computer needing dramatically less ram is.. against the laws of nature. But what almost definitely will happen is we will continue to develop better forms of ram, cheaper, smaller, to feed all those independent AI robots. But it's not going to help us with the current supply/demand cost issues. Bringing a new plant on line that is just following an existing blue print takes years, developing a new technology, scaling it, learning to manufacture it in mass, and THEN bringing a new plant on line. Yeah that takes considerably longer.

My point is, agreed nothing is impossible, not necessarily a question of 'if', but 'when' (assuming we dont blow ourselves up). But 'when' may not be in our lifetime. Just saying.

The answer is most assuredly not simpler.