Actually, that wasn't quite it. What I was saying is that humans use over 1000 times the energy from the grid to do the same job as a moderate agentic query. If you want I can add in the amount of kCals it takes to sustain the humans long enough to do the job, but it won't change the order of magnitude of the disparity.
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Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
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Actually, that wasn't quite it. What I was saying is that humans use over 1000 times the energy from the grid to do the same job as a moderate agentic query. If you want I can add in the amount of kCals it takes to sustain the humans long enough to do the job, but it won't change the order of magnitude of the disparity.
Wahlstrm
macrumors 6502a
For the price of an M5-Ultra with 256GB you can buy two DGX Sparks and network them to get a 256GB total config. It is a nice little set up, faster than the Mac, if you are going to be doing general GPU/CUDA processing. If you are going to use it for a lot of LLM decode, it won't win. The memory bandwidth is 1/6th that of the M5-Ultra. It doesn't matter that your GPUs are faster when you are constrained by bandwidth.
0
That kind of design wouldn't do anything for AI over the Mac Studio.
That was posted before in this thread, also without giving any reasoning. There's nothing relevant the slots would add to a hypothetical new Mac Pro. Remember that the M2 did not allow for graphics cards in the slots and that memory could not be upgraded.
That kind of design wouldn't do anything for AI over the Mac Studio.
Something like 70% of businesses still run their own data centers aka hybrid cloud. There was a rush to cloud in its infancy but then companies wised up.
Many have already addressed the obvious privacy aspect but there's also been a significant closing of the gap between local vs cloud AI skill. A year or two ago, the gap may've been 2-3 years in favor of cloud. Now that lead has been cut in half and will likely cut another 1/3 or 1/4 of the gap by years end. There's also no rails (for better or worse) on local.
There are people who run through thousands of dollars worth of tokens in a day when they’re doing real work with these things.
Meanwhile, sharing data with all the greedy Tech Bros.
The Mac mini would pay for itself in a week.
Can you imagine Excel or Word having replaced workers?
That is true, and A.I.’s potential for advancing medical science is high. However, without any regulation on the horizon, its potential for damage in too many other areas, for example, in primary and secondary education, currently is higher. It is not seeking societal consensus and is not primarily motivated by the desire to improve the quality of life — it is first and foremost driven by corporate greed and a handful of billionaires who overtly battle each other while covertly funding each other on a ticking economic time bomb. Or as the August 27 NYT article “Meta Took Aim at Anthropic. It Is Also One of Its Largest Customers” put it:
Their situation offers a window into the friend-foe relationships permeating Silicon Valley’s A.I. race, in which tech titans can bad mouth rivals in public while giving them billions of dollars behind the scenes, even while saying they may pose an existential risk to humanity.
And PCs are used to create all kinds of illicit stuff. The internet too. Lets get rid of computers and shut down the internet because people use it for really terrible things.
And Excel and Word did replace tons of workers. You guys have only known a world with computers, you didn't experience the transition, so I get that you're over reacting. I guess its just natural.
And Excel and Word did replace tons of workers. You guys have only known a world with computers, you didn't experience the transition, so I get that you're over reacting. I guess its just natural.
They won’t mind – they will just ask for another $30 billion investment because consumer uptake is slow at the moment.
Yeah.
Eurocomment.txt ("We need a an EU AISA/AIMA Act with lots of government control and no more greed and halt development until we know what's going on" or variants thereof.)
The world's innovation doesn't wait for the EU's regulations to catch up.
And this comes just after Apple killed the Mac Pro, the only true enterprise AI Mac. Apple’s business strategy is a s**t show.
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.
Apple normally releases new Mac models in the autumn, closer to October or November, making this week's announcement unusually early, falling just before the anticipated arrival of new iPhone models. The Information says that the AI-driven boom in Mac Studio and Mac mini sales is behind the early launch.
Apple noticeably promoted the ability to link multiple Mac Studios together into a single, more capable system for running large frontier AI models, a feature aimed at business and developer customers rather than everyday consumers.
Apple highlighted the Mac mini and Mac Studio's shift toward business buyers in June, with a "Business at the Park" event involving executives from major companies Ford, Disney, and Anthropic. The Mac mini was said to be the "darling" of the event.
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.
Businesses that approached Apple asking to buy access to the company's Private Cloud Compute infrastructure were reportedly turned down. Apple is instead leaning on partners such as WebAI and Mount Thor, which provide AI tools and execution environments built on Apple hardware.
A surge in demand for Mac hardware to run AI models has coincided with the global memory shortage, leaving many Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations out of stock for months. Some enterprise customers are reportedly turning to other hardware such as Nvidia's DGX Spark, a compact AI desktop launched late last year in a form factor similar to the Mac mini's, as Apple's own high end configurations remain difficult to get hold of.
Article Link: Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
Apple’s ecosystem is brilliantly wonderful, and they could make huge inroads into enterprise and everything else, but they lack clear focus and direction.
racerhomie
macrumors 6502a
Apple definitely needs a Mac Neo for desktops. $900 for a headless Mac is not affordable
Celtic-moniker
macrumors regular
Glad that there's at least some people in this thread that understands what is going on and why. So many other posters in here seem to lack the understanding about how Apple accidentally created extremely good AI machines by accident and the AI base is turning towards Apple. It's not a "Apple didn't understand AI" thing, it's an "Apple's hardware turned out to be absolutely perfect for AI as opposed to Windows aimed off-the-shelf systems".
Watching the developer community swing the Titanic around like a teenage boy drifts a Subaru WRX. This sudden turning to Apple was unexpected by everyone, not just Apple. Apple do need a rack mounted system as that would absolutely kill, but not the "Pro". If anything this M6 development and its optimising for AI has informed Apple that the Pro architecture offered nothing to this wave of AI development. There's a reason Apple thumped an additional that Neural Engine into the M6 as they saw how it gave the M series chips the advantage with AI, paired with the unified memory structure that has made it so efficient for this role.
turbineseaplane
macrumors Penryn
I don’t know why anybody thinks Apple was caught off guard.
They’ve always had perfect planning and don’t ever make any mistakes.
They’ve always had perfect planning and don’t ever make any mistakes.