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

[Biro]

There is no AI bubble to burst. There is hyper enthusiasm but the fakers will get shaken out very quickly. An actual bubble that bursts isn't possible anymore with all the market makers that exist now to expose fakers in the market very rapidly.

As Warren Buffet said, in the short term, the market acts as a voting machine, but in the long term, it acts as a weighing machine that measures a business's true value.

With market makers, that weighing of a business's true value now happens quickly and regularly.

While I appreciate your point of view, I spent close to 20 years in financial news. I found that human psychology doesn’t really change. People get greedy at the same time time, they panic at the same time and go running for the exits at the same time.

There’s a book that’s worth reading on this general subject: This Time It’s Different by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff:

This Time Is Different

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling history of financial crises

press.princeton.edu

Whether it’s Dutch tulips, the Internet, mortgage-backed securities or AI, bubbles can - and will - happen. And with the few AI hyperscalers borrowing so much money and taking up so much of the value of the S&P 500 (meaning everyday people with their 401k’s are invested in index funds that hold much stock in these companies), we are setting ourselves up for a bubble burst and huge correction.

When you say bursts aren’t possible anymore, the markets say “Hold my beer.”

 

[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.

Though I do have a dishwasher, it runs on a simple timer, no AI involved. Loading and unloading is strictly manual.

More importantly it's harvest season for the local apple orchards. I haven't seen a single AI out there among the trees.

There are still jobs for humans as long as they are not located in the office. Of course, this is the opposite of the future that was promised.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Indeed I think the original post-Jobs plan was that Tim would continue to be the ops guy and "make line go up" every quarter using the traditional methods and Ive (along with Scott Forstall) would be the folks that could see what's happening, figure out where the puck was heading and skate to it with the Apple Magic.

Instead Tim got left looking at what the teams (who by the year are getting bozonified) were doing to respond to trends and green light incrementally better designed products, but not answering the core questions with their products in those segments (which is a core part of the "Apple Magic").

This is a really smart look at what feels like probably happened.
I totally agree.

 

[edubfromktown]

I’ll just stick with cloud A.I. with that you can get away with 16,24,32GB of ram

M1 Max Studio running Gemma-4-26b-a4b-qat with LM Studio and Open WebUI does fine on a base model system with 32 GB of RAM. It can get a bit tight on resources if I open a bunch of browser windows and other apps simultaneously though generally speaking, it hums along without piling up SWP.

I keep it "AL local" for personal confidential, financial, etc. things that I don't want ingested and/or training cloud AI platforms.

 

[smaffei]

There is no AI bubble to burst, at least not in the way doom and gloomers are claiming. There is hyper enthusiasm but the fakers will get shaken out very quickly. An actual bubble that bursts isn't possible anymore with all the market makers that exist now to expose fakers in the market very rapidly.

As Warren Buffet said, in the short term, the market acts as a voting machine, but in the long term, it acts as a weighing machine that measures a business's true value.

With market makers, that weighing of a business's true value now happens quickly and regularly.

There is a bubble to burst. It will burst (just like it did in the ".com boom"). All the smaller players will die. Open AI and Antrophic will remain but will struggle to give any of their investors ROI. AI will still live and be a huge help, but it won't become the holy grail that was promised. Seen this all before.

 

[fithian]

It was time for my Power Mac Trashcan to be replaced. It did 13 years with honor and it to time to be put out to pasture. My replacement is a Mac Studio M5 Max with 48 ram and 4 TB storage. $5k.

 

[ProTruckDriver]

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.

Amen!

I'm 57 and have been an Apple developer for 38 years. Can't wait until 65 so that I can get out of this industry. It's nowhere near what it was even 10 years ago. There is very little caring about quality in software anymore. Ship it fast and deal with the quality aftermath later. And now, with AI acceleration, things are even faster; ideas become apps in days with limited or no real QA.

AI slop is real and becoming the norm. I'm done.

Even after retirement we have to deal with this AI Slop. At 76 years old I remember when people had to use their brain. No more, we have AI and our new generation will be a bunch of dummies that can't think for themself. I'm glad I seen the Good Old Days growing up and not this AI Slop.
Am I anti AI? No. It can be useful to some extent. But using it for everything every day is ridiculous.

 

[cohen777]

Why was Apple caught off guard? Since the M1 chip we have heard about neural chips and "Apple Intelligence/Siri." Aren't there highly paid people in the company who think about this? Come on!

 

[germanbeer007]

Though I do have a dishwasher, it runs on a simple timer, no AI involved. Loading and unloading is strictly manual.

Which you had to scrape off the food (if into trash, who's going to take out the trash?), load dishes, add detergent.

More importantly it's harvest season for the local apple orchards. I haven't seen a single AI out there among the trees.

That's correct. Proves AI bubble is not even close to popping

There are still jobs for humans as long as they are not located in the office.

for now.

 

[ikramerica]

AI isn't going to go away, when it pops there will be just less money being tossed around.

Sure it will. I mean, the internet went away after that bubble burst, and nobody lives in houses anymore after 2008.

 

[ikramerica]

Which you had to scrape off the food (if into trash, who's going to take out the trash?), load dishes, add detergent.



That's correct. Proves AI bubble is not even close to popping



for now.

See the Gene Simmons/Tom Selleck vehicle “Runaway.”

 

[MiamiFL]

There is a bubble to burst. It will burst (just like it did in the ".com boom"). All the smaller players will die. Open AI and Antrophic will remain but will struggle to give any of their investors ROI. AI will still live and be a huge help, but it won't become the holy grail that was promised. Seen this all before.

Nope, you're incorrect and obviously don't work in this area or you wouldn't have such an uninformed take.

 

[MiamiFL]

While I appreciate your point of view, I spent close to 20 years in financial news. I found that human psychology doesn’t really change. People get greedy at the same time time, they panic at the same time and go running for the exits at the same time.

There’s a book that worth reading on this general subject: This Time It’s Different by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff:

This Time Is Different

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling history of financial crises

press.princeton.edu

Whether it’s Dutch tulips, the Internet, mortgage-backed securities or AI, bubbles can - and will - happen. And with the few AI hyperscalers borrowing so much money and taking up so much of the value of the S&P 500 (meaning everyday people with their 401k’s are invested in index funds that hold much stock in these companies), we are setting ourselves up for a bubble burst and huge correction.

When you say bursts aren’t possible anymore, the markets say “Hold my beer.”

Sorry but you couldn't be more wrong. I'm in both the financial sector and the AI section and I can guarantee there is no bubble.

 

[NoGood@Usernames]

which one,

The lunacy of Apple having no idea what is going on in the industry

or

The industry going all in for AI like they did for tulips. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania)

The latter one, most definitely.

 

[Biro]

Sorry but you couldn't be more wrong. I'm in both the financial sector and the AI section and I can guarantee there is no bubble.

Okay, let’s revisit this in a few years. People have been saying bubbles are no longer possible for a long time. And yet they keep happening.

 

[fithian]

My Miele dishwasher has AI, and it does a full load in 22 minutes, at 220v. My Lg washer and dryer have AI mode which does the wash in a minimal amount of time, done perfectly. My Teslas (7) all have AI for driving with FSD. Touch one button and go, parks at the charger or my inside my garage. My soon to be arriving Studio M5Max will have AI that I can use to write nasty letters to nasty businesses.

 

[psingh01]

Tim Cook fumbled.

 

[seek3r]

There is a bubble to burst. It will burst (just like it did in the ".com boom"). All the smaller players will die. Open AI and Antrophic will remain but will struggle to give any of their investors ROI. AI will still live and be a huge help, but it won't become the holy grail that was promised. Seen this all before.

I’d bet you dollars to donuts right now that openai crashes and burns and gets bought for parts by one of the older tech giants like Microsoft, IBM, Meta, Google, Amazon, or HPE. They’re spending way more money than they literally can ever make back

Anthropic will probably survive though

 

[unkl bob]

When cat videos are no longer funny

So the end is here! Ya-a-aay

 

[unkl bob]

"You can’t be sirious!"

Very funny; actually the exact words (except sErious) I said out loud in my office after reading something preposterous. Siri responded "Hello Bob" I put her on manual only. Good laugh here. 😂

 

[deconstruct60]

0

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

Didn't need a 'graphics' card. What would have been useful is an AI compute accelerator. They are not necessarily the same thing.

For example, the 300W range would have worked with the Mac Pro 2023 design.

Cards

Blackhole™ PCIe boards are infinitely scalable and designed for high performance AI processing.

tenstorrent.com

What wasn't provisioned was 600-900W cards.

tinyGPU has some drivers that talks via the "PCI card" DriverKit interface to send data to/from a card and get some compute done inbetween. [ That is not to send data to card and then out some video port on the card; graphics. ]

and that memory could not be upgraded.

That really hasn't dramatically hurt the Mini and Mac Studio demand. Nvidia Spark DGX isn't languishing on shelfs forever either.

Can't cover everything for everybody. But cover a decent set of local inference demand is tractable. The market is already demonstrating that.

Would the highly focused 'graphics card' folks be happy to get cards with no graphics. Probably, not; so won't 'win' hardly any of them back (or upgrade) if this rolled out.

That kind of design wouldn't do anything for AI over the Mac Studio.

The Mac Studio only has Thunderbolt and some x4 PCI-e connection. If had 1-2 tenstorrent cards running an 'expert' and one expert running on the Ulra then can get a mixture of experts in a box that is bigger than a Studio on a x16 ( or x8 ) communication backhaul bus. that is going to top the x4 the Studio is stuck with as the data passes inbetween the experts.

Similiar if just Ultras in the Mac Pro and put 1-2 100GbE cards in them with RMDA support. A mesh network of 100GbE probably beats one with maybe 60Gb/s cap on it.

There are somethings over Mac Studio. It is a gap though there it is narrow enough for Apple to consider quitting by picking folks looking for lower system costs ( 1-2 100GbE cards cost more than 'free' Thunderbolt. TB is slower but also doesn't cost more also. )

 

[ChrisA]

There is a bubble to burst. It will burst (just like it did in the ".com boom"). All the smaller players will die. Open AI and Antrophic will remain but will struggle to give any of their investors ROI. AI will still live and be a huge help, but it won't become the holy grail that was promised. Seen this all before.

The bubble is only the stock price, not the technology. When the .com bubble burst, the Internet did not go away. In fact, I would argue the Internet is more important now than it was before the burst.

Consumers think of AI as chatbots. But really, it is the spell checker that runs on your email app. It is in the photo app that finds pictures and removes objects from photos, and in my case, it is the AI that decides how a robot moves its feet. Someday I hope to be able to work on how the hands should move.

While the stock price might burst, the technology is still in its infancy, and I am sure that all the big discoveries are still in the future.

Today, many people ride in cars or taxis that drive themselves using AI. In 10 years, the cars will be better, and in time, human drivers will be banned from public streets.

 

[dougnash]

So, the real question is...is the new M5 Ultra going to be impossible to get?

 

[rafark]

“Apple caught off guard”
Clickbait article. Apple knows very well, perhaps more than anyone else the extreme demand there is for minis and studios right now. It literally was expected.

 

[Biro]

The bubble is only the stock price, not the technology. When the .com bubble burst, the Internet did not go away. In fact, I would argue the Internet is more important now than it was before the burst.

Consumers think of AI as chatbots. But really, it is the spell checker that runs on your email app. It is in the photo app that finds pictures and removes objects from photos, and in my case, it is the AI that decides how a robot moves its feet. Someday I hope to be able to work on how the hands should move.

While the stock price might burst, the technology is still in its infancy, and I am sure that all the big discoveries are still in the future.

Today, many people ride in cars or taxis that drive themselves using AI. In 10 years, the cars will be better, and in time, human drivers will be banned from public streets.

This is exactly right. When the Internet bubble burst it bankrupted many companies and left behind an infrastructure that required years before demand caught up. And a lot of people lost money. But demand did eventually catch up and the Internet survived. Even if it developed into something many did not foresee.

Likewise, we are in a bubble with AI development despite protests that we are not - from people who stand much gain by convincing us that everything is fine. The bubble is likely to burst, many companies will go away and a lot of people will lose money. But AI will survive and make its contributions - and likely develop into something that many will not foresee.

But there’s no question that there is massive overinvestment in AI right now and that projected profits required to justify current stock prices will never become reality.