15 ms·

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

501 points by thm 1mo ago

ceejayoz 1mo ago
Time to bring back the Xserves, I guess.
taskoutputs2k 1mo ago
just a real bummer that they raised the prices so much
- AlexandrB 1mo ago
  I suspect it can't be helped at this point. RAM is the new gold. Valve even had to increase the price for a 4 year old piece of hardware[1]. [1] https://tech-insider.org/ca/steam-deck-price-increase-2026/ https://tech-insider.org/ca/steam-deck-price-increase-2026/
- snarkyturtle 1mo ago
  It definitely puts it out of the range of every day users but a non-insignificant proportion of people who use it for ai have become multi-millionaires because of ai. So there's definitely no shortage of people who have no problem paying those high prices.
  - noman-land 1mo ago
    Citation needed.
  - bigyabai 1mo ago
    > but a non-insignificant proportion of people who use it for ai have become multi-millionaires because of ai I can't even name one person who fits this mold, let alone a non-insignificant proportion of people. Who are you thinking of?
- lenerdenator 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - DarmokTanagra 1mo ago
    They use the datacenters for that.
    - lenerdenator 1mo ago
      No, that's for generating the hot air used to help inflate their egos. Heating is a very separate line item on the budget.
      - DarmokTanagra 1mo ago
        Ah you're right, I have a hard time distinguishing the difference between hot air and SV dev farts.
- VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago
  I don't know if you're young, or new to this industry, or what, but take a look around - the prices went up across the board. It's not just Apple.
- Danox 1mo ago
  Which is why Apple is going to need to design around again and do something about that in house if you can design and engineer a processor or a modem you can certainly do something about memory and SSD’s, Apple buying PA Semi, Intrinsity and Anobit led to Apple Silicon, buying Infineon led to a new Apple modem the capabilities is there and the money is there in house it may take two-four years but long-term I don’t think there is any other choice. One thing to watch for when Apple introduces the new phones coming up shortly is whether or not Apple has replaced Qualcomm in their flagship smart phones because that is coming up soon Qualcomm has given warning to their investors.
compounding_it 1mo ago
More customers is generally a good problem to have in most businesses. Just that the situation is very paradoxical given the supply shortages.
- pmontra 1mo ago
  If those customers are in the market you want to develop. If they are not, money is money but if it comes from the wrong people it might slow you down.
comrade1234 1mo ago
I wish they sold something that could go in a colo - redundant power supplies, lights out management, etc. you know they have them internally...
- dewey 1mo ago
  > you know they have them internally... What makes you think that? There's a lot of data centers that sell you access to colocated Mac Mini's, they have added FileVault unlock via SSH in the boot process which also makes things easier. There's not that many reasons to run a Mac in the cloud unless you have some very specific Mac related workload.
  - scrlk 1mo ago
    Apple built internal M5 servers for private cloud compute: https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-chips-leaked/ https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-... https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
    - dewey 1mo ago
      Thanks, missed that article.
  - ndiddy 1mo ago
    > What makes you think that? There’s articles about them, Apple uses them internally for AI services. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/photos-of-apples-own-new-in-house-ai-servers.2478766/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/photos-of-apples-own-ne...
  - shepmaster 1mo ago
    > What makes you think that? Here's a leaked / rumor image of Apple servers themselves. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/26/leaked-images-of-apple-ai-servers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/26/leaked-images-of-apple-...
  - 1mo ago
paxys 1mo ago
I really hope with Ternus taking the helm Apple starts to remember that it has products outside of iPhone.
- catoc 1mo ago
  I wish they would stop with the new-iPhone-every-year nonsense and refocus on quality, fix some bugs… but yeah, not gonna happen
  - stetrain 1mo ago
    At this point it's basically like car models years. They rev them annually and make a few improvements but they're actually going longer between major redesigns. If they didn't bump the numbers every year people walking into stores would be worried about paying lots of money for an old phone that will soon be replaced by a much newer model.
  - Sir_Twist 1mo ago
    I feel like iOS 27 is a step in this direction, in terms of sanding off the rough edges of iOS 26.
    - catoc 1mo ago
      Wish they would sand off liquid glass
      - kridsdale1 1mo ago
        That would make it frosted glass. Incidentally ios27 has a user control slider for glass frostiness.
      - Tagbert 1mo ago
        Liquid Glass has been refined significantly in the 27 OS's and you have more control over the degree of transparency. Overall stability and performance are better as well.
hzwanip 1mo ago
Off guard? :'D
- throw9399383838 1mo ago
  Apple did not raise prices fast enough
setgree 1mo ago
It's fun to see that even an extremely large company can find unexpected product market fit [0]. Per this article, "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." That sounds insane in retrospect, but I think there's just inherent uncertainty in what people actually need and will use things for. [0]https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html: "In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup... The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work."
- SaltyBackendGuy 1mo ago
  Maybe a bit of hindsight bias / the outside view here, but I feel like they're completely asleep if they didn't anticipate strong demand for this specific use case.
  - adjejmxbdjdn 1mo ago
    I don’t understand how that’s possible. They should have had a better idea of what was happening in the memory markets than pretty much any other entity.
    - Nevermark 1mo ago
      Their universal RAM strategy is so obviously helpful for AI. (1) GPU/NPU <--> CPU RAM copies eliminated. (2) All (most) RAM available for GPU/Neural, when local models are typically kneecapped by limited GPU RAM sizes vs. the much larger RAM options for M/Max/Pro/Ultras. They have been taking NPU's seriously on their phones, tablets and laptops since the M1. Then they enabled fully-connected RDMA for 4 x 512GB MacStudio's = 2TB RAM. Perfect for a large Mixture-of-Experts model. It would be very strange if they didn't notice their product line had landed in a new sweet spot.
      - pizzafeelsright 1mo ago
Grombobulous 1mo ago
I’m curious to know if these local AI setups are legitimately useful compared to cloud. I’ve struggled a lot to get something useful out of the hardware I have. I realize I’m somewhat limited (16GB RX 9070), but still, it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me. Any tips anyone might have are appreciated! I’d love to be local first and would be willing to buy hardware to get there.
- Aurornis 1mo ago
  > it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me. The $20/month subs are much stronger than the local models you can run, even with how far local models have advanced lately. The appeal of local models is that the data never leaves your network so you can feel safer putting sensitive content into it. It also feels “free” to use when you’ve already paid for the hardware. But it doesn’t perform better and if you do the math you’re probably not saving money either. It’s helpful for things that you can’t or don’t want to outsource to a 3rd party.
  - BurningFrog 1mo ago
    It also takes some load off the AI data centers. IDK if that might be a concern for Apple or their AI partners.
    - articulatepang 1mo ago
      Surely this is not something that motivates the vast majority of people using local LLMs.
    - Scene_Cast2 1mo ago
      It worsens the supply crunch, no? A unit you use sparingly vs that memory going into a GPU that serves many more people.
      - maherbeg 1mo ago
api 1mo ago
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 bubble for what it is and temporarily eat some margin to offer machines with more RAM than competitors, especially these models that are great for edge AI, and capture market share.
- bigyabai 1mo ago
  Apple doesn't design GPUs on-par with Nvidia's efficiency yet. They need an architectural overhaul to be a serious competitor, which is what I'm expecting is queued up for M7. Nvidia has CUDA, AMD has CDNA, and Apple has... compute shaders, I guess?
  - nicce 1mo ago
    > Apple doesn't design GPUs on-par with Nvidia's efficiency yet How much it matters in inference? Most GPUs have enough computing for that and the bottleneck is the RAM speed and size. And M5 Ultra is becoming to challenge this.
    - bigyabai 1mo ago
      For prefill, it's basically all that matters. Long-horizon agent tasks, session compaction, file reads and context manipulation will all hit the compute bottleneck in regular usage, incurring several minutes of latency on most Apple Silicon chips, regardless of RAM. It's kinda why memory bandwidth is an enormous red herring, even for datacenter applications. Nvidia's huge advantage is a compute-optimized GPU architecture and their Infiniband networking, their memory controllers aren't really the star of the show.
  - newsclues 1mo ago
    Apple has metal and mlx
Xeoncross 1mo ago
If I had to pick a product, I'd say an affordable 32GB mac would be the sweet spot for running local models that function well like Qwen 3.8. It's true, most people don't run models, but being the default platform for running open weights seems like it has plenty of advantages right now. Just like sales benefited from developers defaulting to MacOS for most open source languages like Ruby, Go, Rust, and TypeScript.
- tristor 1mo ago
  > If I had to pick a product, I'd say an affordable 32GB mac would be the sweet spot for running local models that function well like Qwen 3.8. 32GB is not enough RAM. I don't even own a device with less than 36GB at this point, and that device I only have because my employer is being cheap. 64GB is a reasonable starting point for running local LLMs + normal tasks. 128GB let's you really run most smaller models like Qwen 27B and 35BA3B with good context. Even Qwen3.8-Flash-Next runs in 128GB with a 4-bit quant. 32GB would be limited to running models like Gemma4 12B and smaller dense Qwen versions like 9B unless you were using very small quants which damages quality of response.
  - Xeoncross 1mo ago
    You are mistaken. I'm running Qwen 3.7 28B 4bit (MLX) with a 200k context window and everything total is 32GB RSS. Is this the best? No. That's why I said the sweet spot. Getting from 16GB macs to 32GB is perhaps possible. Jumping to 64GB or 128GB as the default is simply unreasonable right now.
    - e28eta 1mo ago
      I have a similar machine, and briefly poked at running a local LLM, but got discouraged after a couple days. The quality, responsiveness, and impact on the rest of the system didn’t seem worth it to me. What sorts of things are you doing with the local LLM? Anything interactive? Should I take another look?
      - 1mo ago
Scubabear68 1mo ago
Not just the high end stuff. The Neo is sold out until late September on the budget end, it seems like it is a smash for HS and college kids. I hope Apple can take all this cash and do some stability releases like they used to do, bugs around things like Family Sharing, the painful "update" to Settings App, etc could all use a lot of love.
- alistairSH 1mo ago
  Huh, glad I grabbed my Neo two weeks ago. It's the "top" spec version, but still a good bit less than a MBA - seemed like a pretty reasonable replacement for the M1 iPadPro it replaced (wanted to go back to a normal laptop vs tablet).
jmclnx 1mo ago
I am missing something in the article. From what I am reading, AI companies are so desperate for memory they are buying Apple Systems and other hardware and striping them for RAM and maybe other components. Is that what others read ?
- Leftium 1mo ago
  Apple hardware uses a unified architecture. That means the CPU and RAM are integrated together: it is very difficult/impossible to strip the RAM from these systems. This unified architecture makes Apple hardware very good for AI work, where latency between RAM and CPU is very important Even the SSDs (which are normally more strippable) use a proprietary hardware form factor. I think the article mentioned the real draw: > 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. (Couldn't read the source cited, might have more info: The Information)
AdmiralAsshat 1mo ago
Mac Mini's were really nice HTPC candidates, too, before the AI boom. Like all things genuinely useful and affordable, they were snatched from the hands of normal consumers by a bunch of schmucks chasing the latest gold rush.
- scrumper 1mo ago
  I need a new little Mac for my music studio, currently an M2 MacBook Pro. I thought I'd be fun to experiment with some local models as well. Well, let's price up an M5 Pro. $3,019 with 64GB RAM and a 1TB HD. Three thousand American dollars for a Mac Mini. Beefy spec for sure but not comically so. Frankly even the entry price is a bit high - I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model.
  - happyopossum 1mo ago
    > I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model. The base price of a mini has only gone up $200 from $699 in 2020 to $899 today, and for $699 you only got 8GB of RAM instead of 16. Yeah the price has gone up but not nearly as much as you seem to be remembering... [0] https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Mac_mini_(M1,_2020) https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Mac_mini_(M1,_2020)
    - scrumper 1mo ago
      I guess I felt richer in 2020.
  - flyingshelf 1mo ago
    Kinda sad that in 2026 1TB and 62GB of RAM is considered "beefy". We had 1TB iPhones for 5 years. The only reason for this huge speedbump is that chip makers have been dragging their feet for the last 10 years with "just enough" memory.
    - tom_ 1mo ago
jshier 1mo ago
Now if only they hadn't discontinued the Mac Pro. Could be quite the AI machine with multiple compute GPUs at higher bandwidth than an external Thunderbolt enclosure.
- HeWhoLurksLate 1mo ago
  Thunderbolt eGPUs haven't been able to be used on Apple Silicon machines, and the Mac Pro has the same limitation
martythemaniak 1mo ago
This may sound a little wacky, but one potential use case I'm considering is robotics. Say you want to use a fine-tuned mid-size VLM model right on the robot. You pretty much have to use the Jetson line, which has a great ecosystem and everything (depth cameras, lidar, SLAM, small segmentation models, etc) runs on it, but it's gets very expensive very fast if you want to run LLMs on it. The Jetson Thor lines are 3-5k depending on memory etc. One very efficient option today is to have the cheapest Jetson (Orin Nano) run the classical robotics stack, then have a base mac mini run nothing but the VLM. The Mac mini is considerably cheaper and faster at these workloads than the mid-range Jetsons. I think this wonky situation is because Apple us under immense consumer pressure to absorb the ridiculous memory prices, while the Jetson is aimed at "business" and much more likely to fluctuate with the market. Last year I bought a Jetson Orin Nano 8GB for $375CAD, today that official nVidia Amazon page is out of stock and other sellers have it listed for $900-$1100CAD. Absolutely bonkers pricing.
Whatarethese 1mo ago
There are so many used M4 Mac Minis for sale on marketplace for $600+ now that the people I guess got bored of the local models and decided to see if they could make their money back as they probably bought them when they were $399 on sale earlier this year. I lowball them every time.
- mixdup 1mo ago
  When the M6 Minis were announced I pre-ordered and Apple gave me $480 trade-in on my entry level M4 Mini that I paid $499 for about 14 months ago
- chung8123 1mo ago
  Have you been successful with the lowball offers? That would help indicate where the supply/demand for them are.
- okdood64 1mo ago
  > I lowball them every time. And?
evanjrowley 1mo ago
I imagine Apple could also grow their business in the EU by marketing to companies who want powerful AI features but can't leverage 3rd party AI services due to GDPR. If only they could come up with iOS, App Store, and developer policies that respect the sovereignty of the EU.
imagetic 1mo ago
No they weren’t.
- stetrain 1mo ago
  The part where people starting buying Mac minis just to run OpenClaw was a pretty sudden movement in the market. These computers aren't powerful enough to run big local LLMs but are still being purchased for AI workflows. A year ago you could get an M4 Mac mini for $399 on sale and now the same one used goes for over $700. The general AI RAM/SSD spike is part of that but there was also a huge demand spike for small, powerful, desktop machines that could be easily configured with these workflow tools.
- nullbio 1mo ago
  Sad that Apple is stooping to the level of spamming the web with bots and fake news to advertise their products. Are there laws against this sort of thing?
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
wseqyrku 1mo ago
is this a manufactured demand meme
- nullbio 1mo ago
  That's exactly what it is.
jmyeet 1mo ago
So for people who don't understand, there are two markets for Apple hardware in this space: 1. Running an agent like OpenClaude. The $599 Mac Mini was an insanely good deal for this. I happened to buy a M5 Pro Mac Mini for $999 last year for other reasons. The equivalent is now almost $2000; and 2. Hardware for running inference on local models. This to me is the far more interesting market because Apple has a real opportunity to disrupt NVidia's stranglehold on the market. With current architecture, the largest model you can reasonbly run is the amount of memory on the GPU and is a function of the quantization (eg int4, int8, fp8, fp16, etc) available and the number of parameters. NVidia aggressively segments the market. The most VRAM on a "consumer" card is 32GB on the 5090, which allows you to run ~31B parameter models. In comparison, the RTX 6000 Pro has only slightly more CUDA units than a 5090 but has 80GB of VRAM. A few months ago they were $10-11k. Now they're ~$16k. Macs use a shared memory architecture. Apple has previously sold Mac Studios with up to 512GB of RAM. Almost all of that memory can be used to hold much larger models without taking a penalty for interconnections between different GPUs or machines. Plus Apple interconnects between computers are actually relatively good by chaining TB5. It's still slow but it's about the best non-enterprise option available. But the previous Mac Studios just didn't have the raw FLOPS and memory bandwidth. The M5 Ultras are up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth. M3 Ultra had ~900GB/s. RTX 5090s and RTX 6000 Pros are 1.8TB/s. The current best HBM3 NVidia DC GPUs are at 3.2TB/s IIRC. But the M5 Ultra has a claimed ~4.5x the FLOPS of the M3 Ultra. We don't have our hands on these yet but it probably means they are going to be much closer to a 5090. I expect ~50% of a 5090's inference speed. That may sound bad but it's actually really good because a 256/512GB Mac Studio can probably locally run the best Flash models. With NVidia hardware you'll need to spend many tens of thousands for that. We'll see what the inference speed is but I expect it to be usable. DeepSeek v4 Flash, for example, will be entirely runnable. We're not at DeepSeek v4 Pro local yet.
- subarctic 1mo ago
  You have the m4 pro right? I thought the m5 pro mac mini was only just announced
- jubilanti 1mo ago
  > 1. Running an agent like OpenClaude. The $599 Mac Mini was an insanely good deal for this. I still have zero clue how "Buy a $599 Mac Mini to have a sandboxed LLM API caller" became the default. If you're not doing local inference and don't need to inject into iMessage or iCloud, all you need to run openclaw-style harnesses that call external APIs is a Raspberry Pi 4B, an N100, an HTPC, or that 10 year old laptop sitting in your desk.
ChrisMarshallNY 1mo ago
Sounds like people want those bespoke servers that Apple has been rumored to have developed.
alasdair_ 1mo ago
There is a lot of "AI demand" that isn't just running inference on an LLM whose weights you downloaded. I'm training a model using reinforcement learning with self-play. I can and do use vast.ai when scaling but for experiments it's far faster, and cheaper, to run it locally until the bugs are all figured out. Just provisioning a new instance and copying the relevant checkpoints and things can take 25 minutes. It's zero locally.
- kridsdale1 1mo ago
  Likewise. I have a huge demand personally to run AI noise-filtering models on many TB per month of raw video files. It takes about 3 days per file. Apples ProRes codec is only licensed to run in high quality mode on a Mac, and so my Nvidia PC can’t do what I need. Thus, I own the beefiest Mac Studio you can currently buy. I would pay more for more TFlops. I have done local LLM on there but it wasn’t interesting. Far worse performance and intelligence per dollar than the cloud boys. There is no cloud offering for my video needs though.
  - tassadarforaiur 1mo ago
    Have you looked into those tinycorp nvidia drivers for thunderbolt egpus on Mac?
  - veegee 1mo ago
    [dead]
  - varispeed 1mo ago
    Out of curiosity, how would you transfer many TB to cloud and back if such service was available?
    - firecall 1mo ago
      My guess is that it wouldn’t be TB sized files. It’s probably files that, over the course of a month, add up to multiple TBs. Which would suggest that a 1Gbit fibre connection would be adequate. For serious commercial usage, multi Gbit fibre is available in many places around the world. Although being video files, they could easily be in the TB range. In which case, it would be interesting to know!
nobodyandproud 1mo ago
This is the distinguishing angle Apple can take with AI. Local inference solves so many of the privacy and inconsistency problems with these frontier subscriptions.
- nobodyandproud 1mo ago
  Interesting downvote.
moezd 1mo ago
Classic monopoly move: Control the user base, then control hardware. Any decent always-on local LLM setup with Apple devices will have to compete with these behemoths now. Great.
- GeekyBear 1mo ago
  > Classic monopoly move: Control the user base, then control hardware Classic monopoly move by who? Apple created MLX as an open source framework to allow users to run any open model locally.
  - bel8 1mo ago
    just to clarify, models already ran locally without MLX years before it existed, on non-Apple environments. MLX was just Apple's bridge to what already ran in other hardware.
    - GeekyBear 1mo ago
      MLX is an open source framework that allows you to run open models in a manner optimized for Apple's hardware. You can take advantage of larger amounts of memory, higher memory bandwidth, and clustering multiple systems. How is using an open source framework to run open models a monopoly move?
    - Danox 1mo ago
      Apple Pay is a bridge too because at the time the other pay services didn’t care about doing anything for the Mac, and over the years that’s the way it’s been that’s the way it goes when you’re the last vertical computer company left from the 1980s, the Apple Watch and Apple Maps is also a bridge for the same reason…
LoganDark 1mo ago
I hope Apple does not gain some exclusive enterprise tier for hardware. Part of what I love about them is that everything is available to consumers. A lowly home user can buy the exact same 256 (or 512) gigabytes of memory in a Mac from Apple, as long as they have a couple dozen thousand dollars to spare. I'd be really sad to lose that.
shevy-java 1mo ago
This sounds like advertisement, disguised as an "article".
likelybot 1mo ago
[dead]
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
ghostly_s 1mo ago
> 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. Obviously; no one else can justify the expense.
skybrian 1mo ago
Maybe it's not anything specific to Apple? There's high demand and short supply elsewhere due to AI, so it doesn't seem all that odd that many companies would try to buy gear from Apple too.
throwaway613746 1mo ago
[dead]
dogscatstrees 1mo ago
Were they really caught off guard or is it a long-term play by Apple who knows that consumers may just want machines capable of local models. Build-or-buy (subscribe) options. I for one would get a Mac Studio over a DGX Spark because you get a general Mac machine as a bonus. The big news is Apple being caught off guard by Nvidia buying Hugging Face. That should have been Apple's.
saejox 1mo ago
Most of those people will be dissapointed when they experience Q4 variants of those models getting stuck in loops. I would wait till the ram crisis is over to fetch a future 64gb ram gpu to run Q8 models. Cloud inference until than.
- etoxin 1mo ago
  Switching from Q4 to Q8 was a game changer when I upgraded
- jms703 1mo ago
  I'm excited to hear the ram crisis will be over. But will it?
esotericsean 1mo ago
Imagine if Apple truly went the route of local AI and every Mac came with a fully local, open weight Siri. They could put Anthropic and OpenAI out of business.
- dhosek 1mo ago
  Presumably this is on their roadmap. The Jobs-era thing would be to come in with something that people on HN would say, “yeah, I could do this myself with open source tools” but in practice falls into the category of “I could build this $30 thing for $15 for parts and then another $15 for the parts I had to replace because I screwed up the build the first time and then $30 to just buy the damn thing” that would really blow non-HN people away even if it is more expensive than most other local computing systems, but I don’t know what the Ternus-era Apple will be like.
  - Danox 1mo ago
    Apple is almost certainly building the software end of it to go along with the computers that they currently sell to the public they have the time to do it right because their biggest competition in that area would be Microsoft, but Microsoft is currently listing at sea with Copilot, Xbox, and the Surface line of computers. Memory probably is the biggest holdup/obstacle at this moment.
platevoltage 1mo ago
It would be nice if I could upgrade my 16GB M2 MacBook Pro some time in this lifetime. This AI bullshit is getting annoying.
Danox 1mo ago
What’s going on isn’t Apple behind in AI model building I thought I read that somewhere on the MacRumors site in the last two years, that Apple is behind its tech peers and Apple might as well just close the doors. I always thought Apple was in a good position because unlike their peers they didn’t burn billions of dollars trying to build an AI model that has no financial moat around it. I still think they’re in a good position in comparison to their tech peers and we will know even more when some of the new computers get into the hands of some of the tech reviewers. I believe the new computer’s will be pretty good hardware wise what I’m interested in, is the Apple software support for connecting several Mac computers together, and some of the other (new?) software that Apple may have written in house to support those who want to run AI software locally that is just as important as the new hardware.
- rglover 1mo ago
  They're making the smartest possible move: let others burn insane amounts of capital and time finding the quirks and once they see a viable lane, execute. It's old Steve Jobs logic. Works backwards from the customer experience to the technology (they're the only big player I see doing this).
  - pertymcpert 1mo ago
    I feel like they failed upwards into the right strategy. I doubt it was deliberate and not because of the failure of their foundation models to decent.
  - desterothx 1mo ago
    I would argue this has been googles approach as well
HDBaseT 1mo ago
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.
- vikramkr 1mo ago
  I don't think you need the scare quotes. product lifecycles can take years and the actual neo demand was actually pretty insane. They were using it to soak up demand for binned a18 chips and it would have been irresponsible to forecast that they'd have the demand they did when there's another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. this article's also about enterprise demand specifically. That's a bit surprising to me as well frankly. I'd have thought the primary market for mac studios would be hobbyists/enthusiasts with a bunch of disposable income who are willing to pay 18k for a 512 gb machine to run glm 3.5 flash or 9k to run deepseek v4 flash locally. It's competing with a $200/mo subscription or renting server gpu time for open source models during a memory shortage - and idk if it's going to be powerful enough to train or fine tune so it's really just inference. seems reasonable to be surprised
  - lumost 1mo ago
    A lot of big enterprises struggle with ai adoption. Either they can't get models/tools approved fast enough, can't provision them in their internal network, or get slammed with exorbitant inference costs. A big enterprise can drop one (or 4) of these on someone's desk and let them go nuts.
  - dwaite 1mo ago
    > another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. The target audience didn't evaluate that as a limitation - the majority of the market for Apple devices does trust that they will not produce and sell a computer incapable of support their use. Professionals know there are tasks that a baseline computer cannot handle, and even common tasks that a more powerful computer does better, but those people weren't really the target demo for the laptop.
bilsbie 1mo ago
I get the impression they want AI marketing points but don’t actually want people to use local AI on their products. I have no idea why. They could be so successful if they leaned into local AI.
- jonplackett 1mo ago
  I think they’re too scared to ‘own’ it - it would be someone else’s model and potential security issue. But apple have to own everything they do so they’re in a bind
- m463 1mo ago
  I don't think they're ready for local ai. They have memory + memory bandwidth, that's it. I also don't think they do "technology". For example, containers have been around for a long time, and apple didn't show up. (I know they have some support now). Imagine an apple-native docker/podman doing something like FROM macos:10.12 I was actually surprised when they did their own chips. I figure it was about control.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
nullbio 1mo ago
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 OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple marketing bots (you could tell by looking at their post history, where they would drop "Mac Mini" into every conversation they could across all different subreddits and unrelated topics). Then it became fairly common. So Apple's marketing department is seemingly using the same strategy again. Because still, it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim.
- srslack 1mo ago
  I am using Mac studios for local inference, but not for openclaw. It was simply the best bang for the buck at the time, and the software side of things has gotten even better since then. I haven’t run the pricing comparison but I have a feeling with the direction they’re heading that it’s better to hold off for m6 as it may assuage various bottlenecks if you are latency sensitive.
  - bredren 1mo ago
    Reportedly, the M6 will not get pro, max or ultra editions. Instead Apple will go straight to M7 for these.
    - pylotlight 1mo ago
      Some reporting seems to reject that btw: https://wccftech.com/apple-m6-pro-m6-max-soic-mh-wmcm-packaging-report/ https://wccftech.com/apple-m6-pro-m6-max-soic-mh-wmcm-packag...
    - giantrobot 1mo ago
      The Pro, Max, and Ultra chips boil down to different combinations of their "Super", performance, and efficiency cores along with the number of GPU cores. The Max is two Pros bolted together. Thus far they've skipped generations of Ultra chips but Pro and Max versions of all the M-series chips have been released. I can see them not releasing an M6 Ultra but no reason not to see Pro and Max versions of the M6.
FoundARetard 1mo ago
[dead]
RagnarD 1mo ago
Translation: Tim Cook was caught off guard.
- wseqyrku 1mo ago
  Sorry to interrupt. Magic Mouse. Thank you for your attention.
hnav 1mo ago
Apple trying to sit on two chairs. Make bank selling hypeware while keeping distance to not sully their brand too much.
- wseqyrku 1mo ago
  They have no "brand" left with all around hostile behavior wherever they can. The only brand they currently are so proud of is being more expensive than everyone else just because. It's been always a hardware company that doesn't even build their own hardware. Anyone can do that. Call up your investors.
darvo31 1mo ago
Totally saw this coming. My team just grabbed three Mac Studios for local LLMs; the unified memory is a game-changer.
srvmshr 1mo ago
Slightly tangential question: Does having a spruced up Mac Studio help learning the ropes of model tuning and/or development as good as having a CUDA device?
magicmicah85 1mo ago
Caught off guard has been used a lot this year. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/30/apple-unexpected-mac-mini-and-studio-demand/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/30/apple-unexpected-mac-mi... https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/01/apple-was-caught-off-guard-by-macbook-neo/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/01/apple-was-caught-off-gu... https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/29/apple-on-airpods-pro-3-popularity/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/29/apple-on-airpods-pro-3-... Recent work in this space has got me looking at using local models for daily use. I’m waiting for people to start dumping some of the previous generation minis on Facebook marketplace or eBay so I can pick one up. Of course there’s also other options. I’m still hammering out my requirements and what I want to do besides putz around.
- aurareturn 1mo ago
  Two of those links were Macs. No surprise. Macbooks selling like hotcakes due to AI. Not just local LLMs but also just really efficient *nix machines that AI agents love to use for productivity.
Naru_vek 1mo ago
Guess Apple didn't quite grasp how many devs would snap these up for local LLMs. M-series chips are surprisingly good for it.
pjmlp 1mo ago
Only in North America market, and a few similar economies, as many countries buying Apple hardware is only for a select few on top tier society levels. Everyone else keeps buying PCs as always, even more so that Apple doesn't have any proper desktops any longer. Also if there is demand for something, are CUDA cards, being used from Windows and Linux distributions.
Devin3162 1mo ago
[dead]
interludead 1mo ago
[dead]
metchio 1mo ago
I bought one in April '26 for two reasons: I needed a small computer to replace my old one that died, I didn't want to spend more than 600 euros, and the alternatives were not great. Second reason: at that time it was mis-priced on Amazon.IE and I bought it for like 550, one week after my purchase the price bumped to 750.
Havoc 1mo ago
This smells suspiciously like a hunt for RAM that ended with the only thing left on consumer shelves
alescalaios 1mo ago
[dead]
TimByte 1mo ago
Stories about Tim Cook sitting there being surprised by sales are total marketing. They simply ran out of memory chips because of the global shortage, so they repacked supply delays into a nice story about insane hype among AI startups. And hit two birds with one stone by throwing shade at their competitors
zx8080 1mo ago
That's pure marketing. Not off-guard. Profit-maxxing.
gcanyon 1mo ago
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.
bartender26 1mo ago
no one wants AI in their hardware
creamedpeas 1mo ago
[dead]
dolmen 1mo ago
One more website that doesn't render the page in Firefox when scrolling the page using the keyboard (arrow keys, PgUp, PgDn).
greenjudge 1mo ago
[flagged]
rushi053 1mo ago
Its going to be another big iPhone moment with macs for apple since companies and Indies are building on ai.
HumblyTossed 1mo ago
Apple, a 4T USD company, is not caught off guard. They know exactly how many of a certain thing they make will sell. This is just PR nonsense. They do it with iPhone also. They'll introduce a new model and make enough to sell out and then spin that as a high demand. That makes their stock bump up as well as more people place orders for the next batch. It's all marketing and you're being manipulated by it. Edit: Some of y'all are naive.
kodoman 1mo ago
Are these still the best products to run local AI on price performance wise?
ChildOfChaos 1mo ago
It's a massive bummer for me because I'm on an old 2015 iMac and was looking to upgrade soon but buy a fairly heafty machine, but the combined Ram price increases and the fact these still sell like hotcakes has made me reconsider. I like to buy high end and then keep it for a long time. I'd love local AI But even with a fairly large spend, these machines won't run that much local AI well and that's now, I'm not sure if in the future I'd want even more RAM, seems to be it is better to budget for an AI sub + a less insane machine.
- mixmastamyk 1mo ago
  Maybe something used to keep you running for a few more years.
NikhilChowdaryG 1mo ago
[flagged]
akeck 1mo ago
I don't think they were caught off guard. It's clear that Apple is the cheapest option, or even the only option in many cases, for running larger local models, especially with the RAM crunch. With the standard "PC design model" you have to buy RAM twice - once for the system to load the GPU and again in the GPU itself. For Apple, and a few other options like DGX Spark and some laptops, you only need to buy it once. I think the Apple/DGX Spark "unified RAM design model" is maybe the only way forward because of RAM pricing/availability over the next few years.
mschuster91 1mo ago
> 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. They did have one... Xserve. Or the macOS Server package you could buy on the App Store. But there hasn't been an actual device that people could buy for many a year, and most of what enterprises need (aka fleet management, software deployment etc) has been left to third parties like JAMF.
henrycoler 1mo ago
[dead]
clear-octopus 1mo ago
[dead]

501 points by thm 1mo ago

ceejayoz 1mo ago

Time to bring back the Xserves, I guess.

taskoutputs2k 1mo ago

just a real bummer that they raised the prices so much

AlexandrB 1mo ago
I suspect it can't be helped at this point. RAM is the new gold. Valve even had to increase the price for a 4 year old piece of hardware[1]. [1] https://tech-insider.org/ca/steam-deck-price-increase-2026/ https://tech-insider.org/ca/steam-deck-price-increase-2026/
snarkyturtle 1mo ago
It definitely puts it out of the range of every day users but a non-insignificant proportion of people who use it for ai have become multi-millionaires because of ai. So there's definitely no shortage of people who have no problem paying those high prices.
- noman-land 1mo ago
  Citation needed.
- bigyabai 1mo ago
  > but a non-insignificant proportion of people who use it for ai have become multi-millionaires because of ai I can't even name one person who fits this mold, let alone a non-insignificant proportion of people. Who are you thinking of?
lenerdenator 1mo ago
[flagged]
- DarmokTanagra 1mo ago
  They use the datacenters for that.
  - lenerdenator 1mo ago
    No, that's for generating the hot air used to help inflate their egos. Heating is a very separate line item on the budget.
    - DarmokTanagra 1mo ago
      Ah you're right, I have a hard time distinguishing the difference between hot air and SV dev farts.
VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago
I don't know if you're young, or new to this industry, or what, but take a look around - the prices went up across the board. It's not just Apple.
Danox 1mo ago
Which is why Apple is going to need to design around again and do something about that in house if you can design and engineer a processor or a modem you can certainly do something about memory and SSD’s, Apple buying PA Semi, Intrinsity and Anobit led to Apple Silicon, buying Infineon led to a new Apple modem the capabilities is there and the money is there in house it may take two-four years but long-term I don’t think there is any other choice. One thing to watch for when Apple introduces the new phones coming up shortly is whether or not Apple has replaced Qualcomm in their flagship smart phones because that is coming up soon Qualcomm has given warning to their investors.

compounding_it 1mo ago

More customers is generally a good problem to have in most businesses. Just that the situation is very paradoxical given the supply shortages.

pmontra 1mo ago
If those customers are in the market you want to develop. If they are not, money is money but if it comes from the wrong people it might slow you down.

comrade1234 1mo ago

I wish they sold something that could go in a colo - redundant power supplies, lights out management, etc. you know they have them internally...

dewey 1mo ago
> you know they have them internally... What makes you think that? There's a lot of data centers that sell you access to colocated Mac Mini's, they have added FileVault unlock via SSH in the boot process which also makes things easier. There's not that many reasons to run a Mac in the cloud unless you have some very specific Mac related workload.
- scrlk 1mo ago
  Apple built internal M5 servers for private cloud compute: https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-chips-leaked/ https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-... https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
  - dewey 1mo ago
    Thanks, missed that article.
- ndiddy 1mo ago
  > What makes you think that? There’s articles about them, Apple uses them internally for AI services. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/photos-of-apples-own-new-in-house-ai-servers.2478766/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/photos-of-apples-own-ne...
- shepmaster 1mo ago
  > What makes you think that? Here's a leaked / rumor image of Apple servers themselves. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/26/leaked-images-of-apple-ai-servers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/26/leaked-images-of-apple-...
- 1mo ago

paxys 1mo ago

I really hope with Ternus taking the helm Apple starts to remember that it has products outside of iPhone.

catoc 1mo ago
I wish they would stop with the new-iPhone-every-year nonsense and refocus on quality, fix some bugs… but yeah, not gonna happen
- stetrain 1mo ago
  At this point it's basically like car models years. They rev them annually and make a few improvements but they're actually going longer between major redesigns. If they didn't bump the numbers every year people walking into stores would be worried about paying lots of money for an old phone that will soon be replaced by a much newer model.
- Sir_Twist 1mo ago
  I feel like iOS 27 is a step in this direction, in terms of sanding off the rough edges of iOS 26.
  - catoc 1mo ago
    Wish they would sand off liquid glass
    - kridsdale1 1mo ago
      That would make it frosted glass. Incidentally ios27 has a user control slider for glass frostiness.
    - Tagbert 1mo ago
      Liquid Glass has been refined significantly in the 27 OS's and you have more control over the degree of transparency. Overall stability and performance are better as well.

hzwanip 1mo ago

Off guard? :'D

throw9399383838 1mo ago
Apple did not raise prices fast enough

setgree 1mo ago

It's fun to see that even an extremely large company can find unexpected product market fit [0]. Per this article, "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." That sounds insane in retrospect, but I think there's just inherent uncertainty in what people actually need and will use things for. [0]https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html: "In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup... The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work."

SaltyBackendGuy 1mo ago
Maybe a bit of hindsight bias / the outside view here, but I feel like they're completely asleep if they didn't anticipate strong demand for this specific use case.
- adjejmxbdjdn 1mo ago
  I don’t understand how that’s possible. They should have had a better idea of what was happening in the memory markets than pretty much any other entity.
  - Nevermark 1mo ago
    Their universal RAM strategy is so obviously helpful for AI. (1) GPU/NPU <--> CPU RAM copies eliminated. (2) All (most) RAM available for GPU/Neural, when local models are typically kneecapped by limited GPU RAM sizes vs. the much larger RAM options for M/Max/Pro/Ultras. They have been taking NPU's seriously on their phones, tablets and laptops since the M1. Then they enabled fully-connected RDMA for 4 x 512GB MacStudio's = 2TB RAM. Perfect for a large Mixture-of-Experts model. It would be very strange if they didn't notice their product line had landed in a new sweet spot.
    - pizzafeelsright 1mo ago

Grombobulous 1mo ago

I’m curious to know if these local AI setups are legitimately useful compared to cloud. I’ve struggled a lot to get something useful out of the hardware I have. I realize I’m somewhat limited (16GB RX 9070), but still, it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me. Any tips anyone might have are appreciated! I’d love to be local first and would be willing to buy hardware to get there.

Aurornis 1mo ago
> it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me. The $20/month subs are much stronger than the local models you can run, even with how far local models have advanced lately. The appeal of local models is that the data never leaves your network so you can feel safer putting sensitive content into it. It also feels “free” to use when you’ve already paid for the hardware. But it doesn’t perform better and if you do the math you’re probably not saving money either. It’s helpful for things that you can’t or don’t want to outsource to a 3rd party.
- BurningFrog 1mo ago
  It also takes some load off the AI data centers. IDK if that might be a concern for Apple or their AI partners.
  - articulatepang 1mo ago
    Surely this is not something that motivates the vast majority of people using local LLMs.
  - Scene_Cast2 1mo ago
    It worsens the supply crunch, no? A unit you use sparingly vs that memory going into a GPU that serves many more people.
    - maherbeg 1mo ago

api 1mo ago

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 bubble for what it is and temporarily eat some margin to offer machines with more RAM than competitors, especially these models that are great for edge AI, and capture market share.

bigyabai 1mo ago
Apple doesn't design GPUs on-par with Nvidia's efficiency yet. They need an architectural overhaul to be a serious competitor, which is what I'm expecting is queued up for M7. Nvidia has CUDA, AMD has CDNA, and Apple has... compute shaders, I guess?
- nicce 1mo ago
  > Apple doesn't design GPUs on-par with Nvidia's efficiency yet How much it matters in inference? Most GPUs have enough computing for that and the bottleneck is the RAM speed and size. And M5 Ultra is becoming to challenge this.
  - bigyabai 1mo ago
    For prefill, it's basically all that matters. Long-horizon agent tasks, session compaction, file reads and context manipulation will all hit the compute bottleneck in regular usage, incurring several minutes of latency on most Apple Silicon chips, regardless of RAM. It's kinda why memory bandwidth is an enormous red herring, even for datacenter applications. Nvidia's huge advantage is a compute-optimized GPU architecture and their Infiniband networking, their memory controllers aren't really the star of the show.
- newsclues 1mo ago
  Apple has metal and mlx

Xeoncross 1mo ago

If I had to pick a product, I'd say an affordable 32GB mac would be the sweet spot for running local models that function well like Qwen 3.8. It's true, most people don't run models, but being the default platform for running open weights seems like it has plenty of advantages right now. Just like sales benefited from developers defaulting to MacOS for most open source languages like Ruby, Go, Rust, and TypeScript.

tristor 1mo ago
> If I had to pick a product, I'd say an affordable 32GB mac would be the sweet spot for running local models that function well like Qwen 3.8. 32GB is not enough RAM. I don't even own a device with less than 36GB at this point, and that device I only have because my employer is being cheap. 64GB is a reasonable starting point for running local LLMs + normal tasks. 128GB let's you really run most smaller models like Qwen 27B and 35BA3B with good context. Even Qwen3.8-Flash-Next runs in 128GB with a 4-bit quant. 32GB would be limited to running models like Gemma4 12B and smaller dense Qwen versions like 9B unless you were using very small quants which damages quality of response.
- Xeoncross 1mo ago
  You are mistaken. I'm running Qwen 3.7 28B 4bit (MLX) with a 200k context window and everything total is 32GB RSS. Is this the best? No. That's why I said the sweet spot. Getting from 16GB macs to 32GB is perhaps possible. Jumping to 64GB or 128GB as the default is simply unreasonable right now.
  - e28eta 1mo ago
    I have a similar machine, and briefly poked at running a local LLM, but got discouraged after a couple days. The quality, responsiveness, and impact on the rest of the system didn’t seem worth it to me. What sorts of things are you doing with the local LLM? Anything interactive? Should I take another look?
    - 1mo ago

Scubabear68 1mo ago

Not just the high end stuff. The Neo is sold out until late September on the budget end, it seems like it is a smash for HS and college kids. I hope Apple can take all this cash and do some stability releases like they used to do, bugs around things like Family Sharing, the painful "update" to Settings App, etc could all use a lot of love.

alistairSH 1mo ago
Huh, glad I grabbed my Neo two weeks ago. It's the "top" spec version, but still a good bit less than a MBA - seemed like a pretty reasonable replacement for the M1 iPadPro it replaced (wanted to go back to a normal laptop vs tablet).

jmclnx 1mo ago

I am missing something in the article. From what I am reading, AI companies are so desperate for memory they are buying Apple Systems and other hardware and striping them for RAM and maybe other components. Is that what others read ?

Leftium 1mo ago
Apple hardware uses a unified architecture. That means the CPU and RAM are integrated together: it is very difficult/impossible to strip the RAM from these systems. This unified architecture makes Apple hardware very good for AI work, where latency between RAM and CPU is very important Even the SSDs (which are normally more strippable) use a proprietary hardware form factor. I think the article mentioned the real draw: > 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. (Couldn't read the source cited, might have more info: The Information)

AdmiralAsshat 1mo ago

Mac Mini's were really nice HTPC candidates, too, before the AI boom. Like all things genuinely useful and affordable, they were snatched from the hands of normal consumers by a bunch of schmucks chasing the latest gold rush.

scrumper 1mo ago
I need a new little Mac for my music studio, currently an M2 MacBook Pro. I thought I'd be fun to experiment with some local models as well. Well, let's price up an M5 Pro. $3,019 with 64GB RAM and a 1TB HD. Three thousand American dollars for a Mac Mini. Beefy spec for sure but not comically so. Frankly even the entry price is a bit high - I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model.
- happyopossum 1mo ago
  > I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model. The base price of a mini has only gone up $200 from $699 in 2020 to $899 today, and for $699 you only got 8GB of RAM instead of 16. Yeah the price has gone up but not nearly as much as you seem to be remembering... [0] https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Mac_mini_(M1,_2020) https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Mac_mini_(M1,_2020)
  - scrumper 1mo ago
    I guess I felt richer in 2020.
- flyingshelf 1mo ago
  Kinda sad that in 2026 1TB and 62GB of RAM is considered "beefy". We had 1TB iPhones for 5 years. The only reason for this huge speedbump is that chip makers have been dragging their feet for the last 10 years with "just enough" memory.
  - tom_ 1mo ago

jshier 1mo ago

Now if only they hadn't discontinued the Mac Pro. Could be quite the AI machine with multiple compute GPUs at higher bandwidth than an external Thunderbolt enclosure.

HeWhoLurksLate 1mo ago
Thunderbolt eGPUs haven't been able to be used on Apple Silicon machines, and the Mac Pro has the same limitation

martythemaniak 1mo ago

This may sound a little wacky, but one potential use case I'm considering is robotics. Say you want to use a fine-tuned mid-size VLM model right on the robot. You pretty much have to use the Jetson line, which has a great ecosystem and everything (depth cameras, lidar, SLAM, small segmentation models, etc) runs on it, but it's gets very expensive very fast if you want to run LLMs on it. The Jetson Thor lines are 3-5k depending on memory etc. One very efficient option today is to have the cheapest Jetson (Orin Nano) run the classical robotics stack, then have a base mac mini run nothing but the VLM. The Mac mini is considerably cheaper and faster at these workloads than the mid-range Jetsons. I think this wonky situation is because Apple us under immense consumer pressure to absorb the ridiculous memory prices, while the Jetson is aimed at "business" and much more likely to fluctuate with the market. Last year I bought a Jetson Orin Nano 8GB for $375CAD, today that official nVidia Amazon page is out of stock and other sellers have it listed for $900-$1100CAD. Absolutely bonkers pricing.

Whatarethese 1mo ago

There are so many used M4 Mac Minis for sale on marketplace for $600+ now that the people I guess got bored of the local models and decided to see if they could make their money back as they probably bought them when they were $399 on sale earlier this year. I lowball them every time.

mixdup 1mo ago
When the M6 Minis were announced I pre-ordered and Apple gave me $480 trade-in on my entry level M4 Mini that I paid $499 for about 14 months ago
chung8123 1mo ago
Have you been successful with the lowball offers? That would help indicate where the supply/demand for them are.
okdood64 1mo ago
> I lowball them every time. And?

evanjrowley 1mo ago

I imagine Apple could also grow their business in the EU by marketing to companies who want powerful AI features but can't leverage 3rd party AI services due to GDPR. If only they could come up with iOS, App Store, and developer policies that respect the sovereignty of the EU.

imagetic 1mo ago

No they weren’t.

stetrain 1mo ago
The part where people starting buying Mac minis just to run OpenClaw was a pretty sudden movement in the market. These computers aren't powerful enough to run big local LLMs but are still being purchased for AI workflows. A year ago you could get an M4 Mac mini for $399 on sale and now the same one used goes for over $700. The general AI RAM/SSD spike is part of that but there was also a huge demand spike for small, powerful, desktop machines that could be easily configured with these workflow tools.
nullbio 1mo ago
Sad that Apple is stooping to the level of spamming the web with bots and fake news to advertise their products. Are there laws against this sort of thing?

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

wseqyrku 1mo ago

is this a manufactured demand meme

nullbio 1mo ago
That's exactly what it is.

jmyeet 1mo ago

So for people who don't understand, there are two markets for Apple hardware in this space: 1. Running an agent like OpenClaude. The $599 Mac Mini was an insanely good deal for this. I happened to buy a M5 Pro Mac Mini for $999 last year for other reasons. The equivalent is now almost $2000; and 2. Hardware for running inference on local models. This to me is the far more interesting market because Apple has a real opportunity to disrupt NVidia's stranglehold on the market. With current architecture, the largest model you can reasonbly run is the amount of memory on the GPU and is a function of the quantization (eg int4, int8, fp8, fp16, etc) available and the number of parameters. NVidia aggressively segments the market. The most VRAM on a "consumer" card is 32GB on the 5090, which allows you to run ~31B parameter models. In comparison, the RTX 6000 Pro has only slightly more CUDA units than a 5090 but has 80GB of VRAM. A few months ago they were $10-11k. Now they're ~$16k. Macs use a shared memory architecture. Apple has previously sold Mac Studios with up to 512GB of RAM. Almost all of that memory can be used to hold much larger models without taking a penalty for interconnections between different GPUs or machines. Plus Apple interconnects between computers are actually relatively good by chaining TB5. It's still slow but it's about the best non-enterprise option available. But the previous Mac Studios just didn't have the raw FLOPS and memory bandwidth. The M5 Ultras are up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth. M3 Ultra had ~900GB/s. RTX 5090s and RTX 6000 Pros are 1.8TB/s. The current best HBM3 NVidia DC GPUs are at 3.2TB/s IIRC. But the M5 Ultra has a claimed ~4.5x the FLOPS of the M3 Ultra. We don't have our hands on these yet but it probably means they are going to be much closer to a 5090. I expect ~50% of a 5090's inference speed. That may sound bad but it's actually really good because a 256/512GB Mac Studio can probably locally run the best Flash models. With NVidia hardware you'll need to spend many tens of thousands for that. We'll see what the inference speed is but I expect it to be usable. DeepSeek v4 Flash, for example, will be entirely runnable. We're not at DeepSeek v4 Pro local yet.

subarctic 1mo ago
You have the m4 pro right? I thought the m5 pro mac mini was only just announced
jubilanti 1mo ago
> 1. Running an agent like OpenClaude. The $599 Mac Mini was an insanely good deal for this. I still have zero clue how "Buy a $599 Mac Mini to have a sandboxed LLM API caller" became the default. If you're not doing local inference and don't need to inject into iMessage or iCloud, all you need to run openclaw-style harnesses that call external APIs is a Raspberry Pi 4B, an N100, an HTPC, or that 10 year old laptop sitting in your desk.

ChrisMarshallNY 1mo ago

Sounds like people want those bespoke servers that Apple has been rumored to have developed.

alasdair_ 1mo ago

There is a lot of "AI demand" that isn't just running inference on an LLM whose weights you downloaded. I'm training a model using reinforcement learning with self-play. I can and do use vast.ai when scaling but for experiments it's far faster, and cheaper, to run it locally until the bugs are all figured out. Just provisioning a new instance and copying the relevant checkpoints and things can take 25 minutes. It's zero locally.

kridsdale1 1mo ago
Likewise. I have a huge demand personally to run AI noise-filtering models on many TB per month of raw video files. It takes about 3 days per file. Apples ProRes codec is only licensed to run in high quality mode on a Mac, and so my Nvidia PC can’t do what I need. Thus, I own the beefiest Mac Studio you can currently buy. I would pay more for more TFlops. I have done local LLM on there but it wasn’t interesting. Far worse performance and intelligence per dollar than the cloud boys. There is no cloud offering for my video needs though.
- tassadarforaiur 1mo ago
  Have you looked into those tinycorp nvidia drivers for thunderbolt egpus on Mac?
- veegee 1mo ago
  [dead]
- varispeed 1mo ago
  Out of curiosity, how would you transfer many TB to cloud and back if such service was available?
  - firecall 1mo ago
    My guess is that it wouldn’t be TB sized files. It’s probably files that, over the course of a month, add up to multiple TBs. Which would suggest that a 1Gbit fibre connection would be adequate. For serious commercial usage, multi Gbit fibre is available in many places around the world. Although being video files, they could easily be in the TB range. In which case, it would be interesting to know!

nobodyandproud 1mo ago

This is the distinguishing angle Apple can take with AI. Local inference solves so many of the privacy and inconsistency problems with these frontier subscriptions.

nobodyandproud 1mo ago
Interesting downvote.

moezd 1mo ago

Classic monopoly move: Control the user base, then control hardware. Any decent always-on local LLM setup with Apple devices will have to compete with these behemoths now. Great.

GeekyBear 1mo ago
> Classic monopoly move: Control the user base, then control hardware Classic monopoly move by who? Apple created MLX as an open source framework to allow users to run any open model locally.
- bel8 1mo ago
  just to clarify, models already ran locally without MLX years before it existed, on non-Apple environments. MLX was just Apple's bridge to what already ran in other hardware.
  - GeekyBear 1mo ago
    MLX is an open source framework that allows you to run open models in a manner optimized for Apple's hardware. You can take advantage of larger amounts of memory, higher memory bandwidth, and clustering multiple systems. How is using an open source framework to run open models a monopoly move?
  - Danox 1mo ago
    Apple Pay is a bridge too because at the time the other pay services didn’t care about doing anything for the Mac, and over the years that’s the way it’s been that’s the way it goes when you’re the last vertical computer company left from the 1980s, the Apple Watch and Apple Maps is also a bridge for the same reason…

LoganDark 1mo ago

I hope Apple does not gain some exclusive enterprise tier for hardware. Part of what I love about them is that everything is available to consumers. A lowly home user can buy the exact same 256 (or 512) gigabytes of memory in a Mac from Apple, as long as they have a couple dozen thousand dollars to spare. I'd be really sad to lose that.

shevy-java 1mo ago

This sounds like advertisement, disguised as an "article".

likelybot 1mo ago

[dead]

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

ghostly_s 1mo ago

> 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. Obviously; no one else can justify the expense.

skybrian 1mo ago

Maybe it's not anything specific to Apple? There's high demand and short supply elsewhere due to AI, so it doesn't seem all that odd that many companies would try to buy gear from Apple too.

throwaway613746 1mo ago

[dead]

dogscatstrees 1mo ago

Were they really caught off guard or is it a long-term play by Apple who knows that consumers may just want machines capable of local models. Build-or-buy (subscribe) options. I for one would get a Mac Studio over a DGX Spark because you get a general Mac machine as a bonus. The big news is Apple being caught off guard by Nvidia buying Hugging Face. That should have been Apple's.

saejox 1mo ago

Most of those people will be dissapointed when they experience Q4 variants of those models getting stuck in loops. I would wait till the ram crisis is over to fetch a future 64gb ram gpu to run Q8 models. Cloud inference until than.

etoxin 1mo ago
Switching from Q4 to Q8 was a game changer when I upgraded
jms703 1mo ago
I'm excited to hear the ram crisis will be over. But will it?

esotericsean 1mo ago

Imagine if Apple truly went the route of local AI and every Mac came with a fully local, open weight Siri. They could put Anthropic and OpenAI out of business.

dhosek 1mo ago
Presumably this is on their roadmap. The Jobs-era thing would be to come in with something that people on HN would say, “yeah, I could do this myself with open source tools” but in practice falls into the category of “I could build this $30 thing for $15 for parts and then another $15 for the parts I had to replace because I screwed up the build the first time and then $30 to just buy the damn thing” that would really blow non-HN people away even if it is more expensive than most other local computing systems, but I don’t know what the Ternus-era Apple will be like.
- Danox 1mo ago
  Apple is almost certainly building the software end of it to go along with the computers that they currently sell to the public they have the time to do it right because their biggest competition in that area would be Microsoft, but Microsoft is currently listing at sea with Copilot, Xbox, and the Surface line of computers. Memory probably is the biggest holdup/obstacle at this moment.

platevoltage 1mo ago

It would be nice if I could upgrade my 16GB M2 MacBook Pro some time in this lifetime. This AI bullshit is getting annoying.

Danox 1mo ago

What’s going on isn’t Apple behind in AI model building I thought I read that somewhere on the MacRumors site in the last two years, that Apple is behind its tech peers and Apple might as well just close the doors. I always thought Apple was in a good position because unlike their peers they didn’t burn billions of dollars trying to build an AI model that has no financial moat around it. I still think they’re in a good position in comparison to their tech peers and we will know even more when some of the new computers get into the hands of some of the tech reviewers. I believe the new computer’s will be pretty good hardware wise what I’m interested in, is the Apple software support for connecting several Mac computers together, and some of the other (new?) software that Apple may have written in house to support those who want to run AI software locally that is just as important as the new hardware.

rglover 1mo ago
They're making the smartest possible move: let others burn insane amounts of capital and time finding the quirks and once they see a viable lane, execute. It's old Steve Jobs logic. Works backwards from the customer experience to the technology (they're the only big player I see doing this).
- pertymcpert 1mo ago
  I feel like they failed upwards into the right strategy. I doubt it was deliberate and not because of the failure of their foundation models to decent.
- desterothx 1mo ago
  I would argue this has been googles approach as well

HDBaseT 1mo ago

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.

vikramkr 1mo ago
I don't think you need the scare quotes. product lifecycles can take years and the actual neo demand was actually pretty insane. They were using it to soak up demand for binned a18 chips and it would have been irresponsible to forecast that they'd have the demand they did when there's another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. this article's also about enterprise demand specifically. That's a bit surprising to me as well frankly. I'd have thought the primary market for mac studios would be hobbyists/enthusiasts with a bunch of disposable income who are willing to pay 18k for a 512 gb machine to run glm 3.5 flash or 9k to run deepseek v4 flash locally. It's competing with a $200/mo subscription or renting server gpu time for open source models during a memory shortage - and idk if it's going to be powerful enough to train or fine tune so it's really just inference. seems reasonable to be surprised
- lumost 1mo ago
  A lot of big enterprises struggle with ai adoption. Either they can't get models/tools approved fast enough, can't provision them in their internal network, or get slammed with exorbitant inference costs. A big enterprise can drop one (or 4) of these on someone's desk and let them go nuts.
- dwaite 1mo ago
  > another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. The target audience didn't evaluate that as a limitation - the majority of the market for Apple devices does trust that they will not produce and sell a computer incapable of support their use. Professionals know there are tasks that a baseline computer cannot handle, and even common tasks that a more powerful computer does better, but those people weren't really the target demo for the laptop.

bilsbie 1mo ago

I get the impression they want AI marketing points but don’t actually want people to use local AI on their products. I have no idea why. They could be so successful if they leaned into local AI.

jonplackett 1mo ago
I think they’re too scared to ‘own’ it - it would be someone else’s model and potential security issue. But apple have to own everything they do so they’re in a bind
m463 1mo ago
I don't think they're ready for local ai. They have memory + memory bandwidth, that's it. I also don't think they do "technology". For example, containers have been around for a long time, and apple didn't show up. (I know they have some support now). Imagine an apple-native docker/podman doing something like FROM macos:10.12 I was actually surprised when they did their own chips. I figure it was about control.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

nullbio 1mo ago

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 OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple marketing bots (you could tell by looking at their post history, where they would drop "Mac Mini" into every conversation they could across all different subreddits and unrelated topics). Then it became fairly common. So Apple's marketing department is seemingly using the same strategy again. Because still, it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim.

srslack 1mo ago
I am using Mac studios for local inference, but not for openclaw. It was simply the best bang for the buck at the time, and the software side of things has gotten even better since then. I haven’t run the pricing comparison but I have a feeling with the direction they’re heading that it’s better to hold off for m6 as it may assuage various bottlenecks if you are latency sensitive.
- bredren 1mo ago
  Reportedly, the M6 will not get pro, max or ultra editions. Instead Apple will go straight to M7 for these.
  - pylotlight 1mo ago
    Some reporting seems to reject that btw: https://wccftech.com/apple-m6-pro-m6-max-soic-mh-wmcm-packaging-report/ https://wccftech.com/apple-m6-pro-m6-max-soic-mh-wmcm-packag...
  - giantrobot 1mo ago
    The Pro, Max, and Ultra chips boil down to different combinations of their "Super", performance, and efficiency cores along with the number of GPU cores. The Max is two Pros bolted together. Thus far they've skipped generations of Ultra chips but Pro and Max versions of all the M-series chips have been released. I can see them not releasing an M6 Ultra but no reason not to see Pro and Max versions of the M6.

FoundARetard 1mo ago

[dead]

RagnarD 1mo ago

Translation: Tim Cook was caught off guard.

wseqyrku 1mo ago
Sorry to interrupt. Magic Mouse. Thank you for your attention.

hnav 1mo ago

Apple trying to sit on two chairs. Make bank selling hypeware while keeping distance to not sully their brand too much.

wseqyrku 1mo ago
They have no "brand" left with all around hostile behavior wherever they can. The only brand they currently are so proud of is being more expensive than everyone else just because. It's been always a hardware company that doesn't even build their own hardware. Anyone can do that. Call up your investors.

darvo31 1mo ago

Totally saw this coming. My team just grabbed three Mac Studios for local LLMs; the unified memory is a game-changer.

srvmshr 1mo ago

Slightly tangential question: Does having a spruced up Mac Studio help learning the ropes of model tuning and/or development as good as having a CUDA device?

magicmicah85 1mo ago

Caught off guard has been used a lot this year. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/30/apple-unexpected-mac-mini-and-studio-demand/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/30/apple-unexpected-mac-mi... https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/01/apple-was-caught-off-guard-by-macbook-neo/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/01/apple-was-caught-off-gu... https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/29/apple-on-airpods-pro-3-popularity/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/29/apple-on-airpods-pro-3-... Recent work in this space has got me looking at using local models for daily use. I’m waiting for people to start dumping some of the previous generation minis on Facebook marketplace or eBay so I can pick one up. Of course there’s also other options. I’m still hammering out my requirements and what I want to do besides putz around.

aurareturn 1mo ago
Two of those links were Macs. No surprise. Macbooks selling like hotcakes due to AI. Not just local LLMs but also just really efficient *nix machines that AI agents love to use for productivity.

Naru_vek 1mo ago

Guess Apple didn't quite grasp how many devs would snap these up for local LLMs. M-series chips are surprisingly good for it.

pjmlp 1mo ago

Only in North America market, and a few similar economies, as many countries buying Apple hardware is only for a select few on top tier society levels. Everyone else keeps buying PCs as always, even more so that Apple doesn't have any proper desktops any longer. Also if there is demand for something, are CUDA cards, being used from Windows and Linux distributions.

Devin3162 1mo ago

[dead]

interludead 1mo ago

[dead]

metchio 1mo ago

I bought one in April '26 for two reasons: I needed a small computer to replace my old one that died, I didn't want to spend more than 600 euros, and the alternatives were not great. Second reason: at that time it was mis-priced on Amazon.IE and I bought it for like 550, one week after my purchase the price bumped to 750.

Havoc 1mo ago

This smells suspiciously like a hunt for RAM that ended with the only thing left on consumer shelves

alescalaios 1mo ago

[dead]

TimByte 1mo ago

Stories about Tim Cook sitting there being surprised by sales are total marketing. They simply ran out of memory chips because of the global shortage, so they repacked supply delays into a nice story about insane hype among AI startups. And hit two birds with one stone by throwing shade at their competitors

zx8080 1mo ago

That's pure marketing. Not off-guard. Profit-maxxing.

gcanyon 1mo ago

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.

bartender26 1mo ago

no one wants AI in their hardware

creamedpeas 1mo ago

[dead]

dolmen 1mo ago

One more website that doesn't render the page in Firefox when scrolling the page using the keyboard (arrow keys, PgUp, PgDn).

greenjudge 1mo ago

[flagged]

rushi053 1mo ago

Its going to be another big iPhone moment with macs for apple since companies and Indies are building on ai.

HumblyTossed 1mo ago

Apple, a 4T USD company, is not caught off guard. They know exactly how many of a certain thing they make will sell. This is just PR nonsense. They do it with iPhone also. They'll introduce a new model and make enough to sell out and then spin that as a high demand. That makes their stock bump up as well as more people place orders for the next batch. It's all marketing and you're being manipulated by it. Edit: Some of y'all are naive.

kodoman 1mo ago

Are these still the best products to run local AI on price performance wise?

ChildOfChaos 1mo ago

It's a massive bummer for me because I'm on an old 2015 iMac and was looking to upgrade soon but buy a fairly heafty machine, but the combined Ram price increases and the fact these still sell like hotcakes has made me reconsider. I like to buy high end and then keep it for a long time. I'd love local AI But even with a fairly large spend, these machines won't run that much local AI well and that's now, I'm not sure if in the future I'd want even more RAM, seems to be it is better to budget for an AI sub + a less insane machine.

mixmastamyk 1mo ago
Maybe something used to keep you running for a few more years.

NikhilChowdaryG 1mo ago

[flagged]

akeck 1mo ago

I don't think they were caught off guard. It's clear that Apple is the cheapest option, or even the only option in many cases, for running larger local models, especially with the RAM crunch. With the standard "PC design model" you have to buy RAM twice - once for the system to load the GPU and again in the GPU itself. For Apple, and a few other options like DGX Spark and some laptops, you only need to buy it once. I think the Apple/DGX Spark "unified RAM design model" is maybe the only way forward because of RAM pricing/availability over the next few years.

mschuster91 1mo ago

> 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. They did have one... Xserve. Or the macOS Server package you could buy on the App Store. But there hasn't been an actual device that people could buy for many a year, and most of what enterprises need (aka fleet management, software deployment etc) has been left to third parties like JAMF.

henrycoler 1mo ago

[dead]

clear-octopus 1mo ago

[dead]