5 ms·

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 p

by 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.
- ActorNightly 1mo ago
  >It was simply the best bang for the buck at the time, I wouldn't have a problem with Apple fanboys if they just stated that they like Macs, but for some reason you have no problem with just straight up LYING. Or at least being so deluded that you state things that are so easy to prove false as fact. I.e, 600 gb/sec is dogshit slow compared to vram speeds.
  - srslack 1mo ago
    You could not get 500GB of VRAM for less than $100k at the time. It was the absolute best bang for the buck as far as local inference and fine tuning. I am not sure why you are so hostile when I specifically called out “latency sensitivity” as far as prompt preprocessing and various other bottlenecks. I run Linux.
    - ActorNightly 1mo ago
      The reason Im so hostile is because it personally irks me when a technical forum like HN is filled with Apple-slop being passed off as technical discussion. Its fine to like Apple for what it is, the ecosystem, the industrial design, the advantages of dedicated hardware with specialized software to extend battery life. But instead, there is Apple-slop, which is basically starting with the assumption that whatever you can do on Mac is the standard, and that Macs are great because they fit that standard. Being able to run frontier models at <10 tok/sec is just an excersize in showing that you can afford a Mac. Its useless for any real tasks. Gemma4 is on par with a lot of the older frontier models like Gemini Flash, and you can run that at 100+ tok/sec on a 2x3090 rig which costs way less than even top of the line Mac Studio.
ipsum2 1mo ago
Apple's marketing isn't that smart. They're very traditional. You give them way too much credit.
- corndoge 1mo ago
  Any justification for this claim?
  - raydev 1mo ago
    All historical evidence.
  - mixmastamyk 1mo ago
    It's not surprising marketing for a large corporation leans toward the bland. This is not the scrappy Apple from the turn of the century.
  - ipsum2 1mo ago
    The easiest one to think about is that the larger the company (or division), the more likely there are leaks. Think about how much as leaked in Apple's hardware or software division. If they were doing incredibly underground marketing, someone would've bragged on LinkedIn or to a reporter.
mgh2 1mo ago
Additional source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpqGf0m5FaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpqGf0m5FaQ
nsagent 1mo ago
It's not. This article is weirdly light on details. The original source article from The Information apparently mentions that companies like OpenAI are buying them up to run RL. So it's yet another case of AI companies buying all the compute. * I say apparently because The Information wants you to sign up for access to the article, but I found this mentioned in multiple summaries of the article like this one [1]. [1]: https://tech-insider.org/openai-mac-buying-apple-supply-shortage-2026/ https://tech-insider.org/openai-mac-buying-apple-supply-shor...
chzblck 1mo ago
This may be your experience For mine I was on the fence - waited an hour or so and the delivery date went from early oct to 10-12 weeks so i decided to wait on the 512gb version
bensyverson 1mo ago
People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone. People really were talking about and buying Minis due to OpenClaw, because they wanted something that was on all the time and had access to all their stuff in macOS. Occam’s Razor.
- fsckboy 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- bloppe 1mo ago
  Companies that ignore everything besides their legacy cash cow tend to go downhill. I'm sure there are at least a few people at Apple who's main concern is marketing the Mac mini, and those people are highly definitely trying to cook up new marketing strategies all the time
  - brookst 1mo ago
    Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation. If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider: 1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but something. Maybe drum up demand for products they can’t keep in stock anyway? 2. Media outlets chase clicks, and when fringe media finds a hit, mainstream media follows because you can always write a story about the fact that other people are writing stories. Low cost, proven clicks, nobody yells at you for missing a trend. Which is more likely? I’ll cheerfully stipulate Apple is pure evil, serves cooked babies in their cafeterias, whatever it takes to discuss based on reason rather than big-evil-corpos.
    - jchw 1mo ago
      To be fair, the very reasonable take is that if there was guerilla marketing campaigns, they are most likely being handled by external agencies and not Apple directly. And, this isn't making them look particularly dumb. It is making them look dumb the way that most people make themselves look "bad" when they list their biggest weakness in a job interview. Silly Apple, not seeing how fantastically great their product is and how much people are dying to have it. The most serious point in favor of this being organic nonsense is just the sheer lack of any actual evidence that it isn't, but the case is being wildly overstated, in part because we're using the non-standard term "psyop" to describe what I'd consider to be mundane marketing practices. At this point I feel like there is no reasonable way to draw a conclusion. However, viral marketing like this is common and in fact, incredibly easy. This is done through PR services (and even shadier sources) all the time... I'm a bit surprised people on HN are unfamiliar with how utterly common the practice is, it wasn't new when I first came into contact with the industry over a decade ago. The hallmark of this is very similar articles appearing suddenly through the Internet and in the news. It's often not just random plagiarism. This is why the news is constantly running stories about how suits are back in vogue and other vain crap like that.
fortran77 1mo ago
Agreed. It’s also nonsense. You need an NVidia gpu to do any serious work.
transcriptase 1mo ago
The openclaw crowd were just former cryptobros onto their next grift: performative posts about AI that would generate enough views/engagement/ad revenue to pay for the hardware… assuming they were even telling the truth about having it at all. None shipped anything of value. Same with anyone claiming to be running dozens or hundreds of agents 24/4.
- ygytt 1mo ago
  [dead]
EGreg 1mo ago
Alex Finn was using and touting Mac Minis hehe He started that whole trend!
internet2000 1mo ago
This is straight up a conspiracy theory.
- insensible 1mo ago
  In the sense that publishing marketing-driven press releases is a conspiracy between the publishers and the marketing team, I guess?
mister_mort 1mo ago
I'm not so sure. You could literally see configuration options start disappearing from the Mac Mini ordering flow over time as demand increased and supply dried up.
apexalpha 1mo ago
I personally know 5 people using Macs with their unified memory for OpenClaw / Hermes. Also the demand is really there. Or do you think Apple just removed certain options from sale for fun in stead of RAM being out of stock?
swiftcoder 1mo ago
> Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw This is rather revisionist. A lot of the early OpenClaw publicity was about connecting it to iMessage (which was really only possible on Mac hardware at the time)
fennecfoxy 1mo ago
The Internet has magnified the "my church leader said that gay people are actually demons" effect. Or "if you throw salt over your shoulder you're protected" or "wolves have alphas of the pack". People don't fact check in the first place, they don't check that facts came from a trusted source, they don't check if information has changed the last time they got it from a trusted source, etc. Is it just me or is it scary that it seems to me as if the average person just takes everyone's word for most things, as long as the person telling them is a "trusted source" based only on tribal lines?
reactordev 1mo ago
It's not, AI labs and scalers are buying up all the mac mini's and mac studios.
- b40d-48b2-979e 1mo ago
  There are also all the companies building iOS apps that need mac mini compute clusters for CI/CD because of dumb Apple requirements (ask me how I know..).
  - dolmen 1mo ago
    But this isn't a new use or a significant market share. Running models is both.
aurareturn 1mo ago
I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple. I'm not. I have an M4 Mac Mini running 24/7 so I can use it as my Claude Code machine when I'm on the go. Why would they do a guerilla marketing campaign now if their Macs are generally sold out despite nearly doubling the Mac Mini price in the last few months?
- f055 1mo ago
  I don’t get it. You don’t need a Mac mini to use Claude Code on the go, any home server with stable internet is enough. Was it the marketing?
  - rob_b 1mo ago
    Of course it was. I’ve been using Mac minis since they were released and the mania the past year or so is unreal.
  - aurareturn 1mo ago
    I develop using a Macbook primarily. Having a Mac Mini keeps the environment the same when I'm on the go. Plus, any home server would not be as efficient or fast as a Mini with an M4.
  - gwerbin 1mo ago
    Either they're running Claude Code with a local LLM (technically possible via dev tools albeit unsupported), or they genuinely have no idea why the Mac is good for AI and just bought it because they were told it was good for AI. The former honestly sounds like a nightmare because the Mac Mini can run some big models but not that big, and Claude Code will guaranteed stuff your context with 35k tokens, and all the Anthropic proprietary tool-deferral and tool-search stuff is meant to be handled inside the inference engine in a way that I don't think any open-source engine like vLLM can support right now (much as I wish it did). So you have a huge context on startup, broken functionality, and an underpowered LLM struggling through it all. Not to mention I have no idea how any of the sidecar LLM stuff is meant to work in that context (e.g. auto-mode classifier and even things like dynamic session naming). Am I missing something? I don't want to assume it's the latter, I want to be charitable to other people. But.
JKCalhoun 1mo ago
"…but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple marketing bots…" You could make your case easily if you had some links to these. (I understand though it's not likely something one remembers at the time to cache away. Still, without that I have little to go on.)
jjtheblunt 1mo ago
> it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim can you approximate plausibility by the wait time for a maxed-out config?
xnx 1mo ago
Not exactly guerilla marketing, but decades of traditional marketing bearing fruit in people who fetish-ize Apple products, need to socially signal how cutting edge thy are, and have too much disposable income. I follow a lot of people on Twitter who were one-upping each other about how much hardware they had bought (now gathering dust0 to run their Claw assistants. Those same people are now buying some toy robot duck?

by nullbio 1mo ago

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.
ActorNightly 1mo ago
>It was simply the best bang for the buck at the time, I wouldn't have a problem with Apple fanboys if they just stated that they like Macs, but for some reason you have no problem with just straight up LYING. Or at least being so deluded that you state things that are so easy to prove false as fact. I.e, 600 gb/sec is dogshit slow compared to vram speeds.
- srslack 1mo ago
  You could not get 500GB of VRAM for less than $100k at the time. It was the absolute best bang for the buck as far as local inference and fine tuning. I am not sure why you are so hostile when I specifically called out “latency sensitivity” as far as prompt preprocessing and various other bottlenecks. I run Linux.
  - ActorNightly 1mo ago
    The reason Im so hostile is because it personally irks me when a technical forum like HN is filled with Apple-slop being passed off as technical discussion. Its fine to like Apple for what it is, the ecosystem, the industrial design, the advantages of dedicated hardware with specialized software to extend battery life. But instead, there is Apple-slop, which is basically starting with the assumption that whatever you can do on Mac is the standard, and that Macs are great because they fit that standard. Being able to run frontier models at <10 tok/sec is just an excersize in showing that you can afford a Mac. Its useless for any real tasks. Gemma4 is on par with a lot of the older frontier models like Gemini Flash, and you can run that at 100+ tok/sec on a 2x3090 rig which costs way less than even top of the line Mac Studio.

ipsum2 1mo ago

Apple's marketing isn't that smart. They're very traditional. You give them way too much credit.

corndoge 1mo ago
Any justification for this claim?
- raydev 1mo ago
  All historical evidence.
- mixmastamyk 1mo ago
  It's not surprising marketing for a large corporation leans toward the bland. This is not the scrappy Apple from the turn of the century.
- ipsum2 1mo ago
  The easiest one to think about is that the larger the company (or division), the more likely there are leaks. Think about how much as leaked in Apple's hardware or software division. If they were doing incredibly underground marketing, someone would've bragged on LinkedIn or to a reporter.

mgh2 1mo ago

Additional source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpqGf0m5FaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpqGf0m5FaQ

nsagent 1mo ago

It's not. This article is weirdly light on details. The original source article from The Information apparently mentions that companies like OpenAI are buying them up to run RL. So it's yet another case of AI companies buying all the compute. * I say apparently because The Information wants you to sign up for access to the article, but I found this mentioned in multiple summaries of the article like this one [1]. [1]: https://tech-insider.org/openai-mac-buying-apple-supply-shortage-2026/ https://tech-insider.org/openai-mac-buying-apple-supply-shor...

chzblck 1mo ago

This may be your experience For mine I was on the fence - waited an hour or so and the delivery date went from early oct to 10-12 weeks so i decided to wait on the 512gb version

bensyverson 1mo ago

People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone. People really were talking about and buying Minis due to OpenClaw, because they wanted something that was on all the time and had access to all their stuff in macOS. Occam’s Razor.

fsckboy 1mo ago
[flagged]
bloppe 1mo ago
Companies that ignore everything besides their legacy cash cow tend to go downhill. I'm sure there are at least a few people at Apple who's main concern is marketing the Mac mini, and those people are highly definitely trying to cook up new marketing strategies all the time
- brookst 1mo ago
  Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation. If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider: 1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but something. Maybe drum up demand for products they can’t keep in stock anyway? 2. Media outlets chase clicks, and when fringe media finds a hit, mainstream media follows because you can always write a story about the fact that other people are writing stories. Low cost, proven clicks, nobody yells at you for missing a trend. Which is more likely? I’ll cheerfully stipulate Apple is pure evil, serves cooked babies in their cafeterias, whatever it takes to discuss based on reason rather than big-evil-corpos.
  - jchw 1mo ago
    To be fair, the very reasonable take is that if there was guerilla marketing campaigns, they are most likely being handled by external agencies and not Apple directly. And, this isn't making them look particularly dumb. It is making them look dumb the way that most people make themselves look "bad" when they list their biggest weakness in a job interview. Silly Apple, not seeing how fantastically great their product is and how much people are dying to have it. The most serious point in favor of this being organic nonsense is just the sheer lack of any actual evidence that it isn't, but the case is being wildly overstated, in part because we're using the non-standard term "psyop" to describe what I'd consider to be mundane marketing practices. At this point I feel like there is no reasonable way to draw a conclusion. However, viral marketing like this is common and in fact, incredibly easy. This is done through PR services (and even shadier sources) all the time... I'm a bit surprised people on HN are unfamiliar with how utterly common the practice is, it wasn't new when I first came into contact with the industry over a decade ago. The hallmark of this is very similar articles appearing suddenly through the Internet and in the news. It's often not just random plagiarism. This is why the news is constantly running stories about how suits are back in vogue and other vain crap like that.

fortran77 1mo ago

Agreed. It’s also nonsense. You need an NVidia gpu to do any serious work.

transcriptase 1mo ago

The openclaw crowd were just former cryptobros onto their next grift: performative posts about AI that would generate enough views/engagement/ad revenue to pay for the hardware… assuming they were even telling the truth about having it at all. None shipped anything of value. Same with anyone claiming to be running dozens or hundreds of agents 24/4.

ygytt 1mo ago
[dead]

EGreg 1mo ago

Alex Finn was using and touting Mac Minis hehe He started that whole trend!

internet2000 1mo ago

This is straight up a conspiracy theory.

insensible 1mo ago
In the sense that publishing marketing-driven press releases is a conspiracy between the publishers and the marketing team, I guess?

mister_mort 1mo ago

I'm not so sure. You could literally see configuration options start disappearing from the Mac Mini ordering flow over time as demand increased and supply dried up.

apexalpha 1mo ago

I personally know 5 people using Macs with their unified memory for OpenClaw / Hermes. Also the demand is really there. Or do you think Apple just removed certain options from sale for fun in stead of RAM being out of stock?

swiftcoder 1mo ago

> Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw This is rather revisionist. A lot of the early OpenClaw publicity was about connecting it to iMessage (which was really only possible on Mac hardware at the time)

fennecfoxy 1mo ago

The Internet has magnified the "my church leader said that gay people are actually demons" effect. Or "if you throw salt over your shoulder you're protected" or "wolves have alphas of the pack". People don't fact check in the first place, they don't check that facts came from a trusted source, they don't check if information has changed the last time they got it from a trusted source, etc. Is it just me or is it scary that it seems to me as if the average person just takes everyone's word for most things, as long as the person telling them is a "trusted source" based only on tribal lines?

reactordev 1mo ago

It's not, AI labs and scalers are buying up all the mac mini's and mac studios.

b40d-48b2-979e 1mo ago
There are also all the companies building iOS apps that need mac mini compute clusters for CI/CD because of dumb Apple requirements (ask me how I know..).
- dolmen 1mo ago
  But this isn't a new use or a significant market share. Running models is both.

aurareturn 1mo ago

I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple. I'm not. I have an M4 Mac Mini running 24/7 so I can use it as my Claude Code machine when I'm on the go. Why would they do a guerilla marketing campaign now if their Macs are generally sold out despite nearly doubling the Mac Mini price in the last few months?

f055 1mo ago
I don’t get it. You don’t need a Mac mini to use Claude Code on the go, any home server with stable internet is enough. Was it the marketing?
- rob_b 1mo ago
  Of course it was. I’ve been using Mac minis since they were released and the mania the past year or so is unreal.
- aurareturn 1mo ago
  I develop using a Macbook primarily. Having a Mac Mini keeps the environment the same when I'm on the go. Plus, any home server would not be as efficient or fast as a Mini with an M4.
- gwerbin 1mo ago
  Either they're running Claude Code with a local LLM (technically possible via dev tools albeit unsupported), or they genuinely have no idea why the Mac is good for AI and just bought it because they were told it was good for AI. The former honestly sounds like a nightmare because the Mac Mini can run some big models but not that big, and Claude Code will guaranteed stuff your context with 35k tokens, and all the Anthropic proprietary tool-deferral and tool-search stuff is meant to be handled inside the inference engine in a way that I don't think any open-source engine like vLLM can support right now (much as I wish it did). So you have a huge context on startup, broken functionality, and an underpowered LLM struggling through it all. Not to mention I have no idea how any of the sidecar LLM stuff is meant to work in that context (e.g. auto-mode classifier and even things like dynamic session naming). Am I missing something? I don't want to assume it's the latter, I want to be charitable to other people. But.

JKCalhoun 1mo ago

"…but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple marketing bots…" You could make your case easily if you had some links to these. (I understand though it's not likely something one remembers at the time to cache away. Still, without that I have little to go on.)

jjtheblunt 1mo ago

> it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim can you approximate plausibility by the wait time for a maxed-out config?

xnx 1mo ago

Not exactly guerilla marketing, but decades of traditional marketing bearing fruit in people who fetish-ize Apple products, need to socially signal how cutting edge thy are, and have too much disposable income. I follow a lot of people on Twitter who were one-upping each other about how much hardware they had bought (now gathering dust0 to run their Claw assistants. Those same people are now buying some toy robot duck?