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  • I run a lot of local models (I am always experimenting) on my 32G M2-Pro MacMini - I would love to upgrade.

    The financial aspects don’t work however: I can learn and experiment with what I have for local models, and I pay as I go on FireWorks.ai for open model inferencing and no matter how much I use this service my monthly bill is between $10 and $40 and much faster than any reasonable home rig.

    Hybrid ‘small local’ and buying inference is the way I choose.

    by mark_l_watson
  • Honest question - why are you so stuck on Macs for local inference?

    A 4 GPU linux box with 3090s, which are $1500 a piece right now, will blow this thing out of the water. Even 2x3090 rig will run most of the good local models like Gemma4:31b at 100+ tok/sec

    The VRAM of the GPUs are MUCH faster than the unified ram within Apple Silicon. The only difference is the initial model load, which takes longer from disk to VRAM due to PCIE limitations, but once the model is loaded, GPUs can prefill and and generate tokens way faster than any Apple Silicon.

    So is your desire to upgrade to mac because you just aren't aware of how to set up a GPU rig, or is it something else?

    by ActorNightly
  • >fluid frame rates in demanding games like Mixtape.

    not getting on that bandwagon but wasn't that not the most demanding game as its a just a nonstop cutscene.

    by anshumankmr
  • it's not super well optimized I think. unreal engine 5 is taxing even without a lot of gameplay or stuff on screen
    by nemomarx
  • cutscenes are often the most demanding part of a game!
    by wilg
  • But it has the right creative vibe which is the point really. Apple has a general creative aesthetic which plays well with artsy games like mixtape.

    It's a very deliberate choice when if it doesn't make sense to gamers.

    by JauntyHatAngle
  • * it's artsy, which fits Apple's PR image

    * it's critically acclaimed (86 metacritic, 10/10 IGN)

    * whatever person decided this likely knows nothing about video games

    * most importantly it's a modern game in UE5 that's COMING NATIVELY TO MAC, including to the App Store

    What would you have put?

    by serbuvlad
  • Leasing now an option, only $50/month (cheaper than inference subscription?), so even cash-poor can go the amortized-investment route.

    I've often felt there is tremendous value locked up in underutilized old computers. It would be interesting to see Apple in 3 years offering compute as a service using lease returns (or more likely, partnering with someone else to operate it (perhaps exclusively in secondary markets like China or India, to address political demands for local siting or jobs). Apple is in the best position to work around or even gap-fix older software/hardware limitations in a controlled environment, and now they can do so without cannibalizing new hardware sales.

    by w10-1
  • > Leasing now an option, only $50/month (cheaper than inference subscription?)

    For which configuration, though?

    by cromka
  • I looked at multiple configurations, and mathed it out. With leasing, you pay ~75% of the capital cost (excl. tax) over 3 years, but end up with no asset.

    Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value, and Mac Minis/Studios have the least depreciation of them all. I understand the benefits to both taxes and cash flow, but boy is Apple winning big on those lease offers for Studios.

    by GoofGarage
  • Add ARM boot camp, MacOS is too restrictive compared to modern Linux. Asahi's devs can't keep up with the constant hardware releases so official support is important.
    by xacky
  • The 512GB Ultra is amazing, sure. But who is it for exactly? VC funded big spender founders? In that case why would they need local AI? The ultra rich enthusiast? But there can't be too many of those. So who actually buys these?
    by SilverSlash
  • Local AI is the future, and a lot of people want the first mover advantage or to toy around with it. I know a guy with a small rack of Nvidia Spark machines that he uses for that purpose; it's as much as a decent used car.
    by lenerdenator
  • For some , the idea that some proprietary information could potentially leak is enough to justify any price.
    by LeBit
  • Other than the local AI crowd which is much recent it is professionals using Final Cut Pro for video editing, Logic Pro as a DAW and music production, Video transcoding, Photoshop and other tasks for high performance computing that don't need Laptops but want above 128GB of ram and prefer a Mac. Then there is the obvious group of developers that are making Apps for all of their products. Also, these are great for the workplace. AI is much more recent thing that Apple products were used for.

    If Apple didn't sold these things they wouldn't make them but, also the level of marketing that Apple is talking about for AI is basically the new group they need to capture because the ones I just listed are already buying Macs and or easily to motivate with the other obvious CPU / GPU performance upgrades for code compilation, faster memory and video transcoding.

    by zitterbewegung
  • Enthusiasts buying these for fun are not the target market. These aren’t big sellers to begin with but a lot of the sales are going to companies where people have budgets for gear like this and can make a business case for it.

    This is, sadly, probably a foreign concept to a lot of people who have only worked at companies where hardware purchases are viewed as something to minimize and everyone is stuck with the same low spec laptops that the finance department picked out. At companies where someone might have a legitimate use for a $20K machine, their fully loaded costs (not their salary) are $300K or more, and other teams like sales are spending thousands of dollars per week on things like travel and hotels for their job, spending $20K on a computer that’s going to last several years is not a hard choice.

    by Aurornis
  • I think "ultra rich enthusiast" is in the right ballpark. There are people betting on being able to create their own revenue generating products and services with their own local hardware and very little operating costs. That may or may not make sense as a business idea. But people with wealth and risk appetite trying a new kind of business model and cost structure has a strong tradition.

    Put another way: If $25k is the full extent of the start up capital costs, and operating costs are very low, that is a much cheaper business to start than most! The question is whether this is actually a useful model for a revenue generating business. I think that remains to be seen.

    My guess is that there will be a few hits (which we'll hear a lot about - especially when someone actually pulls off "the first single-person unicorn", which I do suspect will happen someday) and a huuuge number of misses, which we won't hear much about.

    by sanderjd
  • If I can get Sol level capabilities on a $20k machine, then it is well worth it for my employer to buy me that machine for work as a workstation. When you start paying in tokens vs subscription costs due to enterprise agreements, you really start to see how much cash utilizing frontier models at the frontier costs (and I'm efficiently using luna and other models where possible!)
    by maherbeg
  • Remember core customers of Apple studio type products is content creation/video editing, etc.

    AI based tools are very useful here - thinks like object removable or cleanup etc, not just AI generation.

    For example Apple mentioned performance increases for https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/reference_guide/air_n...

    by DrScientist
  • I think there's some mental inertia around what a computer is and what it's worth. This thing can build custom software for you, mostly autonomously. It can monitor things happening on the internet that are relevant to you, in a holistic and flexible way. We have one crawling the web for local events we'll like, and it judges them based on what it knows about us, and it tells us about the best matches every weekend, which has yielded some awesome outings we wouldn't have known about. It reads the literature on a subject in seconds and uses it as context to help in decision support. It's not the same value proposition as a computer 3 years ago, where most people are mentally anchored on what a computer should cost. Having it at home means that you can use it as a personal agent that always puts your interests first, regardless of what ad model the commercial providers decide to put in, and you can stash in it your medical data, what you buy, what you make, your worries, hopes, and dreams, without worrying about that being used as training data, or worse, something to exploit you commercially. I think it'll become considered totally reasonable to consider spending the cost of a small car on a computer, for many families.

    Also, a lot of companies are looking at how to run capable models locally to cut some of their (massive) cloud AI bills. An easy answer is worth a lot to them.

    by ericd
  • More validated by the day that my $450 M4 Mac Mini (16GB) was the best deal in computing for a long, long time.
    by paxys
  • Should have grabbed two.
    by F7F7F7
  • Yeah. One place I worked went down under and they offered to hand out on-prem servers for free. These were 192 GB DDR4 each. I was moving houses and lazy, so I declined. I still think what would've happened if I just rented a car and went downtown.
    by moezd
  • I live right next to a micro center and remember when they started offering that deal... still so pissed at myself for not buying one. I ended up just buying a raspberry Pi for what I was doing, but seeing as where the prices are now, I messed that up a bit. Also my worst sin was not buying 64GB of DDR5 when I was doing my computer upgrades back in August last year.
    by hasteg
  • Apple still has the best hardware so I moved to it for the last few years, but the closed software ecosystem is terrible for taking advantage of it.

    I wasn't able to debug network errors (restartin my Mac worked), Metal was missing low level disassembly / debugging tools (there is some hard to use UI), but the worst thing was the inflexible windowing system.

    Even getting all the window handles on all screens/desktops with their titles and programs is impossible.

    I just decided that I move to Omarchy 4 (basically Hyperland + QuickShell) + NVIDIA GPU, and I already was able to customize it more than my Mac in years.

    I will miss Apple's hardware for sure, but not MacOS and the missing hardware documentation

    by xiphias2
  • On what hardware you running Omarchy?
    by rrgok
  • How are you liking Omarchy? I saw a video on it recently, and it looks 'pretty' but still looks like it's a lot of memorization of shortcuts and feels like the 40% keyboard of OS's. Like some people it's absolutely amazing, but lets be honest, it's going to be really difficult to be as productive as a full fat keyboard.
    by AbsurdCensor
  • I don't understand how absolutely basic things are not possible on Mac OS. Switching between two windows easily, displaying hidden files in the finder... These things would be way easier to solve than building the next generation hardware.
    by Einenlum
  • I think the worst is the lack of support for 'click-through' behavior on MacOS. This is that you have to select a window first with left-click before being able to select UI elements within that window with left-click. The amount of time lost with extra clicks is incredible.

    It is even more frustrating that this behavior is somewhat inconsistent, with some applications allowing this and others not (although it is more often the latter).

    I made a workaround solution here with minimal setup/overhead: https://github.com/dainank/apple-click-through but I do wish someday this could be configurable in the OS as a setting.

    by dainank
  • I had a chance to try Omarchy past few days and it's just very different vs macOS. I honestly never had a problem with the windowing system ever since I built my own customization scripts (i.e. Hammerspoon). I can see the appeal for someone who wants ultimate customization though but macOS still wins overwhelmingly when it comes to polish, ecosystem, user experience, and apps (nothing comes close).
    by Axsuul