What I’m not sure to understand is that if you want to just run Claude code or openclaw type software with llm apis or subscriptions (and not run local models) to benefit from a local file system and always-on capability for ‘second brain’ type of workflows, I guess you don’t need a Mac mini but can run it on a raspberry pi or an old laptop ? Does anyone have experience with that ?

Pretty much. Running a local harness calling an llm via APIs doesn't necessarily take a lot of resources. But whatever tasks you want that agent to do via tool calling will be limited by the resources of the machine it runs on if you run those locally, so that's what should inform your choice of specs in this case

Yup, for openclaw and APIs you dont need a big PC. I run something lightweight on the RPI4 8gb. Many people run local LLMs which is where a mac is useful. Frankly I dont think you can beat the value of an openrouter subscription and API calls.

> Many people run local LLMs which is where a mac is useful

Unless you go for the very expensive options, most of the Mac Minis really aren't suitable for running local LLMs, they're painfully slow with prefill/processing input, and the models you are able to run don't handle long context very well, which these sort of long-running agents perform very differently with when you can.

I'll agree with your latter point, hard to beat the value of using something like OpenRouter or similar remote inference.

Even with local models, you can run the agent software and the inference workload on different hosts, which is what I'm doing at home. Beefy server responsible for inference, tiny VM on other server is running the actual agent software + RPC + bridges and what not.

it's only because you can send texts via imessage on a macmini. that's it.

...or any cheap VPS? I now do most of "second brain" things via pi harness with Opencode Go subscription, and it costs me like 20 bucks a year, with added benefit of "you can have tmux and open session realtime on whatever device".

Apple could probably sell a machine starting at $10,000 if they architected it as the sole place one’s Private Cloud Compute [1] ran.

It would need a path to a $2,500 machine, I think. But this is a niche I don’t think another consumer-facing brand could do like Apple.

[1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

The out-of-stock $6000 M3 Ultra Mac Studios with 800GB+ memory bandwidth are going for $24,000 on eBay, so yes definitely

I don’t think we should use current prices as landmarks for large scale demand. That Studio’s current prices is inflated because of a (presumably) short term supply crunch, not because the average user is willing to pay $24k for a home AI inference device.

It assumes that RAM remains supply constrained and that none of the existing RAM contracts are cut short.

But Meta and xAI putting A TON of AI compute onto the market. OpenAI and Anthropic are raising the costs of inference (by reducing how much inference users get via subscriptions). And we haven’t seen Oracle / CoreWeave struggle to pay their debts yet, but they will be selling assets once they get close to that point.

512GB M3 Ultra is out of stock, not coming back, and there’s nothing like it on the consumer market. That’s the reason they go for so much.

If demand doesn't fall down or current manufacturers supply go up, somebody (presumably in China) will spin up fabs. Apple wanted to use blacklisted Chinese RAM already.

where is this cheap Chinese RAM? I'd like to buy some

They're already doing it

https://www.techspot.com/news/112502-memory-prices-tipped-fa...

If the increased demand is not short term, production capacity will eventually increase. In the meantime, the logistics disruptions and industrial material shortages and energy inflation will disappear as soon as the wars disrupting them stop, which should bring prices down.

you assume demand will remain flat

what if demand keeps rising faster than production capacity is deployed?

Unless the raw materials have an inherent limit on mining/production due to the amount present on the planet, why should or would companies not ramp up to eventually meet demand?

Edit: Okay, this doesn’t mean that that’s actually possible in the short-term, so I think you’re right. But that means as the silver lining, in the medium term horizon there’ll be enough supply again? :’)

> why should or would companies not ramp up to eventually meet demand?

Memory is a cyclical market that has historically rewarded conservatism [1].

Counterpoint: there is enough demand from enough capital-rich customers that they may be willing to shoulder the capital risk.

[1] https://www.ldeepai.com/tech-hub/dram-industry-consolidation... Sorry for the slop link, it has a good chart from a solid source

For existing producers expanding capacity would be a risky move. But it's the perfect time for any newcomers to enter the market. Low yields and worse product don't matter as much right now, and by the time the market cools down you have everything dialed in and can compete on even ground

I heard that China was spinning up DDR5 (but not HBM?) production in the next couple of years, with the hope of outcompeting Korea and Taiwan in the mid to long term.

Thanks for the link (and underlying thoughts), I really hadn’t considered that.

So essentially, due to technological progress and other factors inducing price collapses (or at least cycles), you can’t start stockpiling insane amounts of finished-product semiconductor, which means you can’t scale production at current technology levels to infinity either?

Don't forget price fixing [1] which we are seeing clear indicators of happening right now too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

Let me clarify, I think Apple could sell a device at the scale Apple sells at around the $10 to 25 thousand price point.

Like, take out the price sheets for the Apple Car. Then sell me an AI tower at those price points.

In 2010 one of the standard configurations for the Mac Pro was $4,999. Once you customised ram, storage, peripherals and software it could easily end up above $15,000, or $23k today accounting for inflation. Apple hardware is one thing that has actually got cheaper over time.

https://www.macworld.com/article/209019/macguide2010.html

Or they could use that same amount of memory to ship 64x Macbook Neos, and probably make higher margins off the hardware volume.

Those Macbook Neo users would be very reliant on Apple intelligence, enough maybe to pay for a service with it. I think Apple's much happier going this path.

> Or they could use that same amount of memory to ship 64x Macbook Neos, and probably make higher margins off the hardware volume

If it's an "or," absolutely. But if it's an or, they should be prioritising Macbooks over the Mac Mini Doug Brooks is discussing.

When we breach the "and" of memory supply sufficient to allow for more Mac minis (and Mac Studios), I think it would make sense to consider relaunching Xserve (with new branding, of course) as a consumer/small business product.

When I was at Apple we never wanted or. We wanted all. If that push to use Chinese memory works out it will be great for us and Apple.

I’m still disappointed they didn’t make a Mac Pro with 4 or 8 or 16 or 32 ultra M chips for something insane

Not the same issue, but makes me nostalgic for these simpler times:

https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/

Apples on stage use cases for their hardware and software makes me wonder if they actually use computers over there, or what a "job" at apple entails.

I am unsure that apple themselves understand why their hardware (top end & bottom end) has been so successful, without this understanding leaning into these use cases isn't really going to be possible.

> I am unsure that apple themselves understand why their hardware ... has been so successful [like I do]

You have a bold career as a technical journalist ahead of you!

Obviously they are playing 12d chess. They stopped selling high memory machines, they stopped selling pro machines. They are the king of local Ai compute.

With their apple finger right there on the pulse, they are going hard on the VR/AR glasses, cars and folding phones. By the end of the year (tm) we 100% will have all the features that were showcased and demonstrated 2 releases ago.

How many of these 'consumer' customers would they get for $10,000 and how would they reach their Apple-typical gigantic margin with that?

But that would be more for enterprise usage. I cannot imagine a personal computing usage which can justify a 10k machine.

> cannot imagine a personal computing usage which can justify a 10k machine

For me, the privacy pitch wins. I have a friend visiting, however, who spends like $2,400 with Anthropic every year. That's a solid ROI even if the thing becomes obsolete after a couple years. (I'm still on my 2020 MacBook Pro. I love it and will be sad when I have to replace it.)

> That's a solid ROI even if the thing becomes obsolete after a couple years.

How can that be a solid return on investment? There's no model you can run locally to have frontier model level performance. Also who spends 2.4k yearly for personal AI usage, like what's the usecase? If your friend is spending that money for his business then it's not personal computing.

That's the $200/mo subscription -- not uncommon :)

I do the $100/mo for myself, then about ~$200/mo for startup.

> There's no model you can run locally to have frontier model level performance

I'm betting he doesn't need a frontier model. Sonnet, today, is likely good for 80% of his tasks, which largely involve repretitive, tedious work.

> Also who spends 2.4k yearly for personal AI usage, like what's the usecase? If your friend is spending that money for his business then it's not personal computing

Combination of business and personal.

Apple is a premium brand with high brand loyalty. Do you not think even 1 billionaire would want something like that? Even to just say that they bought it. Apple could sell things at a price point much more than $10k.

100%

The remote access story for macOS is absolute sadness, without Jump Desktop there would be zero performant ways to access that “system under my control”.

And all of that because Tim Apple fears any feature that could mean people could have less than one iDevice per person.

I think tech people spend hundreds on tech because it’s fun.

Running models on-device on a Mac is immensely annoying though. Figuring out what will work out of BF16, FP8, BF16+FP8, NVFP4, INT8, GGUF ... the list goes on ... is 'non-obvious' at best. Apple do little to support with tooling. There's MLX, but unless you're happy to transform a model to that format yourself you'll be lagging a long way behind.

Apps like LMStudio, Ollama, Draw Things, etc do a great job of simplifying it but it's still a pain.

Converting a model to mlx is literally a git clone and mlx_lm.convert. 5 minute operation after clone.

I dunno I use LMStudio pretty regularly and the MLX folks and the community usually have MLX versions of new model releases up within a day or two.

For some models like the popular coding and chat models, things move faster. For things like images, voice, sound etc they definitely lag a long way behind.

& they clearly delineate all the models that’ll work on your exact machine (but guardrails can be disabled in settings)

If I had the capital I’d make an household inference appliance.

No peripherals except Ethernet, integrated compute (cpu+gpu+mem) and secondary storage (+mobo, psu). No accoutrements, just the minimum amount of hardware to run a model as a utility.

Even the appliance faceplate would be a display showing stats like an old HiFi stereo.

Edit: something like a series of modules consisting of a RISC-V CPU + Vortex GPGPU + memory

I think the closest to that in existence is the LLM ASIC designed by Taalas:

https://taalas.com/products/

Unfortunately their chatbot, while amazingly fast, doesn't know anything about the company running it.

Anyway I wouldn't mind an ASIC running a diffusion language model locally. Even if eventually it would become dated. Beats outsourcing all that to a company that's running on VC money which in the future might either perish or worse - dominate the market and charge whatever they wish.

You're describing the mac mini/studio with some facelift.

Absolutely, but not under the control of Apple.

Yeah but like running linux hopefully

Raspberry Pi and other SBCs, Android phones and practically all of the embedded devices with a display and microprocessor.

All have unified memory. Linux runs just fine on all of those.

Dude, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858095

Ah ok. I replied to ~45 minutes stale page.

Fairly sure most iGPUs these days are zero-copy and can dynamically allocate memory so what does "unified memory" mean to you exactly? A wider bus would be nice but it's not exactly a groundbreaking new invention.

I was actually pretty far off:

> Unified memory in Linux creates a single address space accessible to both the CPU and GPU, eliminating the need to manually copy data between system RAM and video memory. It is enabled via NVIDIA's CUDA, AMD's ROCm/HIP, or generic kernel-level Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM).

So it does exist and is available for platforms that matter.

It is interesting how apple claimed that "unified memory" is something special, and ppl believed them.

Intel and AMD had been doing this for years already, and had linux support for it from day 1.

Cool. Apple was the only one who managed to ship a consumer device with UMA and RDMA support. 2TB VRAM max over RDMA.

the pheriphels support, or the appliance faceplate is tens of dollars, that not where you make the saving

95% of the price is going to be in GPU+CPU+RAM

Sounds like reinventing the home server.

Isn't that what what George Hotz is doing over at tiny? https://tinycorp.myshopify.com/

Yes, but for inference. 45k is so far out of the budget of a professional unless you earn ridiculous money and have no dependents.

Is that the nvidia spark?

Yes, and a lot of others.

A bit too expensive for a home appliance though, isn't it?

build a Xeon / epyc 4u server. 12 channel ram.

Yes, just a big cool Cerebras wafer for the closet please.

A single wafer comes with 44GB RAM, the reason why Cerebras is so interesting is because the architecture scales up to 1.6PB RAM.

It’s not for the AI inference, it’s for the tool calls and desktop GUI app workloads and browser. There aren’t any on-device models capable enough of real work that can run on lower end Mac Minis. But for running a few browsers and GUI apps, you’re much better off buying a Mac Mini than paying for a more expensive and worse-performing container in the cloud. Browsers were not designed to run in Linux containers but they run optimally on baremetal desktop OSes. An M4 Mac Mini beats the single core performance of any VM you might rent in the cloud, in terms of raw compute per dollar (Geekbench scores).

At their original price points, a set of four were a great solution for my requirements in tokens/second/$.

> Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio have become the machines of choice for running AI agents, according to Doug Brooks, Apple's senior product manager of Apple silicon.

This is mostly an US phenomenon, no Mac mini nor Mac Studio around here.

Only Thinkpads and Macbooks laptops talking to hyperscalers.

Comparing a very popular summer sport to local LLMs is quite crazy. You're in a niche of a niche.

Around here in my German office, and down in my home country Portugal, even less, given the average salaries.

People bought diesel cars as miles per gallon was higher than petrol.

People are buying apple unified as electricity costs in many countries are very high, so cheaper to run than Nvidia setup.

As non-apple unified memory options increase, many people will have more choose those

Ok, I didn’t want to take the bait but this one’s just too much.

> “He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud – a move motivated by privacy, security, and the rising cost of inference as agents consume more tokens.”

Classic Apple. No more just beating the “security and privacy” drum, now its “tokens are expensive!”

<neanderthal voice/> Cloud scary. Cloud expensive. Mac good. Buy Mac!

> “He also singled out what he calls ‘transparent AI’ on iPhone and iPad, referring to features scattered throughout the operating system and third-party apps that work quietly without announcing themselves as AI.”

<neanderthal voice/> Apple use AI, Apple just not say it. Apple smart, not lagging behind industry! Buy iPhone!

How about you invest in developing your own models, correctly? And provide a secure and private inference cloud service on your fancy Apple silicon? And integrate that into your platform so Siri gets smarter without you farming queries out to Google Gemini? Bill me for it in iCloud+ I’ll probably pay for those tokens.

Was that so hard?

But why should apple invest in developing their own models? Why would it be correct?

Or phrase it in a very similar ask, why don't they invest in power plants? The model space is truly crowded, what do they gain or recover suppose they are SOTA? Across the Pacific they are pumping out free models that are only 6-12 months behind. What business sense does it make for Apple to develop their own models?

apple has invested in training models

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-third...

they just suck

They don’t believe in this model and never had. You sound like the people who screamed that Apple was dying because they were not making a netbook style Mac in 2009. Apple is the only big tech company with a non existent financial exposure to the current capex bubble. Let big dogs bark at the moon. They are the loud ones, at least until the moon implodes.

This is a paraphrase of https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/how-apple-s-decade-long...

I don’t understand why they are not reintroducing the Apple Xserve?

Because they killed the market, no one would now buy a macOS server, when Linux distributions, and to a lesser extent FreeBSD, own the server room.

They would even sell less than Windows Server licenses.

By the way, they are down the same path with the workstation market, now that they only top level answer is the Mac Studio.

Workstation market wants flexible towers that they can customise to their own liking and special use cases.

The main reason Swift exists for Linux, is that app developers need to have servers somewhere, and if they want to share Swift code with the backend, well it isn't going to be on macOS Server.

the SemiAnalysis guy argues that there is a market for macOS servers - running macOS VMs that agents need for computer use. some software is mac only

but Apple needs to change the licensing model, currently you are allowed to run only 2 macOS VMs for every physical one you buy

whos going to buy one? You cant trust them not to kill it within a few years and cease all software updates AND make it impossible to install a different OS to keep it going. Until they stop being dicks about what you can do with the hardware you own it's a non starter.

Apple itself was a major user of Xserve, Apples needs for cloud compute are massive and growing, and Apple could probably rent Xserve as a cloud to justify the cost and sell it to privacy focused consumers and businesses.

Target audience - B2B. There are multiple videos of Steve Jobs saying that he hates B2B, because the people using the devices are not the ones making the purchasing decision. It is pretty much against Apples DNA, and all their B2B they have today is a means for them to sell more B2C.

My guess is the OS. People who want a server often enough want to choose the OS, Apple wants to supply the OS and the hardware together so they're not blamed every time the two turn out to be incompatible, as happened the other way round in the 90s.

Being a Mac switcher since 2003 I am as much of a fanboy as anybody else but this quote from the article caught my attention, and smells like PR.

> Many AI tools are also Mac-first or Mac-only

I fail to recall AI tools Mac-only general purpose AI or agentic tools. Most of the claws, harnesses, studios and inference engines seem to be multiplatform. You can say you can run then in a Mac with a nicer UI wrapper or whatever, but "Mac-first" or "Mac-only"?

oMLX[1] is the only one that comes to mind but it's not exactly unique to mac, it just runs MLX models and provides a nice gui. It does have the whole paged SSD KV cache thing, not sure if thats working on other platforms.

[1] https://omlx.ai/

Welcome to the ad-filled experience, we think you’ll love it. – Tim Apple

https://ads.apple.com/maps

What does this mean? Apple ads bring in 8 billion revenue a year.

They aren’t as aggressive and focus on the customer experience more than others, 8bn isn’t a lot for a company with their reach.

For example Apple radio is a free product with no ads, Apple TV and Apple Music don’t have an ads supported tier.

You think Apple is a saint, but they have a completely locked down mobile computing/phone platform. Why the trust in them doing what is best for the user?

I didn’t say Apple are a saint

I said as they don’t push ads as much as others, the customer may be better

As ads focused services are designed to keep you there as long as possible rather than delivering what you are actually want quickly

It's still wishful thinking. A better strategy is to not root for one player and vote (with your wallet) for more competition.

Oh please the neural engine is mostly useless for LLMs. Siri in iOS 27 is laughably pathetic and slow compared to GPT Live DESPITE sending personal context to their (attested) cloud to execute anything but the most basic queries. Still years behind.

I think the relevant comparison is the developer beta, which has access to the Gemini-powered Siri that will roll out publicly later this year. From the reviews I've seen, Apple won't be "years behind" (which surely they were) for long.

But not in the EU, because of the DMA :/

> "The speed of AI development right now is just crazy," Brooks said. "I can't imagine where we're going to be a year from now, three months from now, or even a month from now," he added.

I don't think I'm taking this out of context when I say this is unintentionally correct. Apple still doesn't know what to do about AI.

Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't using AI apart from google search.

Everyone else is using it as a content scraper and praying nobody will step in to end the piracy/fraud.

> Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't using AI apart from google search.

This is... a view.

Maybe I live in a strange sphere of strange ("normie"-ish) people, but the people around me are for sure using AI. Mostly chatgpt to be fair. They use it to compare products that they intend to buy, identify plants in nature, create travel plans, find interesting places to visit nearby, give movie suggestions based on what they have previously enjoyed and so on and so forth. AI is becoming a very integrated part of their reality. To "google" something and digging through the search results manually is very rapidly being replaced by asking chatgpt, for better or worse.

Chatgpt is so damn good for cooking it is unbelievable. It will learn your family's tastes over time, you can tell it what pantry staples you keep is stock, and you can take any recipe you find online and ask for stuff like "find a way to make this preparable in 45 minutes instead of 2 hours, what trade offs will I be making?"

I agree! I think it's because there's so much cooking material in its training data. I wonder what proportion of the internet is food blogs and recipes... Probably a lot!

This is true but I can do the same on free ChatGPT without even logging in. I wouldn't pay $5 a month for that functionality, much less $20 (or >$1000 to be able to run it at home).

SOTA AI for "serious" work is in a different position, used by fewer people but with big pockets and sometimes a pathological dependence on it.

The new Siri isnt that exciting at least on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I know it's beta but it's sluggish and often says try again. I watched many videos on Youtube saying its amazing but maybe not so much on older phones? Also, I need a Siri I can talk in an unfettered manner from my lock screen while Im driving without having to unlock the screen. Probably a big ask for Siri to know my voice via voice fingerprint allowing unfettered access from my lock screen.

Others running the beta now on newer iPhones and enjoying it more so?

> The new Siri isnt that exciting at least on my iPhone 15 Pro Max

On my Pro 16 it has its ups and downs - I still can't get it to "play my running playlist on shuffle" whilst running (this is the only thing I used Siri for before the beta and it would improve my life immeasurably if it worked). But it responds to things like "how long will it take to drive to the AirBnb booking in my inbox", and "when is X playing a concert in Y - add a calendar entry with details" perfectly.

This is a beta and I have hopes, but I can imagine it will run better on a 17 and later

The best models for new Siri, on device, requires the iPhone 17 Pro, so your experience on a 15 is going to be degraded.

I use it on my 15 pro max. It's a major improvement, but I still don't use siri much. It's gone from murderously infuriating to passably usable. I still use gpt for any sort of exploratory conversations. I haven't bothered trying to use siri for that because to me that's not what siri is for.

Although given how effed up the voice for chatgpt is now with the latest updates I might talk with siri more.

Because I use carplay in tandem with my phone where the map is on the carplay screen and turn by turn directions are on my phone, it's always unlocked so I haven't run into whatever lock screen issue you brought up.

Nobody does what to do, they are just throwing trillions at it betting they’ll figure out. If they don’t they’ll be screwed, if they do Apple will quickly catch up with a better and more refined product, as they’ve always done.