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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]