16GB should be enough for TTS/Voice models running locally no ? I was thinking about having a home assistant setup like that where the voice is local and the brain is API based
replyI run ministral for my home knowledge database on 24G iMac and some other non-agentic LLM things.
replySure, that’s why I said maybe it’s useful for a few things. But the main reason people were recommending the Mini was for its price (base model) and having access to the Apple services for clawdbot to leverage. Not precisely for local AI.
replyNo one is buying a base model Mac for local LLM. Everyone is forgetting the PC prices have drastically increased due to RAM and SSD. Meanwhile, Macs had no such price change… at least for the models that didn’t just drop today. Mac’s are just a good deal at the moment.
reply> Meanwhile, Macs had no such price change
replyYeah because Mac upgrade prices were already sky high, long before the component shortage. 32GB of DDR5-6000 for a PC rocketed from $100 to $500, while the cost of adding 16GB to a Mac was and still is $400.
I'm kind of curious how Apple's supply contracts actually work, because it's currently more attractive to buy a Mac with a lot of RAM than it usually is, relative to a PC. So if it's "we negotiated a price and you give us as much RAM as we sell machines" the company supplying the RAM is getting soaked because they're having to supply even more RAM to Apple for a below-market price.
replyBut if the contract was for a specific amount of RAM and then people start coming to Apple more for high RAM machines, they're going to exhaust their contract sooner than usual and run out of cheap memory to buy. Then they have to decide if they want to lower their margins or raise the already-high price up to nosebleed levels.
the new models cost $200 more for each 8GB of Ram you add.. Ouch...
replyThat's been the case for years. Not new to the M5's
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