Basically you can have your own 24/7 AI Employee. At-least thats the appeal and folks were buying mac minis massively.
Just my gut feel. Everybody moved on from that now. But it was a big deal back then.
It was able to create an application that Claude created, using the same instructions file. Considerably slower but I was surprised it could do it.
Now, I use claude code directly on my machine with the remote control flag.. so its like open claw exactly. I can be outside and give commands to it via mobile app
then Control + Command + Q ftw
(keep system from sleeping if plugged in, keep system from going idle even if not plugged in, for 2 hours, start claude code w/ remote control enabled, lock my mac w/ the keyboard shutcut)
It's quite expensive from a value per token perspective. It's quite cheap from a "send one message from my phone and it does something probably productive" perspective. No major security breaches yet.
AI for developing software that runs predictably seems more useful than AI performing actions like a program would.
this article's also about enterprise demand specifically. That's a bit surprising to me as well frankly. I'd have thought the primary market for mac studios would be hobbyists/enthusiasts with a bunch of disposable income who are willing to pay 18k for a 512 gb machine to run glm 3.5 flash or 9k to run deepseek v4 flash locally. It's competing with a $200/mo subscription or renting server gpu time for open source models during a memory shortage - and idk if it's going to be powerful enough to train or fine tune so it's really just inference. seems reasonable to be surprised
Not if you're an enterprise that wants or requires on-prem inference.
The target audience didn't evaluate that as a limitation - the majority of the market for Apple devices does trust that they will not produce and sell a computer incapable of support their use.
Professionals know there are tasks that a baseline computer cannot handle, and even common tasks that a more powerful computer does better, but those people weren't really the target demo for the laptop.
Well, kinda the point. We know this to be fully true in retrospect (and many people correctly predicted it) but decent arguments existed against it at time of release.
the problem with that argument is that the vision pro exists, where they clearly overestimated demand, and where even among people with interest in VR and disposable income, the compromises on battery life and weight were actually too much to bear. Forecasting is just hard and you always need to be especially skeptical when you yourself are doing the forecasting for something you want to succeed. All those arguments for the neo line up in retrospect hindsight is always 2020
A big enterprise can drop one (or 4) of these on someone's desk and let them go nuts.
I’d be willing to pay more to own vs subscribe, but the gap is currently far too large where buying a Mac Studio for AI is a straight up terrible investment.
My biggest problem with buying a Mac Studio is that even in the case of the M5 Max models, I can’t think of any non-AI macOS applications in my creative life that have anywhere near that level of hardware needs, and nor can I forecast that I would within its ordinary supported lifespan as a macOS machine. These machines left high-end stills and modest video work behind generations ago, for example.
So while I would like a local machine that I can leave running in a way that I wouldn’t want to do with my old secondhand M1 Max laptop, it’s going to have to be something a little more pragmatic. Probably based around the Radeon R9700, since the AMD/Nvidia gap for LLMs is beginning to close, and even a single R9700 runs the main models I am interested in at speeds that are acceptably faster than what I have here.
The first time around they almost went broke because people no longer were paying Apple tax, and they did not had any other product to save them.
Nowadays they have the iPhone piggy bank.