FWIW, Ollama, LM Studio and Lemonade (and oMLX) also wrap Apple's MLX framework.
It's the Hardware, Software and Services in combination. None would work without the other (to reach the scale apple is)
More specifically, they're a hardware dongle company first
not getting on that bandwagon but wasn't that not the most demanding game as its a just a nonstop cutscene.
In US its $4000 upgade so $25 for 1GB.
Also:
> 512GB memory option for M5 Ultra coming late October
So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$.
The fully maxed out Apple Studio then will be 24699$. It's 17199$ if you don't upgrade the storage(1TB).
Nevertheless I itch to have one :)
EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.
Also, a lot of companies are looking at how to run capable models locally to cut some of their (massive) cloud AI bills. An easy answer is worth a lot to them.
I plan on maximizing my residual student benefits, and taking advantage of education pricing.
I yield the floor to no one when it comes to pessimism, but that's incredible.
E.g how is the perf/$ vs Wildcat lake
I kinda have to link it now, so uhh here's a random PDF: https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%...
A m4 mac mini is better than al of these per dollar, msrp adjusted.
Hopefully by the end of the decade China figures out manufacturing at scale and fixes this.
Which one is it you can run local models on? I suppose the NPU only.
I can't believe that Apple still comes with this bullshit like 32 GBs is a lot. It's a lot for video memory - vRAM, but not RAM.
Is this a joke?
>Additionally, M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB
Now we're talking. But at what cost?
"M6 also introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, providing up to 2x the peak compute over previous generations to make on-device AI workflows run even faster" .
That's wild!
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
Just amazing engineering push, the competition got the message and we benefit.
- Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance.
- Apple: *Meep Meep...*My Mac Mini is strictly a headless server for llama.cpp.
I use a Linux workstation.
If I were limited to use Mac hardware , I would install Linux in VMware Fusion and work from there.
Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable
For me personally, not quite that valuable yet, but I think it's getting there quickly. Deepseek V4 Flash massively increased the value of local AI to me, to the point where it's displaced most of my Claude Code usage, its upcoming vision enabled version should bump it further, and it's only going to get better from there.
It's a lot faster, but a lot of it is also feeling free to discuss things I wouldn't be comfortable sending to Claude, with the idea that that info is now theirs in perpetuity. I got my genome fully sequenced recently (it's cheap now!), and I get a battery of blood tests every year. Wouldn't do processing on any of that with Claude, but local AI? Totally great.
And if I was running a company with a large cloud AI bill, I'd probably buy a wheelbarrow full of these macs. Cheaper, but also a more solid/predictable base to build on.
Its cheaper than Nvidia AI hardware.
to answer your question : looking at the aftermarket availability of Apple's prior best and brightest : practically no one buys them.
"people here buy them" , well, 'here' is one of the most affluent groups of people in the world.
They're available as movie and television set pieces (undoubtedly disappearing into the home of someone close to the staff post-production), and for administrative/boss types that can slip the cost into a ledger somewhere that few will ever see.
It has been a hobby of mine every few years to check out the apple site and see how big I can option a machine. My record was when I was in high school years ago and was able to option some pro studio-ish apple desktop thing to like 61,000 usd out the door.
For one thing, you can’t tell from a movie what the specs are. A $999 Mac Studio looks exactly the same as a $20,000 one.
For another, Apple updates the industrial design on their products so rarely, a 6-year-old Mac, iMac or MacBook also looks nearly indistinguishable from a brand-new one.
It’s when self hosting and local hosting was the norm, and why it’s also starting to come back.
There will be workloads that can never touch a public cloud, and for it solutions like this are an option.
That may not be many people, but there certainly will be some people who want to do that, and are willing to pay big bucks to do so.
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/safer-and-m...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-digital-self/202...
ELIZA beat the Turing test and then everyone forgot about it. Humans are just really terrible at recognising robots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
It turns out the limiting factor isn't how sophisticated algorithms are, it's how gullible humans are.
No AI would pass this test with experienced judges.
I've tried [1] and I almost 100% detect which is the AI. I really want to convince myself I have failed, does anyone know of a better site/resource for this?
I know it might be moving goalposts but I would consider AI to have passed in a well and truly undisputed manner when [2] is resolved.
But in a more practical sense, if AI can impersonate humans so well today then why are state of the art frontier models so obviously AI when they create PRs, commit messages, documentation, etc. Are the companies deliberately making them unnatural?
[2] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11861/date-when-ai-passe...
Fab capacity is being bought online; there’s just lead time.
Noticeably greater intelligence is being achieved at the same number of parameters (see: Qwen3.8).
I think the future will be bright, it might be a matter of time. And for tinkers, a used Epyc + DDR4 server can be great fun and epic value.
Is there anything better now though?
All I see from AI, is an amplification of the enshittification of the internet.
And people being even more alone.
These times are exciting and rough seas make good sailors. Find your path forward.
I'd rather got to the library and read a book.
- Extreme poverty has dropped from 30% to under 10% globally. - Child mortality rates have dropped in half - Internet access has exploded from 10% to 70% - Solar energy costs have dropped 90% - Cancer death rates have declined by 30%
All of these massive improvements in less than 30 years.
While there certainly are issues to solve, and if you simply follow journalism you may think the world is worse off, but for many, their lives have been significantly improved.
rvz•51m ago
Apple never needed to participate in the AI race to zero. Because they were already at the finish line years ago building their own chips that can run large >100B parameter AI models locally.
nasaeclipse•47m ago
It's possible that they're working on their own LLM that's going to work very well on their chips, and possibly outperform anything out there when they do release it.
ngvrnd•42m ago
compounding_it•40m ago
10 years ago 32GB ram laptops sounded too much. 8 was enough. These days even I would get that much ram since it’s soldered. 64GB is higher end.
In a few years we should see such high end hardware commonplace. Working with a local LLM to get work done is the ideal way to go which has mostly hardware limitation as of now that gets solved in due time.
parineum•28m ago
Ten years ago I got 64gb of ram in my laptop, same as I have now. I bought both for business and personal use. System ram capacity hasn't changed much in 10 years.
It makes me curious how old you were 10 years ago.
swiftcoder•18m ago
We were definitely outliers that long ago. I put 64 GB in a MacBook Pro back in 2019, and that was (a) overkill for everything I ever ran on that machine, and (b) stupidly expensive by 2019 standards (albeit almost affordable by 2026 standards)
givinguflac•35m ago
Yep, Siri AI; they’re doing it in public.
llm_nerd•8m ago
The iPhone 15 was almost entirely marketed based upon AI (I would say fraudulently so, advertising features they still haven't delivered), and a huge portion of the OS work was on local AI or AI integration.
And for that matter Apple has been dumping enormous sums into their own AI development. Their failure to have a lot to show for it doesn't void the fact that they tried really, really hard.
It's bizarre how often this "Apple sat on the sidelines and let the AI people fight...so smart!" narrative appears on HN. Apple hasn't gone down the path of spending hundreds of billions on nvidia GPU data centres, but they absolutely tried really hard to matter in AI.
teekert•46m ago
I mean this is not nvidia based right? It's all custom? So we can use it under Asahi perhaps?
I want to get something for my company to run local models, wondering what would be a good option.
datakan•42m ago
intelkishan•41m ago
Lunar5227•39m ago
terminalcommand•35m ago
LeBit•44m ago
But you get a generic computer and much more RAM.
And you lose a couple of organs.
noodletheworld•40m ago
rbinv•30m ago
snapcaster•40m ago
danielEM•10m ago
bel8•39m ago
It would take Apple one or two engineers to make Linux life much easier on macs. But Linux is outside their walled garden so it's ignored.
jjice•39m ago
chasd00•32m ago
jjice•17m ago
maherbeg•7m ago
* the iPhone * the iPad * apple watch * airpods * unified memory laptops and computers
Those are all products that either created a category or changed that industry.
dgellow•29m ago