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 $2 million in Apple stock.
Also, a lot of companies are looking at how to run capable models locally to cut some of their (massive) cloud AI bills. An easy answer is worth a lot to them.
I plan on maximizing my residual student benefits, and taking advantage of education pricing.
I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really.
Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.
I yield the floor to no one when it comes to pessimism, but that's incredible.
E.g how is the perf/$ 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.
This may depend on the size of your library. I tried installing Jellyfin on a Synology NAS, which runs Plex just fine, and it ran so poorly it was basically unusable. It “worked”, but it was painful.
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" .
256 memory gets you to like 11k. So like 15-20k.
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
I ordered an ASUS Zephyrus G16 with 5090 NVIDIA card + 1.9kg (quite an overkill, and I know that I will have to limit power output), but hasn't arrived yet.
But what's fun is that I love QML+QuickShell with its hot reloading, Hyprland with its Lua support.
With AI nowdays it's just so easy to do deep UI changes that wasn't possible a year ago.
Just amazing engineering push, the competition got the message and we benefit.
Also: "a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth" -- yay, the GPU has reached the year 2020! (I'm a bit bitter that my M4 Max is near useless for local LLMs because of its low memory bandwidth.)
- Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance.
- Apple: *Meep Meep...*and 512GB is so 2025.
Give us 1TB version. Where is the competitive spirit?
I've often felt there is tremendous value locked up in underutilized old computers. It would be interesting to see Apple in 3 years offering compute as a service using lease returns (or more likely, partnering with someone else to operate it (perhaps exclusively in secondary markets like China or India, to address political demands for local siting or jobs). Apple is in the best position to work around or even gap-fix older software/hardware limitations in a controlled environment, and now they can do so without cannibalizing new hardware sales.
You might expect the M5 Ultra to produce 50 t/s from Qwen 3.8 27B with a good context length.
"According to reports from Bloomberg, Apple will be skipping its M6 Pro, M6 Max, and M6 Ultra chips to accelerate development of the M7 chip. That means the only chip to be released from the M6 family will be the base M6.
The reason for this break with tradition: AI. Apple had been planning major neural-processing upgrades for the M7 family and ultimately decided those improvements were important enough to justify accelerating the next generation rather than completing the M6 lineup." https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/08/apple-m7-chip-heres-why-it-ma...
I'd skip M5 and M6 chips for LLM work and wait for a year for M7.
Can we please kill the xcode. It is worst pile of garbage I have to use just to develop ios app.
The problem I'm having now is that no models are targeting RAM of that size. Everything is either much smaller, targeting laptops, or much larger, targeting hardware well out of reach of enthusiasts.
Please, AI people, start making models targeting 128GB machines again. The last interesting one was Qwen 3.5 122B.
I just want my butt ugly repairable beast machine to do the same trick. Why is my ram not unified? I have an iGPU in my server, but it can't access the 64 GB ram directly or something? It's on the CP right? Why did only Apple go for this architecture? So many questions...
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.
Unless you need privacy for your inference this instant, paying for credits can get 80 to 90 percent of people everything they need.
Of course if you do need that privacy, then forking the $25K over to Apple is a no brainer.
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.
Though we're pretty good at sizing up a person's emotional balance/maturity and competence at familiar tasks. So maybe have an old blacksmith watch the AI/robot interact with horse owners for a while, then shoe their horses, and see how well it does.
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...
Not sure where you're quoting from but if it's the metaculus question comments, many of them are from 2023. The consensus is it will resolve in 2029. I believe it will not resolve before 2035.
An the "popularized" version is faulty also since it uses an ideal, abstract human judge (like the "spheroidal economic agent").
But if you want to add declinations to the said popularized image of the Turing test, you may add Maxim Lott's IQ tests at trackingai.org . Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 LLMs reached an equivalent IQ of 100, for example.
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.
Could you provide more details about the Epyc + DDR4 server?
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 go to the library and read a book.
"Find your path forward!" he shouted with glee, as he ran toward the cliff.
- 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.
That's one big plus.
rvz•1h 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•59m 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•55m ago
compounding_it•53m 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•40m 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•30m 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•48m ago
Yep, Siri AI; they’re doing it in public.
robotresearcher•4m ago
llm_nerd•21m 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•58m 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•55m ago
intelkishan•54m ago
rowanG077•3m ago
Lunar5227•52m ago
terminalcommand•48m ago
LeBit•57m ago
But you get a generic computer and much more RAM.
And you lose a couple of organs.
noodletheworld•52m ago
rbinv•42m ago
snapcaster•52m ago
danielEM•23m ago
bel8•52m 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•52m ago
chasd00•45m ago
jjice•29m ago
maherbeg•20m 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•42m ago