One of the things that Steve Jobs got very right was "and you can order right now". Announcements where you have to wait a month to order throw away all of the hype. Even allowing pre-orders and shipping later is a better idea and so silly that Apple has started walking away from that.
So happy with my base M4 purchase for $499 when it released. I even snagged a 1TB replacement drive for $199 a year ago. Feels like I got the last train out.
Same thing for me! Got it with the education discount when it came out in 2024 and, although I've been pretty disappointed with macOS, it's crazy to see that the price increased by $300 in less than 2 years, with no sign of the price increases slowing down.
What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
I don't really understand this dooming. All market forecasters, memory bulk purchasers and the memory producers themselves have stated multiple times, unequivocally that the shortage will get worse in 2027 and then as new fabs come online the shortage will taper off as 2028 progresses.
We've been through.. 4? 5? memory boom-bust-boom cycles already. Nothing is pointing to this one being any different, aside it probably becoming the mother of all busts since AI isn't adding much productivity and as businesses realize this, they'll stop paying top dollar for access meaning AI vendors cancel all their reserved fab capacity.
The fabs already exist at that point so it's less of a loss for the memory fabs to crank out memory chips and have the RAM OEMs sell them at bargain bin prices. No pseudo-cartel pricing possible either with CMXT becoming a major player. $50 for 32GB-64GB of DDR5 in 2029 here we come babyy
no one remembers the last time things got better rather than worse. shitcoin-driven scarcity seamlessly transitioned into COVID-driven scarcity and now into hyperscaler-driven scarcity. the chipmakers' cabal decided to meet increased demand with four digit margins rather than expanding production.
Aside: I used to love reading qz. Anyone remember when it was a chat/imessage style mobile app? The news was super short and quirky.
Then they sold out and most recently literally sold out to this software company from my neck of the woods. Every single article now feels like it's written by an LLM optimized to write like a crypto/AI bro.
Seems hard to believe, I mean I'm not an AI absolutist but as a programmer it allows me to automate simple things like writing small patches or config changes in a matter of minutes where before I would have invested hours, so hard to believe that it won't at least bump productivity up by 20-60 % overall, it's also tremendously better at finding relevant content and curating it than me so that's another time saver unrelated to programming but relevant for any type of knowledge work. Friends in research and medecine and law also tell me that AI has drastically accelerated their rate of processing and ingesting any type of information and helped them to automate aspects of their jobs. So not sure but negligible isn't the word I would use here.
> it allows me to automate simple things like writing small patches or config changes in a matter of minutes where before I would have invested hours
One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?
Very few orgs I've worked in have actually been limited by the speed of programmers writing code. Usually it's communication overhead and management processes eating up most of the bandwidth - and those tend to expand to absorb any additional bandwidth.
My take: this was done to pull consumers back into the cycle of upgrading to every new release. iPhones already do so much more than most people need. With the RAM price hikes, even though there was an influx of sales (according to a store rep) initially, I think Apple was expected a significant decline; people just choosing to stick with their current device to avoid paying the premium.
Leasing not only allows Apple to keep "selling" people new devices, it will also mostly like accelerate the second-hand sales and resource recycling arms of the business. Consumers will be more willing to upgrade sooner and stay in perpetual payments vs having to buy out the device at lease end - and Apple gets back newer devices where the recycled tech is arguably more valuable.
I’m sure some kind capitalist will be happy to rent them a thin client linked to a computer in the cloud.
Maybe we'll see a return to the late 1990's, when companies would give you a free computer as long as you allowed it to constantly display an ad banner on the top of the screen.
- Lots of options competing on quality, price, user experience, user needs
- Every marketplace innovation that we talk about on this platform
So somebody might offer exactly that and if it's a good option, people will use it. If it's not, they'll use an alternative.
Government regulation will lead to:
- Giant entrenched companies that are difficult to disrupt thanks to insider connections
- Lack of competition, price increases, terrible customer service and pretty much everything that "anti-capitalists" today complain about in regards to capitalism.
Capitalism doesn't exist without government regulation. Who's going to enforce the contracts? Who's going to break up the giant entrenched companies rent-squeezing every cent out of their natural monopolies, and then using their illicit gains to crush any would-be competitors as they ooze into other markets?
Literally everything listed for 'government regulation will lead to' can and has happened in unchecked capitalism. Insider connections rule everything right now in this current regime of chest-beating 'capitalists.'
Capitalism and socialism aren't real things outside of freshman year econ textbooks.
Current government already doesn't enforce contracts. Ex, prime video ads. Further there's no point in having contract terms if they can be changed unilaterally at any time.
Contracts are worth exactly as much as you're lawyered up and willing to get them enforced. There is absolutely still a functioning courts system to enforce contracts.
The one notable exception is if you're a group of workers and you negotiate a contract with your employer: the state can and will interfere to void it if it prevents the workers from being properly exploited.
> Government regulation will lead to:
>
> - Giant entrenched companies that are difficult to disrupt thanks to insider connections
Oh, you mean like Apple, Google, and Microsoft?
> - Lack of competition, price increases, terrible customer service and pretty much everything that "anti-capitalists" today complain about in regards to capitalism.
Have you looked around? This is already happening.
Thinkpad and Framework are notable brands for easily replaced components. They should run forever if you just replace moving parts like fans and keyboards.
Macs, as nice as the hardware is, are hostile to repair.
Yes. I looked just two days ago to purchase a M4 Mac mini (I had no idea they would refresh it), and estimated delivery times were '5-6 weeks', with the highest RAM configs unavailable. Other retailers still have some in stock though.
I'm kind of lost on what to do with it. I have better workstation PCs, and I couldn't find a good way to turn it into a media center - it would be a great living room PC - but couldn't find a BT remote friendly solution last time I checked. Anyone has a solution for this ? I don't want to be using mouse/keyboard every time I sit on the couch - something that would let me stream something like jellyfin fullscreen with a remote ?
There are various "air mouse" variants that properly work with MacOS as well. I have one with some media/navigation keys on the front, and a tiny keyboard on the back - kodi I can navigate just with the navigation keys, and if I want to do a bit more (but not get out the proper keyboard) I just flip it around, and can do that as well.
Personal assistant (e.g. openclaw) in the mac ecosystem. You need external models to power it ofc, but cool to have all the Apple integration and local network in your assistant. The claw can be addressed in multiple ways and can command your local hardware if you so wish.
I was not in need of a mac mini then and I’m not in need now, but damn I hope my laptop will last a long time because FML the best price/performance minipc of the last few years got wrecked and the entire market is in shambles
My personal laptop is a 2018 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 6. It's eight years old now. Still running Linux pretty well, but I really need to figure out what to do for a replacement sooner than later...
I don't really care about gaming, but there's a PC I got for free a while back with a 2060ti that overheats if I don't peg the fans at 100% and keep the case open. Would be nice if that holds on.
I’m currently hoping that my Intel Arc B580 doesn’t die on me cause even a 5060 Ti 16 GB has reached like 700 EUR price over here. I don’t think the prices will get better anytime soon.
Same with my M1 Air for being on the move, even notebooks would be more expensive than they’re worth.
I got an essentially free upgrade from an M1 air to an M4 air and let me tell you...there is zero difference in day to day usage. You've got another 5+ years of headroom at least.
It's a bit of an emotional goodbye to the super cheap Mac Minis we got to enjoy for a while. I got some for family members, we had some serving as iOS/macOS build servers sitting in a closet at my last job, they were fantastic.
Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
When they discontinued the M4 with 16GB a few months ago I had literally just ordered one off Amazon which they promptly cancelled. It would have been 600 after exchange rate from GBP.
I can't justify a more than 2x price increase for what I'm guessing are marginal improvements. I want to replace my home lab but as it stands my underpowered NAS will have to continue as it has the past few years
If you adjust for inflation, is it a big change from the super cheap Mac Minis of the past? Probably still somewhat more expensive, but not as much as the nominal difference would imply.
And except at the beginning, the Mac Minis of the past weren’t famous for being cheap, but rather for being disappointingly, unattractively expensive and, over time, apparently increasingly forgotten by Apple.
What I am missing in all of those benchmarks, how does the M6 compares to the M5 Pro.
I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.
Upgraded my work machine from an M1 MBP to an M4 Mac Mini a couple of years ago. I do a lot of work in Excel with large sheets. The performance improvement was very noticeable and appreciated!
Says 1.2x for multithreaded and doesn't specify (I presume smaller) for single-threaded. That's compared to M5 not M5 Pro, so M5 Pro is likely significantly faster.
Don't worry, there are exactly zero Apple chips that are good for any sort of local inference right now. Unified ram is fast for ram, but dogshit slow compared to actual dedicated VRAM on graphics cards.
The M-chips are insanely powerful. So powerful for my regular use that I'm still on M1-generated devices and don't really need to update. Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade.
As a disclaimer though, I haven't even tried to really run local models on the M1 as I also have a 'gaming PC' that can run them fine.
I feel much the same. I feel like the next time I upgrade I could splurge a bit more and get a really bigger CPU and storage to be even more productive with.
However the main reason I would upgrade is to run LLMs locally and RAM prices are making this a no-go. One day if RAM comes down to earth I'll upgrade. If not I'll stick to this old machine for a long time.
yeah my m1 mac studio shows no signs of stopping and i can't justify another upgrade until doing so really unlocks something new at a reasonable price (like running local llms that are competitive with the cloud services at a decent speed, which presumably the mac studio M5 Ultras can do with qwen 3.8 but the 256GB Ultra config is more than $10k!)
> Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade.
I mean, local LLMs already are really good if you own Nvidia Cards, not sure what you are waiting for. 2x3090 will blow any current Mac out of the water in tok/sec
I was talking about upgrading to another M-series device. I actually mentioned in the comment that you're replying to that I do run them locally on my desktop. And I run them off of an AMD card, 7900XTX.
I'm not sure I'd consider a gaming PC 'regular consumer' hardware especially with today's prices. But yeah, it's definitely doable.
After watching a video about how the filesystems are > 2x faster (and testing this myself in my mac mini vs a linux machine), I feel like Apple is leaving a lot on the table, and I hope that they get APFS to be as fast as the linux filesystems.
Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.
I took a peek into APFS a bit ago [1] because I (stupidly) yanked a usb SSD before it was unmounted and corrupted it. Reading the documentation, it seems to have many "cool" features which just aren't fully exposed/utilized in the OS, and there is a lack of API tooling.
For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.
Is APFS that much slower than ZFS or btrfs (more comparable Linux file systems) or just ext4? Btrfs is noticeably slower than ext4, but at least all the Mac and Linux file systems are way faster than file operations on Windows :)
Apple does this thing where they pick a very old game and then boast about how well it runs. It's so bizarre.
Not like Mac gaming is good anyway...they have "Game Porting Toolkit" but it's not free and open like Proton so nobody will use it unless Apple pushes them. Removing Rosetta doesn't help either.
Apple also just can't give up the idea of selling games through the AppStore either and you end up with situations like with AC: Shadows where it was ported, but you must buy the macport via the app store. Your copy on steam does not include the mac port, so if you wan to play on both your Windows/Linux desktop and Mac, you have to buy it twice. So stupid.
From what I've seen they do care quite a bit about gaming, but not to the point where they're willing to actually do much about it, so I wouldn't expect a proton style compatibility layer anytime soon unfortunately
I play quite a few games on my Mac Mini via Crossover, but rarely anything particularly graphically intensive. Though I do see occasional buzz about improvements in the game porting toolkit leading to significant perf improvements when they make their way into Crossover.
> Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?
They include game metrics in their marketing often, because they know their customers care about gaming. But no—for whatever reason, it never translates into Apple caring about gaming. I don't get it, but that's the way it has been for a long time.
With the “game mode” and “game porting toolkit” in recent history, I think there’s one person at Apple who cares about gaming and every couple of years he escapes from the basement where they keep him locked up and manages to sneak something into the release branch
They’ve also said when they pull Rosetta for intel compatibility, it will still be available for old games to use, which is a huge improvement from their usual stance of “that game studio that hasn’t existed since 2008 should dust off their code and update it to our new architecture.”
they've done a bunch to make macs a better gaming platform, including the very nice game porting toolkit (https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/) which you can use yourself to run pc games on the mac. All macs since m1 have very nice gpus that can handle most games made today, and the newer ones can run the latest AAA ones with good detail. At this point it's more that game publishers/studios don't care about the mac
cp2077 sits permanently at 60fps and looks great on my m1 max 64gb. I used to play it on my 4090, but once I figured out how to do redmods on macos I quit using it and play it on my mac to save power (I'm 100% solar powered and barely generate 600w, 4090 consumes 500+). In apples infinite wisdom they don't support egpus, so my 4090 egpu will never work with my mac, which was a really disappointing thing to discover.
My cable internet is 2.5G. So it’s nice to get that full speed when I have a wired connection.
To be honest though, my usage does not benefit from the speed. The only benefit is to the reptile part of my brain that says “speed. Must have the fastest possible, and since I’m paying for it, even though maybe I should downgrade it, I want my speed.”
The "4x AI performance" smells suspicious to me, M5 Pro does have slightly higher memory bandwidth than the M4 Pro, but there are also the new Neural Accelerators in the GPU cores, I've always wondered what they actually do, since the SoC has AMX (Apple Matrix Coprocessor) since the original M1 chip era.
So is this performance gain probably due to the new Neural Accelerators?
Which is more important for AI/LLM stuff, the number of GPU cores or the amount of unified memory? I can choose from a Mini with the M5 Pro 18CPU/30GPU and 64GB RAM or a Studio with a M5 Max 18CPU/40GPU and 48GB RAM for roughly the same price
Memory bandwidth is one of the most important factors. The Max machines typically have higher bandwidth than Pro (you should look up these exact models to verify though). Having said that, you could run bigger models with 64GB.
I went with a 64GB M2 Max a few years back even though it stretched my budget and I'm glad I did. I'm not sure what I'd pick in this case. Tough call.
Not really. It's Gurman, once again throwing darts at the wall to see what sticks like a desperate roach begging for subscribers to his bullshit newsletter of guesses and predictions he'll flip in a month the opposite direction for even more clicks and bait.
I don't know why some guy downvoted me. It's a great choice without expending 7K on some hardware than in less than two years will be replaced by the M7 (which is in the making).
I'm usually running about ~4 instances of it locally in separate Git worktrees, which (in our setup) means I'm also running 4 copies of the whole stack: web, frontend, Redis, Postgres, etc. These are rebuilt and torn down multiple times per day. Lot of frontend assets to compile.
Additionally, like many people in corporate environments, we do of course also pay a performance tax thanks to the security software we need to run.
So perf does matter for us.
We could, of course, alternatively... just run cheap shitboxes locally and have all our dev environments in the cloud. Certainly appealing in many ways from a cost perspective and you don't even need to give up DX really.
However, in the next ~5 years, as "actually useful" local LLM inference starts to become genuinely useful (for software engineering, this seems to roughly mean "the ability to run 28B+ models at usable speeds") then having local compute horsepower might start to look more attractive again. Even if it's not an absolute winner on cost/utility alone, the data privacy and cost certainty have value to many.
Have been considering a used M1 but I'm concerned that I'm going to get flash storage that's been thrashed to within an inch of it's life by someone running it as a poorly configured inference host.
There are sooo sooo many students and normal people using these devices or corporate laptops never seen inferencing or anything like this, its so hard to trash the storage of them, i wouldn't worry about it.
Last week I purchased a MacBook Pro M1 Max from www.macsales.com, which is owned by Other World Computer, a maker of Mac peripherals. My computer comes with a 1-year warranty. It was my first time purchasing from them.
I’m still not convinced by the value of local models. It feels like ray-tracing where we are driving up the compute cost for a high cost and fringe benefit.
Upgrading to 48GB memory is $600…. Gut punch. I have a M4 Pro (top cpu skew 14 cores). Any idea the performance gain to M5 Pro? I feel like they holding off releasing M6 Pro because a new studio is dropping soon as well.
I think there's a valid argument for this pattern when you know most people are on 3-ish year upgrade cycles. Also, if you compare against the most recent generation, you risk creating buyer's remorse for recent purchases.
I'd imagine most are on longer than 3 years for computers. Most (non developers) I know hang onto their laptops and computers until they die or get spec constrained, and that ends up being around ~6 or 7 years, so in this case the comparison to the M1/M1 Max makes sense, as for the next couple years that's going to be the cohort that's looking to upgrade.
Not a surprise with John Ternus taking the reigns as CEO in a week, who was previously SVP of hardware engineering.
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
I do worry that at this point it's no longer just Apple's problem to solve. They need to figure out a way to take the rest of the industry with it. Maybe if their standards are high enough everyone else will look bad by comparison.
My daily driver personal machines are incredible pieces of kit, but everything is always getting worse because majority of software is some SaaS living in the cloud, or even if on-desktop is constantly updating slop.
Why does it take 10 seconds for my streaming music app to open when my machine is 10-20 cores, 32GB+ RAM, high bandwidth NVMe storage, and I am connected to gigabit fiber internet? The thing is autoplaying videos, and has about 10 different panes clearly owned by different product managers that hate each other. Half the time its pushing me some pop-up dialog I don't care about.
I agree with you, but I also think sadly most consumers don't really care about this. The reason the internet is in the state it's in is because most people tolerate it.
Most people simply don't care about using well-made software so long as it gets the job done because they don't even look at other options. I suppose this is how carpenters feel when they see ubiquitous IKEA furniture.
~75% higher price for some extra GPU power and small CPU boost compared to M4? Eh. It's pretty far from M4's value, which was a no-brainer recommendation for people who wanted a tiny box sitting somewhere on their desk.
Yup. Yesterday it was $799 for the base Mac Mini M4, a $200 increase from the original MSRP before June’s price hikes.
I paid $499 for my M4 back in April with the academic discount since I predicted the next generation base model would cost more. Sadly my prediction was correct: $599 to $899 is steep. I understand why; the prices of DIMMs, GPUs, and SSDs have also skyrocketed. But $899 for a base Mac Mini is painful, even if the alternatives on the current market are also painfully expensive.
I really want a mini for running local models, but there's no way I'm buying one for the next few years. I'm planning on waiting for models to get better and more powerful, as well as for hardware prices to come down.
Dear mods, please could these announcements be merged, if not done away with? They aren't really following the guidelines, they aren't 'curiosity', these are little more than marketing announcements.
(250,000 pre-orders, vs now ~5000 sales/quarter)
What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
We've been through.. 4? 5? memory boom-bust-boom cycles already. Nothing is pointing to this one being any different, aside it probably becoming the mother of all busts since AI isn't adding much productivity and as businesses realize this, they'll stop paying top dollar for access meaning AI vendors cancel all their reserved fab capacity.
The fabs already exist at that point so it's less of a loss for the memory fabs to crank out memory chips and have the RAM OEMs sell them at bargain bin prices. No pseudo-cartel pricing possible either with CMXT becoming a major player. $50 for 32GB-64GB of DDR5 in 2029 here we come babyy
no one remembers the last time things got better rather than worse. shitcoin-driven scarcity seamlessly transitioned into COVID-driven scarcity and now into hyperscaler-driven scarcity. the chipmakers' cabal decided to meet increased demand with four digit margins rather than expanding production.
Then they sold out and most recently literally sold out to this software company from my neck of the woods. Every single article now feels like it's written by an LLM optimized to write like a crypto/AI bro.
I used to use it daily and now not at all.
Would love to know where this comes from. I am not sure about that. Could you point to data/anecdata?
There's been a few studies. Most find productivity gain from 'AI' to be negligible.
One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?
Very few orgs I've worked in have actually been limited by the speed of programmers writing code. Usually it's communication overhead and management processes eating up most of the bandwidth - and those tend to expand to absorb any additional bandwidth.
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/27/america-has-be...
If it persists for years people will have time to spin up more fabs and meet demand
I’m sure some kind capitalist will be happy to rent them a thin client linked to a computer in the cloud.
Leasing not only allows Apple to keep "selling" people new devices, it will also mostly like accelerate the second-hand sales and resource recycling arms of the business. Consumers will be more willing to upgrade sooner and stay in perpetual payments vs having to buy out the device at lease end - and Apple gets back newer devices where the recycled tech is arguably more valuable.
Companies will prioritize components for cloud computing and lease us thin clients...
Maybe we'll see a return to the late 1990's, when companies would give you a free computer as long as you allowed it to constantly display an ad banner on the top of the screen.
- Lots of options competing on quality, price, user experience, user needs
- Every marketplace innovation that we talk about on this platform
So somebody might offer exactly that and if it's a good option, people will use it. If it's not, they'll use an alternative.
Government regulation will lead to:
- Giant entrenched companies that are difficult to disrupt thanks to insider connections
- Lack of competition, price increases, terrible customer service and pretty much everything that "anti-capitalists" today complain about in regards to capitalism.
Everything government involvement touches gets more expensive. See healthcare, college tuition, student loan debt as some easy examples.
Literally everything listed for 'government regulation will lead to' can and has happened in unchecked capitalism. Insider connections rule everything right now in this current regime of chest-beating 'capitalists.'
Capitalism and socialism aren't real things outside of freshman year econ textbooks.
The one notable exception is if you're a group of workers and you negotiate a contract with your employer: the state can and will interfere to void it if it prevents the workers from being properly exploited.
Oh, you mean like Apple, Google, and Microsoft?
> - Lack of competition, price increases, terrible customer service and pretty much everything that "anti-capitalists" today complain about in regards to capitalism.
Have you looked around? This is already happening.
And it leads to comments like the parent blaming "capitalism"
Macs, as nice as the hardware is, are hostile to repair.
My son is using my old ~2011 Mac mini with Linux Mint on it. Slow but works.
Personal assistant (e.g. openclaw) in the mac ecosystem. You need external models to power it ofc, but cool to have all the Apple integration and local network in your assistant. The claw can be addressed in multiple ways and can command your local hardware if you so wish.
It will last longer and hopefully the GPU prices will recover in a few years.
I hope
Same with my M1 Air for being on the move, even notebooks would be more expensive than they’re worth.
Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
I can't justify a more than 2x price increase for what I'm guessing are marginal improvements. I want to replace my home lab but as it stands my underpowered NAS will have to continue as it has the past few years
We should be buying European solutions anyway. Different psychological barrier that was broken long before.
https://www.imec-int.com/en
I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.
I am to only one?
170GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 32GB unified memory
307GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 64GB unified memory
That is also the factor you want to take into account for AI inference, of course.
I just wait for practical real live numbers with real stacks i use.
And btw. they reduced the memory bandwdith on the M4 in comparision to its previous version by 40gb/sec or so, you need to wait to see.
Says 1.2x for multithreaded and doesn't specify (I presume smaller) for single-threaded. That's compared to M5 not M5 Pro, so M5 Pro is likely significantly faster.
Don’t know, but this as main ad headline feels almost like a threat to my personal home computing needs
I have an old M1 Max with 32GB that runs inference models fine, especially those using MLX.
Dedicated graphics cards are faster but not to the point that it matters.
That’s a six year old machine.
My newer machine M5 max 128GB will far outperform your typical 32GB gaming card once the model exceeds memory.
To even get close to that on a dedicated graphics card you are paying upwards of $20K.
That said, models are getting smaller and faster which allows me to run multiple different models with ease.
[edit] Just checked the 5 models I use take up 57GB when all loaded at the same time.
As a disclaimer though, I haven't even tried to really run local models on the M1 as I also have a 'gaming PC' that can run them fine.
However the main reason I would upgrade is to run LLMs locally and RAM prices are making this a no-go. One day if RAM comes down to earth I'll upgrade. If not I'll stick to this old machine for a long time.
I mean, local LLMs already are really good if you own Nvidia Cards, not sure what you are waiting for. 2x3090 will blow any current Mac out of the water in tok/sec
I'm not sure I'd consider a gaming PC 'regular consumer' hardware especially with today's prices. But yeah, it's definitely doable.
Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.
For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.
[1] https://www.ntfs.com/apfs-structure.htm
Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?
And while i'm at it, I was wondering a few weeks ago if I should try this game on my M3 pro. Anyone has played it on Apple and has feedback ?
Not like Mac gaming is good anyway...they have "Game Porting Toolkit" but it's not free and open like Proton so nobody will use it unless Apple pushes them. Removing Rosetta doesn't help either.
I don't know what this means - game porting toolkit is free
They include game metrics in their marketing often, because they know their customers care about gaming. But no—for whatever reason, it never translates into Apple caring about gaming. I don't get it, but that's the way it has been for a long time.
They’ve also said when they pull Rosetta for intel compatibility, it will still be available for old games to use, which is a huge improvement from their usual stance of “that game studio that hasn’t existed since 2008 should dust off their code and update it to our new architecture.”
To be honest though, my usage does not benefit from the speed. The only benefit is to the reptile part of my brain that says “speed. Must have the fastest possible, and since I’m paying for it, even though maybe I should downgrade it, I want my speed.”
So is this performance gain probably due to the new Neural Accelerators?
(it was late in it's lifecycle and there were frequent sales)
A new Mac Mini with that much ram and storage costs about double now.
It depends on what model(s) you want to run.
I went with a 64GB M2 Max a few years back even though it stretched my budget and I'm glad I did. I'm not sure what I'd pick in this case. Tough call.
Today development work is limited by compile times and test run times, particularly with UI tests in the iOS simulator.
Hardware on the development machine finally maters.
I'm usually running about ~4 instances of it locally in separate Git worktrees, which (in our setup) means I'm also running 4 copies of the whole stack: web, frontend, Redis, Postgres, etc. These are rebuilt and torn down multiple times per day. Lot of frontend assets to compile.
Additionally, like many people in corporate environments, we do of course also pay a performance tax thanks to the security software we need to run.
So perf does matter for us.
We could, of course, alternatively... just run cheap shitboxes locally and have all our dev environments in the cloud. Certainly appealing in many ways from a cost perspective and you don't even need to give up DX really.
However, in the next ~5 years, as "actually useful" local LLM inference starts to become genuinely useful (for software engineering, this seems to roughly mean "the ability to run 28B+ models at usable speeds") then having local compute horsepower might start to look more attractive again. Even if it's not an absolute winner on cost/utility alone, the data privacy and cost certainty have value to many.
I really miss when vendors would run the SPEC benchmark suite and performance was quantitative, and not qualitative.
“Results are compared to previous-generation Mac mini systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB SSD.”
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
My daily driver personal machines are incredible pieces of kit, but everything is always getting worse because majority of software is some SaaS living in the cloud, or even if on-desktop is constantly updating slop.
Why does it take 10 seconds for my streaming music app to open when my machine is 10-20 cores, 32GB+ RAM, high bandwidth NVMe storage, and I am connected to gigabit fiber internet? The thing is autoplaying videos, and has about 10 different panes clearly owned by different product managers that hate each other. Half the time its pushing me some pop-up dialog I don't care about.
Winamp in 1998 took about 2 seconds to load.
Most people simply don't care about using well-made software so long as it gets the job done because they don't even look at other options. I suppose this is how carpenters feel when they see ubiquitous IKEA furniture.
I paid $499 for my M4 back in April with the academic discount since I predicted the next generation base model would cost more. Sadly my prediction was correct: $599 to $899 is steep. I understand why; the prices of DIMMs, GPUs, and SSDs have also skyrocketed. But $899 for a base Mac Mini is painful, even if the alternatives on the current market are also painfully expensive.
/s
Apple's software holds the hardware back, and it's ugly (especially liquid glass!)