5 ms·

Apple was also allegedly "caught off guard" by the Macbook Neo demand. I don't really see how they couldn't see the Local AI demand or demand for a cheaper Mac

by HDBaseT 16d ago

Apple was also allegedly "caught off guard" by the Macbook Neo demand. I don't really see how they couldn't see the Local AI demand or demand for a cheaper Macbooks. This just reads like marketing imo.

vikramkr 16d ago
I don't think you need the scare quotes. product lifecycles can take years and the actual neo demand was actually pretty insane. They were using it to soak up demand for binned a18 chips and it would have been irresponsible to forecast that they'd have the demand they did when there's another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. 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
- lumost 16d ago
  A lot of big enterprises struggle with ai adoption. Either they can't get models/tools approved fast enough, can't provision them in their internal network, or get slammed with exorbitant inference costs. A big enterprise can drop one (or 4) of these on someone's desk and let them go nuts.
- dwaite 16d ago
  > another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. 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.
  - odo1242 16d ago
    > 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. 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.
    - deleted 16d ago
      [deleted]
  - vikramkr 16d ago
    >"the majority of the market for Apple devices does trust that they will not produce and sell a computer incapable of support their use" 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
    - pjmlp 16d ago
      They also irritated plenty of devs, who aren't shelling out 3500 for what is in practical purposes a toy device, and then having Apple congratulate themselves the devs are the ones that should be happy they are allowed to play on Apple's kingdom in first place.
- Gigachad 16d ago
  I think people just hate subscriptions so much they are willing to make an obviously worse financial choice to buy upfront. 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.
  - dofm 16d ago
    I am also willing to overpay to not be reliant on cloud things, to have control of local hardware. 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 requirements, and nor can I forecast that I would within its ordinary supported lifespan as a macOS machine. These machines left high-end stills and most 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.
    - Gigachad 16d ago
      I think the best move right now is to just wait a couple of years. There is room for the prices to drop dramatically. Buying the highest spec mac at the peak prices probably isn't a financially sensible move.
      - dofm 16d ago
        I tend to buy secondhand anyway, and yes, almost certainly it's best to wait. At the moment, speccing out a local box more powerful than the machine I am using is largely an intellectual exercise, but it does have some value for understanding what a client might be able to use if they absolutely require on-premises inference, and I do have a couple who fall into that zone. So I am trying to keep up to date in principle, but the built machines don't get beyond the shopping cart. The M5 Ultra has probably smoothed out the major issues of AI on Apple Silicon (prefill doesn't suck anymore) but the way Apple marketed that chip strongly suggests they are now fully aware of the strengths but also the limitations of their architecture and will get a lot more done. It's properly put the (fairly equivalently priced) DGX Spark in the shade, though.
- RossBencina 16d ago
  > It's competing with a $200/mo subscription or renting server gpu time Not if you're an enterprise that wants or requires on-prem inference.
  - vikramkr 16d ago
    if you're one of those enterprises it's perfectly reasonable to assume you're more likely to go have your procurement and legal teams negotiate with google for one of those weird boxes to run gemini on prem (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/run-gemini-and-ai-on-prem-with-google-distributed-cloud https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/r...) or other enterprise-y nonsense vs buying consumer hardware to run a chinese large language model in your network. I do not envy the person at a company having to get approval model by model because of weird open source licensing terms dealing with the "how do we know chinese models are safe" question (hopefully they're at least getting asked in the context of hooking it into an agent harness so there's some sort of plausible risk that necessitates the conversation - i can very much imagine it getting shut down to even run in a sandbox because chinese model + people being scared after the huggingface stuff). There's a lot of reasons to assume enterprise wouldn't be interested, and it's very very cool that they are IMO. Anthropic cut claude code rate limits - they dont seem to be see open source llms as a market threat (rhtetoric to the white house aside) yet but enterprises being willing to run consumer hardware to run local models could make things a bit more tangible
  - curt15 16d ago
    Wouldn't enterprises investing in their own hardware be more likely to buy standard 4-GPU or 8-GPU servers? Apple machines aren't really designed for server racks.
- la_oveja 16d ago
  > 8 gigs was too much of a compromise i come from a ultrabook with 2 gigs of ram and the neo takes 2 vscode instances, one antigravity and firefox while keeping telegram and whatsapp on the background. that device can be used as a workhorse, pagination is very good. can even run ios/android emulators but then you have to only have that project open, which is a non-issue for me. and the battery literally keeps working all day. good screen, good keyboard, good touchpad, operative system is close to linux. if youre thinking about getting one for programming and you're scared about the 8 gigs, hope i gave someone some light about it.
  - matroxmemories 16d ago
    If the latest apple hardware could run Linux I would be buying a good amount. But I just hate the idea of being at the whims of macOS timelines. But I guess when you’re selling more than you can produce it doesn’t really matter.
InterviewFrog 16d ago
I have a strong suspicion its because of openclaw mania that happened like 3 to 4 months ago. 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.
- CrimsonCape 16d ago
  If you use OpenClaw now can you tell us how it's going?
  - InterviewFrog 16d ago
    I used it initially. It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high.. 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
    - jonchurch_ 16d ago
      caffeinate -is -t 7200 claude --remote-control 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)
      - manmal 16d ago
        The Amphetamine app from the App Store keeps a MacBook awake even with the lid closed.
        ustad 16d ago
        You need an app for that?
        manmal 15d ago
chacham15 16d ago
the machines arent optimized for it is why. the main driving factor is large unified memory which makes large(r) models possible, but there isnt the gpu horsepower to back it up. essentially, it fits the corner of the market that wants large models and is ok with running them slowly which doesnt sound like it would be a large market.
- skohan 16d ago
  For decode, memory bandwidth is the main bottleneck, so these machines will likely perform well even without a ton of GPU horsepower. Not as well as Blackwell, but I expect they will be a reasonable choice in terms of price/performance if you want to run large models with a lot of context. The main place they are a bit behind is in the number formats they support natively. Iirc M5 doesn't have native FP8 support, so you will take a speed penalty on quants where other architectures get better acceleration.
  - TimByte 16d ago
    [dead]
- anon373839 16d ago
  Macs have excellent generation speed, and the new Ultra will positively smash that at 1.2TB/sec of bandwidth. For example, that new 176B parameter Qwen model would generate tokens at ~200 tokens/sec. Macs don’t have very good prefill, though. So it’s important to use a model serving stack that has excellent prompt caching and use a harness that won’t bust the cache. I’m cross-shopping DGX Sparks and M5 Studios, and having a hard time deciding because they have exactly opposite characteristics for prefill and decode.
api 16d ago
There are probably people in Apple who think desktop is dead or pro-only and didn’t think many people would want a lower end cheaper Mac. Why wouldn’t they just get an iPad?
- ghaff 16d ago
  Even with the newer keyboard, the iPad just doesn't work for me as a MacBook replacement. And really isn't lighter at that point. Yes, an iPad is better for watching movies on a plane but that's not really a reason to bring one relative to a MacBook Air when I could also just bring a Kindle Paperwhite which weighs nothing. I've tried and an iPad basically doesn't work for me.
- pjmlp 16d ago
  Of there are, otherwise they would not have killed the few really desktop hardware, by what are now consumer electronics devices.
raydev 16d ago
What is useful marketing in saying "we could have made more money but accidentally didn't"?
- ShinyLeftPad 16d ago
  They literally announced the products early and profiting on this coverage.
  - commandersaki 16d ago
    So is the news outlet that is speculating for clicks.
    - ShinyLeftPad 16d ago
      For sure... Just that wasn't the argument.
resonious 16d ago
Marketing that makes them look like they have their heads in the sand.
- pjmlp 16d ago
  There has been demand for Mac at PC prices since the Mac Classic was announced to the world. 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.
simonh 16d ago
Suppose you have a 6 months lead time to order volumes of parts for a new product launch. 4 months before the launch you see a new use case developing that's going to dramatically boost demand at launch. Even though you saw this coming 4 months before the launch, at the launch time itself you're still caught off guard. Demand is still dramatically higher than your capacity to meet it, and that's still going to be true for at least another few months, and there is nothing you can do about that. What you can do, you did 4 months ago to increase parts orders, but you're still caught flat footed right now.
- jayd16 16d ago
  For a company like Sony, you would say they failed to meet demand. Under Apple's reality distortion you instead must say that they were surprised by the demand.
  - simonh 15d ago
    Er, would I? Projecting much?
lwkl 16d ago
This isn't marketing this is just how the media decided to spin this story. Saying "Apple was caught off guard" makes the story more engaging than just saying Mac minis are sold out for 4 - 12 weeks after launch. We don't know if Apple misjudged the demand or couldn't source enough parts to match the initial demand. Another explanation could be that they decided it wasn't worth it to increase the production capacity to match the higher demand at launch because that capacity would go unused later down the line.
JKCalhoun 16d ago
"This just reads like marketing imo." You could be right, but I don't see being caught off guard as the kind of praise you seem to think it fosters for Apple. If I were in marketing I would be looking for a message that showed Apple in more of a leading, not following, position.
- pc86 16d ago
  "oh my garsh this asinine $900 thing is so good at local AI even we didn't expect it! I bet it'll be sold out any moment!" The way you get people to believe a lie is to put just a bit of truth in it. The way you get people to accept marketing as not-marketing is to put just enough not-marketing in it.
pdpi 16d ago
You can see that there is demand for a product (and, therefore, make that product), while misestimating the scale for that demand. It's what leads to failed products (when you overestimate the demand), and Apple has had a few of those. Why is it so weird that they would also underestimate the demand for other products?
commandersaki 16d ago
There's no indication there's a limited supply by Apple or you cannot get one. I don't see a marketing angle here, just speculation from "The Information", and people love to speculate for clicks so there's the motive.
- Tagbert 16d ago
  Shipping times have been increasing over the last several months.

by HDBaseT 16d ago

vikramkr 16d ago

I don't think you need the scare quotes. product lifecycles can take years and the actual neo demand was actually pretty insane. They were using it to soak up demand for binned a18 chips and it would have been irresponsible to forecast that they'd have the demand they did when there's another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. 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

lumost 16d ago
A lot of big enterprises struggle with ai adoption. Either they can't get models/tools approved fast enough, can't provision them in their internal network, or get slammed with exorbitant inference costs. A big enterprise can drop one (or 4) of these on someone's desk and let them go nuts.
dwaite 16d ago
> another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. 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.
- odo1242 16d ago
  > 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. 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.
  - deleted 16d ago
    [deleted]
- vikramkr 16d ago
  >"the majority of the market for Apple devices does trust that they will not produce and sell a computer incapable of support their use" 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
  - pjmlp 16d ago
    They also irritated plenty of devs, who aren't shelling out 3500 for what is in practical purposes a toy device, and then having Apple congratulate themselves the devs are the ones that should be happy they are allowed to play on Apple's kingdom in first place.
Gigachad 16d ago
I think people just hate subscriptions so much they are willing to make an obviously worse financial choice to buy upfront. 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.
- dofm 16d ago
  I am also willing to overpay to not be reliant on cloud things, to have control of local hardware. 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 requirements, and nor can I forecast that I would within its ordinary supported lifespan as a macOS machine. These machines left high-end stills and most 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.
  - Gigachad 16d ago
    I think the best move right now is to just wait a couple of years. There is room for the prices to drop dramatically. Buying the highest spec mac at the peak prices probably isn't a financially sensible move.
    - dofm 16d ago
      I tend to buy secondhand anyway, and yes, almost certainly it's best to wait. At the moment, speccing out a local box more powerful than the machine I am using is largely an intellectual exercise, but it does have some value for understanding what a client might be able to use if they absolutely require on-premises inference, and I do have a couple who fall into that zone. So I am trying to keep up to date in principle, but the built machines don't get beyond the shopping cart. The M5 Ultra has probably smoothed out the major issues of AI on Apple Silicon (prefill doesn't suck anymore) but the way Apple marketed that chip strongly suggests they are now fully aware of the strengths but also the limitations of their architecture and will get a lot more done. It's properly put the (fairly equivalently priced) DGX Spark in the shade, though.
RossBencina 16d ago
> It's competing with a $200/mo subscription or renting server gpu time Not if you're an enterprise that wants or requires on-prem inference.
- vikramkr 16d ago
  if you're one of those enterprises it's perfectly reasonable to assume you're more likely to go have your procurement and legal teams negotiate with google for one of those weird boxes to run gemini on prem (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/run-gemini-and-ai-on-prem-with-google-distributed-cloud https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/r...) or other enterprise-y nonsense vs buying consumer hardware to run a chinese large language model in your network. I do not envy the person at a company having to get approval model by model because of weird open source licensing terms dealing with the "how do we know chinese models are safe" question (hopefully they're at least getting asked in the context of hooking it into an agent harness so there's some sort of plausible risk that necessitates the conversation - i can very much imagine it getting shut down to even run in a sandbox because chinese model + people being scared after the huggingface stuff). There's a lot of reasons to assume enterprise wouldn't be interested, and it's very very cool that they are IMO. Anthropic cut claude code rate limits - they dont seem to be see open source llms as a market threat (rhtetoric to the white house aside) yet but enterprises being willing to run consumer hardware to run local models could make things a bit more tangible
- curt15 16d ago
  Wouldn't enterprises investing in their own hardware be more likely to buy standard 4-GPU or 8-GPU servers? Apple machines aren't really designed for server racks.
la_oveja 16d ago
> 8 gigs was too much of a compromise i come from a ultrabook with 2 gigs of ram and the neo takes 2 vscode instances, one antigravity and firefox while keeping telegram and whatsapp on the background. that device can be used as a workhorse, pagination is very good. can even run ios/android emulators but then you have to only have that project open, which is a non-issue for me. and the battery literally keeps working all day. good screen, good keyboard, good touchpad, operative system is close to linux. if youre thinking about getting one for programming and you're scared about the 8 gigs, hope i gave someone some light about it.
- matroxmemories 16d ago
  If the latest apple hardware could run Linux I would be buying a good amount. But I just hate the idea of being at the whims of macOS timelines. But I guess when you’re selling more than you can produce it doesn’t really matter.

InterviewFrog 16d ago

I have a strong suspicion its because of openclaw mania that happened like 3 to 4 months ago. 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.

CrimsonCape 16d ago
If you use OpenClaw now can you tell us how it's going?
- InterviewFrog 16d ago
  I used it initially. It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high.. 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
  - jonchurch_ 16d ago
    caffeinate -is -t 7200 claude --remote-control 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)
    - manmal 16d ago
      The Amphetamine app from the App Store keeps a MacBook awake even with the lid closed.
      - ustad 16d ago
        You need an app for that?
        manmal 15d ago

chacham15 16d ago

the machines arent optimized for it is why. the main driving factor is large unified memory which makes large(r) models possible, but there isnt the gpu horsepower to back it up. essentially, it fits the corner of the market that wants large models and is ok with running them slowly which doesnt sound like it would be a large market.

skohan 16d ago
For decode, memory bandwidth is the main bottleneck, so these machines will likely perform well even without a ton of GPU horsepower. Not as well as Blackwell, but I expect they will be a reasonable choice in terms of price/performance if you want to run large models with a lot of context. The main place they are a bit behind is in the number formats they support natively. Iirc M5 doesn't have native FP8 support, so you will take a speed penalty on quants where other architectures get better acceleration.
- TimByte 16d ago
  [dead]
anon373839 16d ago
Macs have excellent generation speed, and the new Ultra will positively smash that at 1.2TB/sec of bandwidth. For example, that new 176B parameter Qwen model would generate tokens at ~200 tokens/sec. Macs don’t have very good prefill, though. So it’s important to use a model serving stack that has excellent prompt caching and use a harness that won’t bust the cache. I’m cross-shopping DGX Sparks and M5 Studios, and having a hard time deciding because they have exactly opposite characteristics for prefill and decode.

api 16d ago

There are probably people in Apple who think desktop is dead or pro-only and didn’t think many people would want a lower end cheaper Mac. Why wouldn’t they just get an iPad?

ghaff 16d ago
Even with the newer keyboard, the iPad just doesn't work for me as a MacBook replacement. And really isn't lighter at that point. Yes, an iPad is better for watching movies on a plane but that's not really a reason to bring one relative to a MacBook Air when I could also just bring a Kindle Paperwhite which weighs nothing. I've tried and an iPad basically doesn't work for me.
pjmlp 16d ago
Of there are, otherwise they would not have killed the few really desktop hardware, by what are now consumer electronics devices.

raydev 16d ago

What is useful marketing in saying "we could have made more money but accidentally didn't"?

ShinyLeftPad 16d ago
They literally announced the products early and profiting on this coverage.
- commandersaki 16d ago
  So is the news outlet that is speculating for clicks.
  - ShinyLeftPad 16d ago
    For sure... Just that wasn't the argument.

resonious 16d ago

Marketing that makes them look like they have their heads in the sand.

pjmlp 16d ago
There has been demand for Mac at PC prices since the Mac Classic was announced to the world. 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.

simonh 16d ago

Suppose you have a 6 months lead time to order volumes of parts for a new product launch. 4 months before the launch you see a new use case developing that's going to dramatically boost demand at launch. Even though you saw this coming 4 months before the launch, at the launch time itself you're still caught off guard. Demand is still dramatically higher than your capacity to meet it, and that's still going to be true for at least another few months, and there is nothing you can do about that. What you can do, you did 4 months ago to increase parts orders, but you're still caught flat footed right now.

jayd16 16d ago
For a company like Sony, you would say they failed to meet demand. Under Apple's reality distortion you instead must say that they were surprised by the demand.
- simonh 15d ago
  Er, would I? Projecting much?

lwkl 16d ago

This isn't marketing this is just how the media decided to spin this story. Saying "Apple was caught off guard" makes the story more engaging than just saying Mac minis are sold out for 4 - 12 weeks after launch. We don't know if Apple misjudged the demand or couldn't source enough parts to match the initial demand. Another explanation could be that they decided it wasn't worth it to increase the production capacity to match the higher demand at launch because that capacity would go unused later down the line.

JKCalhoun 16d ago

"This just reads like marketing imo." You could be right, but I don't see being caught off guard as the kind of praise you seem to think it fosters for Apple. If I were in marketing I would be looking for a message that showed Apple in more of a leading, not following, position.

pc86 16d ago
"oh my garsh this asinine $900 thing is so good at local AI even we didn't expect it! I bet it'll be sold out any moment!" The way you get people to believe a lie is to put just a bit of truth in it. The way you get people to accept marketing as not-marketing is to put just enough not-marketing in it.

pdpi 16d ago

You can see that there is demand for a product (and, therefore, make that product), while misestimating the scale for that demand. It's what leads to failed products (when you overestimate the demand), and Apple has had a few of those. Why is it so weird that they would also underestimate the demand for other products?

commandersaki 16d ago

There's no indication there's a limited supply by Apple or you cannot get one. I don't see a marketing angle here, just speculation from "The Information", and people love to speculate for clicks so there's the motive.

Tagbert 16d ago
Shipping times have been increasing over the last several months.