[btown]

It would be incredibly ironic if, with Apple's relatively stable supply chain relative to the chaos of the RAM market these days (projected to last for years), Apple compute became known as a cost-effective way to build medium-sized clusters for inference.

[andy99]

It’s gonna suck if all the good Macs get gobbled up by commercial users.

[icedchai]

Outside of YouTube influencers, I doubt many home users are buying a 512G RAM Mac Studio.

[FireBeyond]

I doubt many of them are, either.

When the 2019 Mac Pro came out, it was "amazing" how many still photography YouTubers all got launch day deliveries of the same BTO Mac Pro, with exactly the same spec:

18 core CPU, 384GB memory, Vega II Duo GPU and an 8TB SSD.

Or, more likely, Apple worked with them and made sure each of them had this Mac on launch day, while they waited for the model they actually ordered. Because they sure as hell didn't need an $18,000 computer for Lightroom.

[lukeh]

Still rocking a 2019 Mac Pro with 192GB RAM for audio work, because I need the slots and I can’t justify the expense of a new one. But I’m sure a M4 Mini is faster.

[NSUserDefaults]

How crazy do you have to get with # of tracks or plugins before it starts to struggle? I was under the impression that most studios would be fine with an Intel Mac Mini + external storage.

[DrStartup]

I'm neither and have 2. 24/7 async inference against github issues. Free. (once you buy the macs that is)

[madeofpalk]

I'm not sure who 'home users' are, but i doubt they're buying two $9,499 computers.

[trvz]

Peanuts for people who make their living with computers.

[jon-wood]

So, not a home user then. If you make your living with computers in that manner you are by definition a professional, and just happen to have your work hardware at home.

[selfhoster11]

In the US, yes.

[Waterluvian]

I wonder what the actual lifetime amortized cost will be.

[oidar]

Every time I'm tempted to get one of these beefy mac studios, I just calculate how much inference I can buy for that amount and it's never a good deal.

[embedding-shape]

Every time someone brings up that, it brings me back memories of trying to frantically finish stuff as quickly as possible as either my quota slowly go down with each API request, or the pay-as-you-go bill is increasing 0.1% for each request.

Nowadays I fire off async jobs that involve 1000s of requests, billion of tokens, yet it costs basically the same as if I didn't.

Maybe it takes a different type of person, than the one I am, but all these "pay-as-you-go"/tokens/credits platforms make me nervous to use, and I end up not using it or spending time trying to "optimize", while investing in hardware and infrastructure I can run at home and use that seems to be no problem for my head to just roll with.

[asimovDev]

anyone buying these is usually more concerned with just being able to run stuff on their own terms without handing their data off. otherwise it's probably always cheaper to rent compute for intense stuff like this

[dontlaugh]

For now, while everything you can rent is sold at a loss.

[bee_rider]

Are the inference providers profitable yet? Might be nice to be ready for the day when we see the real price of their services.

[stingraycharles]

Nevermind the fact that there are a lot of high quality (the highest quality?) models that are not released as open source.

[icedchai]

Heh. I'm jealous. I'm still running a first gen Mac Studio (M1 Max, 64 gigs RAM.) It seemed like a beast only 3 years ago.

[servercobra]

Interesting. Answering them? Solving them? Looking for ones to solve?

[7e]

That product can still steal fab slots from cheaper, more prosumer products.

[kridsdale1]

I did. Admittedly it was for video processing at 8k which uses more than 128gb of ram, but I am NOT a YouTuber.

[mirekrusin]

Of course they're not. Everybody is waiting for next generation that will run LLMs faster to start buying.

[rbanffy]

Every generation runs LLMs faster than the previous one.

[mschuster91]

it's not like regular people can afford this kind of Apple machine anyway.

[teeray]

It’s just depressing that the “PC in every home” era is being rapidly pulled out from under our feet by all these supply shocks.

[Aurornis]

You can get a Mac Mini for $600 with 16GB of RAM and it will be more powerful than the "PC in every home" people would need for any common software.

The personal computing situation is great right now. RAM is temporarily more expensive, but it's definitely not ending any eras.

[m-s-y]

Not Apple’s ram.

[jeroenhd]

RAM prices have exploded enough that Apple's RAM is now no longer a bad deal. At least until their next price hikes.

We're going back to the "consumer PCs have 8GB of RAM era" thanks to the AI bubble.

[dghlsakjg]

Huh?

Home PCs are as cheap as they’ve ever been. Adjusted for inflation the same can be said about “home use” Macs. The list price of an entry level MacBook Air has been pretty much the same for more than a decade. Adjust for inflation, and you get a MacBook air for less than half the real cost of the launch model that is massively better in every way.

A blip in high end RAM prices has no bearing on affordable home computing. Look at the last year or two and the proliferation of cheap, moderately to highly speced mini desktops.

I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax.

That’s not depressing, that’s amazing!

[inferiorhuman]

  A blip in high end RAM prices 

It's not a blip and it's not limited to high end machines and configurations. Altman gobbled up the lion's share of wafer production. Look at that Raspberry Pi article that made it to the front page, that's pretty far from a high end Mac and according to the article's author likely to be exported from China due to the RAM supply crisis.

  I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house
  before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax.

B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.

Amazon is showing some no-name stuff at $298 as their cheapest memory and a Ryzen 7700X at $246.

Add another $100 for an NVMe drive and another $70–100 for the cheapest AM5 motherboards I could find on either of those sites.

[dghlsakjg]

People that can reliably predict the future, especially when it comes to rising markets, are almost always billionaires. It is a skill so rare that it can literally make you the richest man on earth. Why should I trust your prediction of future markets that this pricing is the new standard, and will never go down? Line doesn’t always go up, even if it feels like it is right now, and all the tech media darlings are saying so.

If everything remains the same, RAM pricing will also. I have never once found a period in known history where everything stays the same, and I would be willing to bet 5 figures that at some point in the future I will be able to buy DDR5 or better ram for cheaper than today. I can point out that in the long run, prices for computing equipment have always fallen. I would trust that trend a lot more than a shortage a few months old changing the very nature of commodity markets. Mind you, I’m not the richest man on earth either, so my pattern matched opinion should be judged the same.

> B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.

I didn't say I could build one from parts. Instead I said buy a mini pc, and then went and looked up the specs and price point to be sure.

The PC that I was talking about is here[https://a.co/d/6c8Udbp]. I live in Canada so translated the prices to USD. Remember that US stores are sometimes forced to hide a massive import tax in those parts prices. The rest of the world isn’t subject to that and pays less.

Edit: here’s an equivalent speced pc available in the US for $439 with a prime membership. So even with the cost of prime membership you can get a Ryzen 7 32gb 1tb for $455. https://www.amazon.com/BOSGAME-P3-Gigabit-Ethernet-Computer/...

[sspiff]

Add to that a case, PSU and monitor and you're realitically over $1000

[jeroenhd]

> I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax

That's an amazing price, but I'd like to see where you're getting it. 32GB of RAM alone costs €450 here (€250 if you're willing to trust Amazon's February 2026 delivery dates).

Getting a PC isn't that expensive, but after the blockchain hype and then the AI hype, prices have yet to come down. All estimations I've seen will have RAM prices increase further until the summer of next year, and the first dents in pricing coming the year after at the very earliest.

[dghlsakjg]

Amazon[0] link below. Equivalent systems also available at Newegg for the same price since someone nitpicked that you need a $15 prime membership to get that Amazon deal.

Shipping might screw you but here’s in stock 32gb kits of name brand RAM from a well known retailer in the US for $280[1].

Edit: same crucial RAM kit is 220GBP in stock at amazon[2]

(0)https://www.amazon.com/BOSGAME-P3-Gigabit-Ethernet-Computer/...

(1)https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1809983-REG/crucial_c...

(2) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CTHXMYL8?tag=pcp0f-21&linkCode...

[behnamoh]

> Home PCs are as cheap as they’ve ever been.

just the 5090 GPU costs +$3k, what are you even talking about

[dghlsakjg]

“A computer in every home” (from the original post I was replying to) does not mean “A computer with the highest priced version of the highest priced optional accessory for computers in every home”

I’m talking about the hundreds of affordable models that are perfectly suitable for everything up to and including AAA gaming.

The existence of expensive, and very much optional, high end computer parts does not mean that affordable computers are not more incredible than ever.

Just because cutting edge high end parts are out of reach to you, does not mean that perfectly usable computers are too, as I demonstrated with actual specs and prices in my post.

That’s what I’m talking about.

[platevoltage]

Man you positively demolished that straw man.

How much as a base model MacBook Air changed in price over the last 15 years? With inflation, it's gotten cheaper.

[pests]

A home PC has to have a SOTA gpu?

[heavyset_go]

Home calculators are cheap as they've ever been, but this era of computing is out of reach for the majority of people.

The analogous PC for this era requires a large amount of high speed memory and specialized inference hardware.

[dghlsakjg]

What regular home workload are you thinking of that the computer I described is incapable of?

You can call a computer a calculator, but that doesn’t make it a calculator.

Can they run SOTA LLMs? No. Can they run smaller, yet still capable LLMs? Yes.

However, I don’t think that the ability to run SOTA LLMs is a reasonable expectation for “a computer in every home” just a few years into that software category even existing.

[atonse]

You can have access to a supercomputer for pennies, internet access for very little money, and even an m4 Mac mini for $500. You can have a raspberry pi computer for even less. And buy a monitor for a couple hundred dollars.

I feel like you’re twisting the goalposts to make your point that it has to be local compute to have access to AI. Why does it need to be local?

Update: I take it back. You can get access to AI for free.

[platevoltage]

No it doesn't. The majority of people aren't trying to run Ollama on their personal computers.

[teaearlgraycold]

It already is depending on your needs.