ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
66% Positive
Analyzed from 2570 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#mac#apple#ram#neo#more#mini#performance#studio#openclaw#don
Discussion (75 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I have Radarr and Sonarr running on my homeserver. I switched my model to cloud Claude, pasted the API docs of said apps and told it to make 'search, add, remove, update, and statusupdate' available in a small MCP.
It took 7 minutes, I switched back to my local Qwen3.6 model and I haven't touched the webinterface of Radarr and Sonarr in weeks. I just ask the model.
Everyone now gets a chat with my (telegram) AI bot in stead of relaying requests through me.
I have been looking into a decent local device. DGX Spark, Mac Studio etc... I think I am willing to spend on this, it really does feel like the 'iPhone moment' for me: I am not going back to individual front-ends for everything when my AI bot is a unified frontend for all API based software.
Overseerr is a thing.
2) How does Overseerr help? I've never really understood it if I could give my family access to Overseerr over a VPN I could just give them sonarr / radarr directly.
Though egress is heavily restricted for OpenClaw and everything is behind a FW.
Maybe by the time they sort it out there will be an M5 Ultra Mac Studio with a full terabyte of RAM.
Not sure who’s buying these or if it’s just people dreaming about finding a rube.
Apple doesn't make much of a fuss about it but their chip performance is laughably ahead of the other chipmakers.
The Mac Mini M4 gets a score of 3788 in Geekbench[0]. The top of the PC processor chart is 3395[1]. It's not even Apple's latest chip!
PC processors can only keep up by adding more cores, but real world performance in many workloads is enhanced by having a smaller number of higher performance cores.
[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
[1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
But single-number outputs like that are useless. Is the number ~10% higher because it's consistently ~10% faster at everything, or because it's 100% faster on a minority of things and slower at everything else? The first one is pretty unlikely when comparing processors with different designs, and indeed that isn't it:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/4
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/5
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/6
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/7
The CPU in those charts with a similar TDP to the M4 is the Ryzen HX 370. You can see that the M4 is ahead of it in a few of the tests (C-Ray, DuckDB, PyBench, FLAC) but in even more of them the M4 is at the bottom of the stack. (Only a third of those charts are actually performance; each performance chart is followed by two power consumption charts.)
And the ~20W TDP is a nice parlor trick (the HX 370 is the only one on the list that competes with it there) but in a desktop CPU that's pretty irrelevant. Whereas if you compare it to the CPUs that can be had for a similar price (e.g. Ryzen 9700X, 65W), it's only ahead in C-Ray and FLAC while losing quite badly in most of the others and subjecting you to unupgradable soldered memory that the PC hardware doesn't.
Meanwhile doing ray tracing on a CPU instead of a GPU isn't much fun, and FLAC is an audio codec so a ~10% improvement there is probably not going to be a big part of your day if you're not a full-time sound engineer. So does averaging those kinds of things in to make a single benchmark number make sense? Or should you be looking at the results on applications you actually use?
Which is obvious if you spent more then half a microsecond thinking about it, because apple silicone barely draws any power - it's performance is fantastic in it's niche, which is squarely within what a home user cares about - but it's not leading on benchmark performance, because that's not what apple designed it for
The reason its coincidentally good for local ai inference is also just down to the fact the embedded GPU has shared memory access to the system VRAM. That means low performance/throughput but large memory.
Which is great for home use, but once again not gonna top charts.
If you want to run local models, another advantage is Apple’s unified memory architecture. The biggest Mac mini has 64gb ram and Mac Studio has up to 512gb. Compare this little box to what monster Nvidia gpu system you would have to buy to get the same memory there. And how much your PG&E bill would go up. That doesn’t account for the shortage of basic $600 Mac minis though.
The take away is that some of the Apple hardware hits a sweet spot for performance and price which may change in the future but for now it's causing a lot of demand so people can run inference without GPUs.
Also Macs keep a lot of their resale value so you can use them for a while and then sell them for sometimes 80% of their original value.
I recently bought one for my k3s cluster, and it was the cheapest 16g ram I could get by a decent margin.
Most likely the limiting factor is the crunch that chip companies are going through.
What annoys me most isn't the Mac Studio and Mini. It is the Neo. Someone must have done a poor job in demand planing. ( As well as pricing ). Only 5M unit till the end of the year when they are now increasing it to 10M. And it will likely miss this education's year cycle in the summer.
Hopefully they do better with A19 Pro Neo. Mac could reach up to 400M to 500M usage share. Roughly 25% of PC market.
The thing is that the Neo is actually useful.
I am old enough to remember the iPod nano -- Especially the 2nd generation. They were effectively low-priced and smaller iPods.
Apple sold millions of these much much quicker than the iPods and iPod minis (which came right before). Especially in 2006, it was _the_ "Christmas gift" just before the iPhone, iPod touch and later iPad mini took over. Possibly Steve Jobs' demo where he showed how they fit into the otherwise useless small jeans pocket helped convince the world.
The iPod nano effectively wiped out the competing music player market.
The Neo reminds me of the iPod nano and iPad mini. It is smaller and cheaper version of an existing successful product.
I think the iPhone SE and E are the outliers.
Is the memory not part of the SoC?
I wanted to build a gaming PC, and now that's out of the question, even though I can afford to buy one in the current state. I just refuse to participate in this, so I quit.
There are thousands of great games that run on older hardware that would last me a lifetime of gaming.
Consumers always get the shit fed to them.
At some point even the most economically liberal people will say that enough is enough. Making money and building capital is perfectly okay if you're working hard, but if you use said money or capital against the rest of us (who chose a different life) then we have a problem.
My M2 studio was the only computer I ever owned that had issues with the USBC ports not working with certain cables (and for the price, it should have had better performance).
I've owned a M2 Mac Studio, PowerMac G5, Mac Pro. Every single one had flaws that you would consider inexcusable on PC Hardware priced half that amount.
The PowerMac G5 had terrible video cards (the liquid cooled ones also had issues with leaks, but ignoring that). The Mac Pro also had terrible Video cards (they were PCI-X), but also Fully Buffered ECC ram (which cost substantially more than any other ram)..
Apple still can't even manufacture a proper mouse (who the hell puts a USB C port at the bottom).
It's ridiculous..
If Linux distro's had a way to integrate Android as a first class citizen (like IOS is in MacOS), it would greatly boost the number of apps available in ecosystem, and have a huge impact on MacOS I feel. Waydroid is good, but, it still is too clunky (I'd like to see something more like Wine for Android, where its native)
Do you wish you could go back to macs?
Will you be around to police the discussion the next time something having "Microsoft" in the title is submitted and the shit-flinging-at-Windows-and-the-PC-world contest starts regardless to any relevance to the topic at hand?
Tim Cook, the supply chain master leaves house the moment the very reason why he got hired in the first place is in dire straits.
I don’t think that the successor will likely change that, since Cook made sure, no one is remembering Jobs anymore and as top manager won’t pass a reversal of many of his decisions.
So he will lead through a CEO he controls. Only if the new guy takes on the battle in the name of product there might be a chance but this would mean, Cook and the new CEO have to be dismissed. So popcorn times, I think Apple is going to stay as boring as it got, while the quality constantly declines.
The Neo isn't just a bet on low prices - it's a machine that convinces people they can get away with less RAM. In the middle of a pricing crunch, why wouldn't you ship an 8GB machine like the Neo?
Its a win-win, Apple gets to ship a brand new SKU in volume despite the RAM crunch, and they get to punch into a previously untouched market.
That 32GB or even 64GB is considered a minimum to be able to run some word processing, chat app, fetch remote content, and display funny cat photos is preposterous. In terms of information storage, these are absolutely immense numbers.
The infinite treadmill of chasing for more RAM and then immediately proceeding to carelessly fill all of it at the first line of code is part of a deeper, wasteful, and self-imposed obsolescence process.
We don't need more RAM, we need more frugal software.
I am able to do all of those things pretty fine with 16gb ram cheap msi laptop.
Says this on a post about the powerhouses all selling like hot cakes, with many months long waiting times.