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.

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

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

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.

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?