alt Hacker NewsI'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple. When this started spreading a day or two ago, it was all from no-name spam media sites that are paid to publish articles. They all claimed "a source" is where they got the intel, without specifying the source. It was spreading like wildfire on socials.
The same thing happened with Mac Mini's and OpenClaw. Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple marketing bots (you could tell by looking at their post history, where they would drop "Mac Mini" into every conversation they could across all different subreddits and unrelated topics). Then it became fairly common.
So Apple's marketing department is seemingly using the same strategy again. Because still, it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim.
Replies
I am using Mac studios for local inference, but not for openclaw. It was simply the best bang for the buck at the time, and the software side of things has gotten even better since then. I haven’t run the pricing comparison but I have a feeling with the direction they’re heading that it’s better to hold off for m6 as it may assuage various bottlenecks if you are latency sensitive.
Apple's marketing isn't that smart. They're very traditional. You give them way too much credit.
It's not. This article is weirdly light on details. The original source article from The Information apparently mentions that companies like OpenAI are buying them up to run RL. So it's yet another case of AI companies buying all the compute.
* I say apparently because The Information wants you to sign up for access to the article, but I found this mentioned in multiple summaries of the article like this one [1].
[1]: https://tech-insider.org/openai-mac-buying-apple-supply-shor...
Additional source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpqGf0m5FaQ
This may be your experience
For mine I was on the fence - waited an hour or so and the delivery date went from early oct to 10-12 weeks so i decided to wait on the 512gb version
The openclaw crowd were just former cryptobros onto their next grift: performative posts about AI that would generate enough views/engagement/ad revenue to pay for the hardware… assuming they were even telling the truth about having it at all.
None shipped anything of value. Same with anyone claiming to be running dozens or hundreds of agents 24/4.
Alex Finn was using and touting Mac Minis hehe
He started that whole trend!
Agreed. It’s also nonsense. You need an NVidia gpu to do any serious work.
People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.
People really were talking about and buying Minis due to OpenClaw, because they wanted something that was on all the time and had access to all their stuff in macOS. Occam’s Razor.