I’ve wanted the idea of a home server or even home “mainframe” and some terminals for me and family forever but the idea never takes off….

I've been thinking about this a fair bit recently.

We make a lot of price/performance compromises for having an attached screen and keyboard on our computer. That was what got me started.

Then I remembered the days of having to go to a special corner of the house to use a computer, vs now when I have a computer with me all the time. In my bag, on the sofa, on the train. Hell, I'm writing this on the work MBP while waiting for an appointment.

And you know what, I think I got more done when I went and sat in a corner of the house all those years ago. I set up an area for "computer work", and it worked really well.

I have a home office, but it's a jumble of cables going into docking stations and all sorts of weird stuff. I think if I streamline it and turn it into a proper "computer room", I might get some of that mojo back. I might even convince my partner that surrendering the home office and having a corner of the den might be good - she can watch TV while I tinker. And I won't be balancing a laptop on my knee and trying to do two things at once.

And the price/performance thing comes back in. Hmm.

I got an M1 Max studio w/ 64gb when they first came out and I love it. Price was obviously a lot more reasonable at the time. I’m fortunate to have dedicated office space, and there is definitely a nice psychological effect to having a desktop in a specific spot and “going to the office”. I’ve since purchased an m3 MacBook Air as my thin client and for lightweight travel use, and when my wife needs to take a call in the office or whatever I pop out to the living room and either hop on Remote Desktop or SSH into my Studio. Highly recommend this setup. If you’re primarily doing thin client on a local network, a neo should be fine for that (and to use as a media player/communicator around the house). That said, I have been eyeballing Omarchy…

Why not a non-mac cheaper desktop/workstation and a Mac laptop for use?

E.g. what most major tech companies have - a laptop that is for VSCode via ssh/web browsing, and a beefy Linux dev box you ssh into for everything else?

It's way cheaper, and what I use at home too - a lot cheaper than a Mac studio for everything, especially with RAM and storage.

Having replaced my MacBook with a Mac Mini, I would reconsider. The MacBook is just such a _complete_ package. Great speakers, great keyboard, fantastic screen, the fingerprint sensor thingy.. Takes a lot of gear to match that

My goto. Even ignoring speed, it's nice to have a remote machine that keeps doing whatever it's doing while your laptop is closed. And the ARM Macs idle at such low power that it's not wasteful like my MacPro4,1 was haha. My UPS's ammeter doesn't even display the Mac mini's draw.

They gave me a nice MBP for my new job. I tried doing heavy work on it locally, it was fine for that, and yet it still ended up being a light terminal into an EC2 instance, partially because their stuff is on AWS and latency is way lower within that. My personal mini is running too.

I would not use Neo, Air with 24 GB ram should be your minimum because you will want to do some work locally even when you're running a VPN/SSH thin client setup.

I'm currently SSH-ing into my workstation from my M4 Air with 24 gb ram and it's ideal for this flow. Slack/editors/clients/browsers/etc. easily gobble up over 16 GB. I have no more dev tools/compilers/source on my client machines, everything is dockered up on remote workstation in isolated VMs (too much supply-chaining).

My only downside to using a pro is not having 120/4k HDMI port on air and my dock won't support it with Apple (it does with windows)

Another option is a 'maxed out' mini e.g M5 Pro/64GB. Mini is super easy to travel with if you know there'll be a 'dock' at the far end e.g office<>home or whatever.

I dusted of my lightest computer with an M1 chip and use Tailscale to make my network virtual from anywhere. Been running a. Pi5 as a main house hub and an M1 Pro as an always on Mac. It would be nice to go all out and make a Studio a hub I can just screen share into for major compute.

I had the same thought, I grabbed a studio two years ago for this reason and it’s been great. 99% of the time lack of portability isn’t a concern. Every now and then (e.g. travel) I notice the limitation, but it’s not much of an inconvenience to just not do some work for a bit.

I’ve debated Mac Studio or MBP at each generation. For equal spec machines the price premium to get a MBP over the Studio is always smaller than I expected, so I pay the extra amount and get the MBP.

This changes when you get into connotations that aren’t available in the laptop form factor, but with RAM prices the way they are those configurations are more than I want to spend on a local machine right now.

For running local LLMs the high memory Mac options always look appealing, but the processing speed (prefill) is so much slower than GPUs that it hurts. For situations where you have no rush and can let something work in the background for 24 hours it can some times be ignored, but the speeds I get from a real GPU setup are so much faster that I never use the larger models on a high memory Mac any more.

>I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked.

Having owned 3 MacBook Pros since 2008, the decision to make my next computer be a Mac Studio came down to (1) MacBook thermal throttling that slows down CPUs when it starts to overheat and (2) easier upgrade of Mac Studio SSD with after-market storage module whereas the MacBook requires more complicated disassembly and hot air gun to dislodge the surface mounted SSDs.

I have a brand new M5 Pro MacBook Pro I don't like it when the fans turn on. The Mac Studio will be faster and quieter for the same workloads.

I've been holding out, because I think my next purchase will be a Studio with an Ultra Chip in it. I'm wanting it to be a "forever" server, so I'm holding out while I can.

Happy with M4 Mini, although I recommend using a well ventilated M.2 enclosure instead of the integrated docks as I just had a 2TB Kingston die which I'm pretty sure was caused by "zero thermal forks given (chopsticks only)" UGreen hub design. Also can use as a laptop and replace screen/keyboard/whatever when failed/unsuitable. Higher resulting device longevity, especially with Asahi Linux making such great progress. https://github.com/vk2diy/hackbook-m4-mini

This is my setup (except I have an Air because the Neo didn't exist yet). And it's great. Tailscale makes it trivial.

At my current job, one of my biggest blunders was thinking "Let me just order the same hardware as most of my teammates to avoid unnecessary complications".

Most, if not all, of our current work happens on remote cloud vms. Now I'm stuck with carrying a 3KG monstrosity to work.Every day.

Absolutely no positives compared to my ThinkPad that weighed less than half in my previous job.

Remote development is "good enough" these days. With VS Code, Development containers etc... Having a light weight, portable laptop is so much nicer than a laptop that you can't even rest on your lap for long duration.

The only thing you need to be mindful of using light weight laptops is not having enough RAM to fit all your browser tabs..

I used to have a high-powered laptop, but just use a combination of ssh and NFS to my machine at home from a low powered laptop for travel these days. It works well.

Makes managing both backups and handling failure scenarios involving loss or unauthorised access to the laptop less of a hassle as well.

I have been thinking a lot about buying a very fast desktop and a cheap laptop that uses remote desktop to connect to the fast computer.

But in the end I ended op buying a Lenovo Legion and put Linux on it.

Laptops are so fast these days that I didn't want to be bothered with setting up connectivity to a remote desktop.

But if your laptop never leaves your desk I think a desktop computer is a great option. Relatively cheaper and easier to maintain and upgrade.

Recently took a Minisforum 7840hs PC out of rotation as a media PC and made it a full time coding workstation with Proxmox. I do a VM per project due to the nature of agentic editors.

I was using a VM setup on my MBP but it felt like a huge waste, having to leave a laptop on 24/7 when all it did was run Claude Code inside VMs.

I likely will stick with a Macbook Air 15" for next purchase, and beef up my "Claude Server" down the road.

Yep, this is my exact thought. The pendulum has swung back toward a desktop making more sense for me than a laptop. It all depends on whether there is anything useful to do with an amount of computation that can't be fit into a laptop package. For a long time there wasn't, now there is.

I had the same view recently. For the past year I’ve been using my iPad to remote into both my MacBook Pro M1 Max and my racked Linux workstation at home using Jump and moonlight/sunshine, respectively. Never looked back

If all you want to do is remote into your desktop, Neo seems like overkill. Why not just get a $200 Chromebook and save yourself $500?

That’s nearly what I do but on a smaller scale. My iPad Pro serves as my laptop 90% of the time, and the 10% of the time I need to actually code and test in a chromium browser I remote into a mini.

Cheap Linux laptop with Tailscale back into the Studio when traveling?

How about business where you send in all your old devices and get back a SSD using using their memories

Im writing this from a MacBook Air.

Everything is a container or VM now, and none of it runs locally for me.

I have a desktop (older intel) with giant monitors and a keyboard for when I sit at the desk. I have the laptop for when I travel, go out or just want to work from the couch.

When I do my next upgrade to "better hardware" I'm not migrating a machine, rather I'm migrating the containers. My workflow is such that if I loose one of the boxes I sit at to a cup of coffee I really wont care other than the financial loss of a new laptop or keyboard.

The biggest win in all this was dumping the off the shelf firewall/router and moving to Opnsense. Wireguard vpn lets me route all my traffic through home for all my devices (and what is now a growing home lab).

There are scopes of work that this setup would not work for. I would not want to be a video editor with this set up, it's not ideal if you want to play AAA games. But for what I do, it is pretty ideal.

Yes, except that the only way to get a fancy screen is also to put the fancy cpu in it. If there would be an Air with the screen of the pro I would buy it. Maybe even a Neo with that screen.

Oh yeah. Throw it behind tailscale. Herdr multiplexer in terminal is cool, it’ll remember your session if you open it in ssh from the neo

I’m doing essentially this, and got a MacBook Neo.

Fir kinda the first time in my life I don’t really have development tools on my personal laptop. I ghostty and openvpn client installed.

I have a large remote linux workstation (2x 8c/16t xeon cpus, 256gb ram, 2x8tb spinning rust disk) and i have my tools over there (along with some VMs).

It works surprisingly well.

Also, the macbook neo is a surprisingly capable little machine.

For a desktop you may find yourself better on a Linux or Windows machine price/performance wise.

I personally own an M3 ultra, an M1 max as laptops, but my desktop is a Ryzen desktop I built in 2022 and it was a third in price of the ultra for more power.

Do it! I went with the Mini/Neo combo. I don't need MBP power when out and about. When at home, the Mini is all I use.

I was in the same situation, I used maxed out 15'' M3 Max MacBook Pro docked to Studio Display closed on vertical stand behind the screen. It was fine for office work, but running local LLMs would definitely overheat it. The battery started degrading purely due to heat issues. And it was audible as well.

I decided to get Mac Studio M4 Max, also all maxed out config and the cooling is so much better that I can run local LLMs like Gemma 3/4, gpt-oss 120b all day long without any heat issues or any audible fan noise. So for my use case it was the right decision. I subsequently added 15'' M5 Max MacBook Pro all maxed out to my collection and even though it is slightly faster on LLM inference (I get 100 tokens/s with Gemma 4 27b model), you just can't run LLMs longer than a few minutes. It starts overheating and gets really loud.

That’s what I have been doing for years, it remains in the house secured while I ssh into it from an old thinkpad. You can get air to pair it with it if you really wanna have that seamless flow, otherwise, ssh works well.

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Apple prices have always been insane, there is a reason why during the days it almost went bankrupt, in Europe it could not rival with PC, Amiga, Atari, Acorn.

Laptops can't do agentic engineering. They get hot as hell and battery drains instantly. I think this will promote a switch to desktops for the next couple of years, until we have new mobile chips.

A lot of those "up to"s are expressing user options, though -- "up to" 512 GB RAM means that there are configurations that include that, but also cheaper configurations that don't. That's a pretty different beast than "up to 4.3x faster performance", which means (presumably) that exactly one benchmark showed a 4.3x improvement and the rest showed less -- which is to say, means very little.

up to 46 times, you mean?

I enjoyed "up to an 80-core GPU, and a staggering 512GB of unified memory"

Staggering?? I can count on no hands the number of times that a fact or figure has caused me to stagger.

Whats an up to dog?

That's probably up to 300% of an increase from 'previous' press releases

There is no "future proof" for >1T param models, there is no present or future where you can run a model that size on consumer hardware.

That's in the same ballpark as two 128GB AI machines like the Asus GX10 or DGX Spark or Strix Halo. And, it seems very likely to perform better than either of those for inference. And, 256GB brings some pretty good models into play.

But, that doesn't make it a good deal. It just means the Apple tax doesn't apply when stacked up against AI machines and with memory prices being so out of whack. I'm still planning to wait until the RAMpocalypse ends before I buy any more hardware.

> Not exactly "future proof"

Computers are never "future proof".

> 10 grand for 256GB memory.

A NVIDIA RTX 6000, 96 GB at 1.7 TB/s, is 13 grand.

This 256 GB at 1.2 TB/s Mac is extremely competitive, it will be sold out everywhere.

3 of those thunderbolt 5 ports, so you can do a fully connected 4 machine cluster topology.

10 grand for 256GB new Ultra sounds too cheap in today’s crazy DRAM market, it feels too good to be true.

The local ai is used by Apple services, mostly. Though there is a Swift SDK to access it, apparently.

Im curious, how often is SSD / storage speed performance really useful? I feel like for many people it's akin to gigabyte wifi in that its nice to have, but not really particularly necessary

Apple puts the NAND flash controller on package, so it cooled as part of the SoC/CPU as they share an IHS. Given it is part of the fabric it only has to maintain signal coherence on millimeter to micrometer scales, while enterprise/consumer NAND PCIe have to adhere to standards which force them to signal at 800-1200mV and keep that signal stable for centimeter scale distances.

Basically, Apple gets to cheat because they shove everyone onto the same IC & make the OS that runs on this SOC.

Yes, and they specifically mention "Up to 10.7x faster LLM prompt processing in LM Studio" which is probably using the neural accelerator for prefill.

How much would is the cost for that machine though, I'm pretty sure I could just buy tokens from a provider and never run out of money for 10 years, and get far better quality output because inference is being served by professionals on far better hardware and this machine would be obsolete long before that as well. Hosting local seems like a possibly the dumbest thing you could possibly do from an economics perspective. And don't hit me with the privacy argument because everyone saying they care about privacy uses fucking gmail, whatsapp and instagram all day long.

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To put this into a perspective, Google helpfully reminds:

> A fully configured IBM Personal Computer AT (Model 5170) with expanded memory and storage cost around $5,795 to $6,000 at its launch in August 1984, which equals roughly $18,600 to $19,300 in 2026 USD.

Don't forget that US prices usually do not include the VAT, while EU prices usually do include respective VAT.

> I am in Europe, and the Mac Studio M5 Ultra GPU 64 cores with 96GB RAM is up to 6.649,00 €. Ouch.

It would be significantly cheaper to fly to a tariff-free country and buy there.

They probably literally don't have enough NAND to go around. 768GB of memory (48GB x 16) is enough for nearly 100 iPhone 17s; that's $80k (corrected) of iPhones at MSRP, although likely much lower margins than these high-RAM boxes.

they`re skipping m6 pro and ultra

For local LLMs with a Mac, rule of thumb is you always want an Ultra (due to memory bandwidth). Even an M1 Ultra is superior to an M6 Pro in this regard.

There are no configurations even close to running something comparable to frontier model variants, they're simply far too large, but something like full precision Qwen 35b or DeepSeek 70b at 50+ t/s is well within available configuration, and potential for plenty of room for large context sizes.

Opus is probably ~2T parameter model, so that would probably not run on these. More like Sonnet.

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The reason the mini & studio work as well as they do for the use cases that have made them popular again is because the architecture puts memory, cpu, and gpu/npu on the same die, and puts storage right next to it, which is why you get the storage & memory bandwidth you do. The separability of those components would break that, which is why the Mac Pro didn’t survive past one generation in the Apple Silicon era.

I'm actually coming around to realizing that I _do_ expect a desktop PC to be small. I'm finding myself only considering Mini ITX desktop cases when I think about upgrading my desktop. I only have one video card and don't have storage requirements that necessitate lots of 3.5" drives, a big nvme is all I need.

We no longer need CD/DVD/floppy drives, storage has shrunk/moved to the cloud. The only thing that's really grown inside a pc case is the video card, and most of these ITX cases are built specifically around fitting popular cards.

Even folks primarily focused on gaming are probably thinking that a full ATX case is a lot of wasted space.

Maybe it's just me, but I think ATX full and mid towers are going the way of the dinosaur.

The memory and GPU are integrated into the CPU so those can't be upgraded anyways. That's also how the memory can be so fast (shorter physical distance).

They sorta did right? It didn’t sell well at all.

It is. That's the mac mini. For local LLMs you would want the Mac Studio, which tops out at 1.2TB/s.

It's higher bandwidth than any dual-channel DDR5 desktop machine, but Apple never quote the memory latency, so hard to compare otherwise.

For max memory bandwidth you need to buy the Ultra versions (M5 Ultra: 1,2TB/s, this gets comparable to real GPUs regarding the memory bandwidth).

M6 and M5 Ultra both have comparable memory bandwidth per GPU core. I think they will perform well.

It's fast by computer standards and excellent for entry level chip. The Pro/Max/Ultra chips are always faster.

Compared to something like VRAM it's slow.

You would want to get the M5 pro version with 307gb/s if you were interested in running local LLMs.

Kinda. Strix Halo does 256GB/s of memory bandwidth, and is significantly slower than an M5 Max (614GB/s). Feels like intentional market segmentation?

Same reason they cut the big options on the existing models, this way they can sell more devices. The additional cost for the additional 512GB would have to make up for the loss of another sold device otherwise. No idea if there would really be that many people buying this then while on the other hand AI stuff makes people do crazy stuff, so...yeah :)

They seem to be suffering from the supply constraints like everyone else. They phased out the higher capacities on the M3 Ultra Mac Studio a while ago, and if you order a 128GB MBP, say, you're looking at six weeks or more for delivery.

It's more bizarre that Apple got caught with pants down. Focused on CPUs and ignored RAM.

Seems like miscalculation. If they had their own fab for RAM, they could completely corner the market today.

If you like to experiment with training / finetuning / etc on LLMs, these are actually incredibly ‘cheap’.

1.2TB/s memory bandwidth unlocks a lot with 256GB unified, and agentic AI is pretty good at optimising performance.

For comparison, to get 256GB with NVIDIA, you’re looking at a DIY workstation build (need pcie lanes), and like $70k?

The spark’s ~250gb/s bandwidth doesn’t really count here.

So weird, launching M6 so silently.

spoiled westerners will still buy though, when 1k would buy them enough tokens for the life of the computer (for the types of models this could host). All while a 1/3 the world is calorie deficient and can barely afford food. There are people digging out the ingredients for these machines with their bare hands and only living to 45. But who cares, I have a mediocre llm on demand I don't actually use and mostly just watch youtube on all day!!!

The 256GB option is +$4,000 - the overall price for 512GB setup would probably be $20k!

They already do: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels/s...

Also see: https://apfel.franzai.com

What is unified ram? RAM and VRAM as one thing?

1tb would likely be ~$20k - given the current >$10k price tag of 256gb. Would you still be considering it at that price?

chaining an option?

Depends on your perspective. People think nothing of spending 50-100K on a car that basically gets them to work. But the thing they use for day to day work then gets the evil eye when it costs more than 1K. It's slightly irrational. Not everybody needs a high end mac. But when you do, it sure is nice that you can get one.

I don't actually own a car and my startup is bootstrapped and our salaries are modest. But the one thing we spend on is laptops. I have M4 max pro with 48GB. That thing was on the expensive side (~4.5Kish). But it delivers a lot of value and I spend most hours I'm awake using it. I like fast builds. I like that I can try out open source AI models. And I like just having the option to run those.

We actually lease them and mine costs something like 105 euro/month. Including Apple Care. I don't need a Mac Studio but I could see some roles where that would not be a crazy expense. Even the tricked out version that basically only costs the same as a very modest car.

Base models are okay-ish.

But +4000$ for an additional 128GB of ram is simply milking the customers, as they know they will have many of them.

That came with a monitor and floppy drive.

Depends if it's Pro Ultra Max, or Plus Max Ultra.

I dunno, Apple's been throwing many bones to their customers who use their Macs for AI stuff; like Apple working with, and signing TinyGPU's NVIDIA eGPU drivers.

Plus introducing features like RDMA over thunderbolt, which is critical for distributed inference/training/etc. On the software side, Apple is investing heaps.

It's still ridiculous they don't support expandable NVMes, but the memory being soldered makes sense, you need it for 1.2TB/s bandwidth.

They are still selling high-margin hardware. Apple loves selling high-margin hardware.

> Boy, oh boy Apple is the new shovel seller during AI gold rush.

They're eating nvidia's lunch.

GLM 5.3 in ~q4 quantiziation with 4bits

anyone know if this is "pre-order" is coming late October, or "will be available to ship in late October, thus pre-order will be available earlier than that"

I only with I got more than 96GB at the time.

My sarcasm detector just made a small cloud of smoke. What does that mean, a buffer over or underflow??

To me it seems like a cheeky way to preface the AI part of the title.