| ▲ | ericd 6 hours ago |
| I think there's some mental inertia around what a computer is and what it's worth. This thing can build custom software for you, mostly autonomously. It can monitor things happening on the internet that are relevant to you, in a holistic and flexible way. We have one crawling the web for local events we'll like, and it judges them based on what it knows about us, and it tells us about the best matches every weekend, which has yielded some awesome outings we wouldn't have known about. It reads the literature on a subject in seconds and uses it as context to help in decision support. It's not the same value proposition as a computer 3 years ago, where most people are mentally anchored on what a computer should cost. Having it at home means that you can use it as a personal agent that always puts your interests first, regardless of what ad model the commercial providers decide to put in, and you can stash in it your medical data, what you buy, what you make, your worries, hopes, and dreams, without worrying about that being used as training data, or worse, something to exploit you commercially. I think it'll become considered totally reasonable to consider spending the cost of a small car on a computer, for many families. Also, a lot of companies are looking at how to run capable models locally to cut some of their (massive) cloud AI bills. An easy answer is worth a lot to them. |
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| ▲ | zamadatix 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| By this kind of logic we'd paying something like ~$10,000/month for our internet connections. The perceived value needs to exceed the cost but that does not make it the only factor to consider price with. What makes this expensive & sell well is it's not very fungible at the moment. Where else are you going to get 512 GB of high speed memory with a well supported accelerator attached that you can throw in the corner of anyone's home and not really have them notice? There are plenty of lesser options, plenty of noiser/power hungry options, plenty of harder to support options, but not really something in direct competition at the moment. Even the next rounds of the integrated AMD/Nvidia solutions are only targeting 196 GB of much slower memory and compute. |
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| ▲ | ericd 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think the difference besides the supply crunch there is that everyone connected gets the ~same internet, just faster or slower. Quantitative, not qualitative difference. On the other hand, a computer that can run Gemma 4 8B versus one that can run DeepSeek Flash are different enough experiences that I'd say they're effectively a difference in kind. It's been a bit since we had such serious stratification in outright capability in computing, rather than just how long it takes to get something done, or how many of something it can serve at once. In the early 90s, I think there were a lot more of those "this computer can do this thing, this one just can't" scenarios. Closest competition I see right now are stacks of 2-4 connected DGX Sparks, similar lowish speed high mem, and about the same cost/gig. |
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| ▲ | Jesus_piece 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Could you share what you did to find events to do? That sounds really cool |
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| ▲ | ericd 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, it’s pretty dumb/naive implementation, would need to be a lot more efficient to scale. Basically had Claude write polite/low touch dumb crawlers for a bunch of local sites (library, local events spaces, luma, theaters, maker spaces) and whip up a little frontend to let our family and friends manage a little text description of what their family members like, constraints, that sort of thing. Once a week, the crawlers look for new events, add to a db, and then run through the list and ask our local LLM to grade each event, given the text description and constraints. Take the top 20ish for the following two weekends and email out. It’s been super helpful, lowers the activation energy to go to more local events. | | |
| ▲ | saturn8601 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Do you really need a powerful Mac to do this? Wouldnt this work on a base model or even an old Windows computer? |
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| ▲ | conmod278 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nvidia is definitely working on a AI Rack machine fully built for on-prem uses for companies. |
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| ▲ | hectdev 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I like this train of thought. The inverse is saying that the cost of this computer is the value we give away to AI companies by doing compute on their servers with our data. And to take it another way, is the value to you, the cost of a small used car? |
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| ▲ | ericd 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > And to take it another way, is the value to you, the cost of a small used car? For me personally, not quite that valuable yet, but I think it's getting there quickly. Deepseek V4 Flash massively increased the value of local AI to me, to the point where it's displaced most of my Claude Code usage, its upcoming vision enabled version should bump it further, and it's only going to get better from there. It's a lot faster, but a lot of it is also feeling free to discuss things I wouldn't be comfortable sending to Claude, with the idea that that info is now theirs in perpetuity. I got my genome fully sequenced recently (it's cheap now!), and I get a battery of blood tests every year. Wouldn't do processing on any of that with Claude, but local AI? Totally great. And if I was running a company with a large cloud AI bill, I'd probably buy a wheelbarrow full of these macs. Cheaper, but also a more solid/predictable base to build on. |
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| ▲ | jeffreygoesto 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | brookst 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hey, a high school jock from 1982 wandered in to the computer lab... |
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| ▲ | iammrpayments 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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| ▲ | evanjrowley 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Members of my C-suite are doing this today on a raspberry pi, so the promise is not empty. Key difference is they aren't using local AI to do it. For the M5 Ultra, I suspect it would be valuable for someone who wants to achieve all the above and more, but with local AI due to data privacy concerns, and also not regulated data that comes with lots of other requirements solved by more traditional approaches. Three possibilities: 1. The type of person who deals with lots of intellectual property using expensive Mac-only desktop applications that aren't meant for servers, whose mind has formed positive associations with the term "Apple Intelligence", whose values overlap with Apple's lawyer's values, who actually stands to profit from having a Mac that's more powerful than anyone else's Mac, whose long-term goals are not impacted by planned obsolecense on a piece of computer hardware costing over $25k ($50k after 1TB SSD add-on). 2. Trust fund beneficiary who wants to show off, LARP as #1, prime target for Apple's marketing. 3. 2026 kit for billionare-class iPad babies. All brain rot content is 100% local AI-generated. Never have to speak to your children again. A true "we have dead internet theory at home" machine. | | | |
| ▲ | ericd 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Weird swipe, I'm not trying to sell it to you, this is just where I see it going, and why these things are going to sell (and why 512 gig M3 Ultra Mac Studios have skyrocketed in demand/price). It's not been an empty promise, in that it's been providing lots of very concrete value to us already. | |
| ▲ | marknutter 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What exactly is empty about any of what he wrote? |
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