I'm also a little bummed that they seem to have dropped the Pro Display XDR. I wanted a 32" display as the main display, and then use my existing two Studio Display vertically as secondary on each side.
I guess we're going to see how the support for DP Alt-Mode will be, as I'm not sure how much bandwidth that can provide, so 120Hz might be out of the question. But for now that has been a simple way to get around the lack of multiple display inputs, you just needed a separate KVM switch for it.
I just want to natively hook up a PS5 without capture card latency... I would've bought a Studio Display years ago but can't bring myself to purchase a $2000 device-locked monitor.
Current hardware and standards have them backed into a corner.
No Mac today supports 6k 10-bit @ 120Hz because the DisplayPort 2.1 standard can't handle it uncompressed and that's the best Macs offer. HDMI 2.2 just came out last year and would likely be able to handle it over a TB5 cable, but again, no hardware support.
So say that Apple did update the Pro Display XDR, what would it have exactly? More dimming zones for sure, the new Studio XDR has 4x the dimming zones. But they are clearly not confident in OLED tech for standalone monitors yet, so no OLED.
Anyway, their updated XDR would be shipping with the same ol' 60Hz. Reviewers and social media and tech nerds would rip them to shreds, it'd be a PR clownshow. I can already see the "Apple really expects us to pay $7k for a 60Hz monitor in 2026" viral posts.
And Apple being Apple would never explain why a monitor is lacking a feature like 120Hz, because it would mean acknowledging people had higher expectations. So we get an expensive 5k 120Hz monitor instead.
I've been pretty happy with my ASUS ProArt PA32QCV (32", 6k, but only 60Hz). Kinda infuriating that Apple doesn't let you adjust third-party monitor brightness though (and my work disallows apps like BetterDisplay).
It’s exactly that. They are buying the base model just for that. You are not going to do much local AI with those 16GB of ram anyway, it could be useful for small things but the main purpose of the Mini is being able to interact with the apple apps and services.
16GB should be enough for TTS/Voice models running locally no ? I was thinking about having a home assistant setup like that where the voice is local and the brain is API based
Sure, that’s why I said maybe it’s useful for a few things. But the main reason people were recommending the Mini was for its price (base model) and having access to the Apple services for clawdbot to leverage. Not precisely for local AI.
No one is buying a base model Mac for local LLM. Everyone is forgetting the PC prices have drastically increased due to RAM and SSD. Meanwhile, Macs had no such price change… at least for the models that didn’t just drop today. Mac’s are just a good deal at the moment.
Yeah because Mac upgrade prices were already sky high, long before the component shortage. 32GB of DDR5-6000 for a PC rocketed from $100 to $500, while the cost of adding 16GB to a Mac was and still is $400.
I'm kind of curious how Apple's supply contracts actually work, because it's currently more attractive to buy a Mac with a lot of RAM than it usually is, relative to a PC. So if it's "we negotiated a price and you give us as much RAM as we sell machines" the company supplying the RAM is getting soaked because they're having to supply even more RAM to Apple for a below-market price.
But if the contract was for a specific amount of RAM and then people start coming to Apple more for high RAM machines, they're going to exhaust their contract sooner than usual and run out of cheap memory to buy. Then they have to decide if they want to lower their margins or raise the already-high price up to nosebleed levels.
Apple has accepted a 100% price increase for Samsung's LPDDR5X memory, with DRAM supply commitments secured only through the first half of 2026. Tim Cook acknowledged during the Q1 FY2026 earnings call that storage price increases would significantly impact Q2 gross margins.. Apple is evaluating ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) as new supply sources, attempting to rebuild pricing leverage through supply chain diversification.
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