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eddythompson80 | on: Apple has new Mac app coming to make running local AI models easy
It has nothing to do with generosity. Apple (and other laptop and PC makers) just have different segments of the market that they catered for. Plenty of people use laptops just to browse the web. They didn’t need a lot of RAM. Those who needed the RAM (usually branded as pro-users or “creators” or engineers) always had the option to get more RAM both from Apple and others at a premium. It’s just that ~32GB was the upper amount for almost any use case. Why would Apple put 256GB or 512GB in every laptop back when there was no use case for it?

Every scenario you described applies the same to a NAS. What if you need a file from your phone? Open your laptop? What if your partner needs a file? Open your laptop? The answer to all of them is either yes, or they have it on their laptop/phone too.

Apple (and other laptop makers) weren’t charging $300 for 4tb even before the shortage. They realized that not everyone needed that and they way overcharged for that but still less than today’s prices. People who needed it bought it even though it would have been a lot cheaper for them to build a NAS. A current-gen M5 is perfectly capable of doing decent tk/s given enough RAM. In 2 or 3 years it would be even more capable, it just needs RAM.

Plenty of people will use clou hosted models like they do with storage today. Plenty of people will build home servers for AI. Just like plenty of people have home NASs. But the number of people who just want a large SSD on their laptop make the previous group a rounding error and those people would rather have a beefy laptop or desktop with enough RAM in it. If anyone can solve the Phone<->Desktop communication seamlessly it’s Apple after all.

Unlike storage however, a lot of people are now aware of how much data collection tech and AI companies are doing and the idea that AI models are training on their personal photos and prompts is deeply unappealing to many. With just storage, what could Google or Apple do? Certainly they wouldn’t just print your photos and put them in an ad or on their website. But with AI models, it’s a different equation

flaunf221 | parent
> Every scenario you described applies the same to a NAS.

No. Files are your property. Inference is a service.

There's also the fact that working with files over network is often ill-advised and borderline impossible for some workloads. Even when that NAS is connected over wire and not wireless. Meanwhile even if you're on so-so connection, LLMs work great.

eddythompson80 | root | parent
And storage can’t be a service?
flaunf221 | root | parent
A. Like I said - unless you invented magical communication channel that will give latency and speed and and reliability of local NVMe drive to your remote NAS, no, remote storage can't replace local storage in full.

NAS is mostly good for backups, torrenting linux isos and serving them with Plex or Jellyfin. You are not installing software on your NAS instead of your machine. Or doing video editing. Or playing demanding games. I have file server at home and I still have ~8 TB of storage in my desktop, of which at leat 3 TB I can't move out.

B. If I have 1 TB of my work files, my wife has 1 TB of her work files, that's 2 TB of total storage. If both us need LLM, it doesn't mean we need twice the LLM as one of us.