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Same here. Have a Base M1 Air. Will trade that for M7 Base Air maybe if I can drag this one for a while. I can't go back to computers with noisy fans. It seems too last generation since the M1 launched.

I'm still astonished at how good this little thing is. The only problem I've had is the realization that 256GB isn't enough for me, but save for that I really have no excuse to upgrade. Can't justify a newer machine when this thing does everything I need!

Even for pretty intense workloads it rarely struggles or slows down. And even with some pretty intense battery degradation (reasonable, to be expected after five years of heavy use) it still runs for more than long enough for me on a single charge, although I really can't go to a coffee shop without a charger if I'm doing development work. All that, and it's dead quiet? I could never go back to the old ways!

I understand the thinking of "I'd like to do local inference on a laptop", but as long as I have a beefier Mac Mini sitting at home that can do all of that for me remotely, why bother?

I can see myself putting Asahi on this thing and giving it to my yet-unborn kids for them to finally drop it down a staircase someday. I've been rough with it and it hasn't broken yet!


I really do not know when I will replace my five year old M1 Pro. I'm not even starting to begin to get to the point where I start thinking about replacing this thing which I'm frankly astonished by.

I think the interesting part of that sort of success is that if/when this thing will start to lose a step (local inference would be cool, 16GB of RAM is starting to get a little tight, especially for rust builds and agentic programming), I really have no serious qualms about spending $5000+ on its replacement.


On a base M1 air, running local inference (non tool calling).

please share your setup

LM Studio Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct (Q4_K_M GGUF) with metal offloading

Is it safe to assume at this point that GNU and the kernel accept AI code but there is quality control compared to private companies ? What I am hearing (and what friends talk about) is that with AI everyone is hooked on quantity while quality has taken a back seat. I would assume that the quantity and features don't bother free software much so they can take their own sweet time with these things.

From a psychological standpoint, maybe customers thinking 26 is old on their brand new device in 3 months isn't exactly good. People might start expecting 27 in 3 months when actually 27 is going to be around for most of the year.


Kind of like a vechical's model year.


More customers is generally a good problem to have in most businesses. Just that the situation is very paradoxical given the supply shortages.


If those customers are in the market you want to develop. If they are not, money is money but if it comes from the wrong people it might slow you down.


Because the verification would also be done by something non deterministic and then that’s a paradox.


Feed the LLM output into a “deterministic” verifier, problem solved. That’s how LLMs verify their new mathematical proofs with lean.


>optimization is by far the easiest part of the process

Not if the whole thing is architected poorly but was a requirement of the hour so it became big. Then optimisation becomes an art, but definitely not the ‘easiest part of the process’


> Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia late last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, the Financial Times previously reported. Hugging Face said at the time it did not want a dominant investor that could sway decisions.

So instead they sold themselves to the same investor completely ?


I mean, it's $500M versus $13B.


Money always wins, sadly.


>local models run on your mac for your workflow.

10 years ago 32GB ram laptops sounded too much. 8 was enough. These days even I would get that much ram since it’s soldered. 64GB is higher end.

In a few years we should see such high end hardware commonplace. Working with a local LLM to get work done is the ideal way to go which has mostly hardware limitation as of now that gets solved in due time.


> 10 years ago 32GB ram laptops sounded too much. 8 was enough. These days even I would get that much ram since it’s soldered. 64GB is higher end.

Ten years ago I got 64gb of ram in my laptop, same as I have now. I bought both for business and personal use. System ram capacity hasn't changed much in 10 years.

It makes me curious how old you were 10 years ago.


> Ten years ago I got 64gb of ram in my laptop

We were definitely outliers that long ago. I put 64 GB in a MacBook Pro back in 2019, and that was (a) overkill for everything I ever ran on that machine, and (b) stupidly expensive by 2019 standards (albeit almost affordable by 2026 standards)


from a financial perspective they would assume one persons data is worth maybe 50$ a year (a random number) on top of maybe another 50$ in subscriptions they can sell. Assuming most such products service the business for up to 3 years, you are looking at an additional 300$ upfront that the business loses giving the data away to someone like Apple. Also the value gain from purely having such a business of subscriptions and data collection is probably another 100$ per customer. Thats close to 500$ for that thing.

Someone like Casio could just sell it for 500$ and collect their future cashflows right away. However, the customer turnout might be significantly less than 55$ they are selling it for.

So the only way to sell it for profit is to keep the data and make a subscription (which may or may not exist yet for Casio).


They could just sell it at an honest price with an honest profit. It’s an upsell from cheap F91Ws so they could have made more money just by selling me a thing that reads from Apple Health. It doesn’t even need to track steps itself.

I also disagree my email address and step data is worth $450 to them.

Let’s be honest. This thing is not innovative. It’s going to be using cheap commodity chips. Its selling point is nostalgia. I find it hard to believe it’s not already profitable at $55.


Are you sure it’s a bug ?

The crypto network you hosted should pay for itself in 10-20 years just like LLMs. Don’t worry. Consider Bank of America until then if you are good on credit score.


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