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Comment by nullbio | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple. When this started spreading a day or two ago, it was all from no-name spam media sites that are paid to publish articles. They all claimed "a source" is where they got the intel, without specifying the source. It was spreading like wildfire on socials.

The same thing happened with Mac Mini's and OpenClaw. Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple marketing bots (you could tell by looking at their post history, where they would drop "Mac Mini" into every conversation they could across all different subreddits and unrelated topics). Then it became fairly common.

So Apple's marketing department is seemingly using the same strategy again. Because still, it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim.

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People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.

People really were talking about and buying Minis due to OpenClaw, because they wanted something that was on all the time and had access to all their stuff in macOS. Occam’s Razor.

These companies absolutely do have people who's job it is to sit on social media and promote these products, its marketing 101

Having worked at multiple large companies more often than not the truth is there are 5 levels of approval for every tweet that goes out and writing a single blog post can take months.

The smart companies out source their gorilla marketing to a third party, having realized their own inadequacies.

The problem with outsourcing your gorilla marketing is that it can cost big bananas with a hard to quantify return

I remember talking to a person who worked in marketing Kingsford, which at the time had like over 90% of the marketshare for USA charcoal. They had a marketing budget that was willing to spend money on any ol' stupid idea because they had already won & just wanted to stay on top by getting their name out there.

Guerilla marketing, but never mind, worth it for the bananas joke.

The original comment had the typo.

It not the bananas joke.

I worked in community marketing for few rather large software companies. The struggle is real. Almost every CMO I worked for seemed to make it their mission to squeeze any life out of social conversation with actual users and replace it with bland, boring "on message" communication about synergies for leveraging pivots enabling disruption at enterprise scale.

For every Tweet that goes out on the company account and every blog on the company blog. But that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about vague sources like low-impact social media snippets getting cited on low-reputation blogs until someone more reputable comments on the apparent trend. There are absolutely marketing people who do that "unofficially".

Different ballpark. Original comment is about shadier methods of marketing not official stuff landing on the primary domain of Apple. I have 1st knowledge of a travel tech company laying off their entire marketing team during COVID that then got hired by a brand new company to find different and riskier approaches on how to keep the funnel alive despite the travel restrictions without direct risk of exposure for the brand.

Yeah and why they outsource that? First is effectiveness of reach as you mention. Second is the ability to have a clean official record.

Wake me up when an extremely capitalistic company, in the past caught with dirty hands on numerous topics, will reject increasing massively a legal revenue stream with no strings attached. Right, exactly how to become a trillion dollar company and keep it.

I grok that specifically for apple their echo chambers do majority of certain work themselves, but claiming with 100% confidence thats all is a bit of a stretch. If I was a personal close friend with their head of marketing, I would maybe believe that. In any other case, hard logic prevails over anonymous online claims.

It's Guerrilla Marketing. It comes from guerrilla warfare, not gorillas the large ape.

It was a joke referencing the typo in the message they responded to.

Not in this thread, the joke is in an aunt comment.

That only applies to tweets that are published on behalf of the company, not tweets from sockpuppet accounts that have no direct connection to the company and are made to look like a regular consumer.

Tbf comment you replied to never said they were direct hires. Outsourced workers sitting around is possible. You seem to have customized their more general statement

Can confirm though, being acquainted with PR people in the field for >20 years; everything on TV is scripted these days.

Chatted with some of my PR friends coworkers over the years at Christmas parties and the like. They claimed stunts during MTV specials, other "candid" moments from the last 20-25 well known to pop culture were actually organized by a PR company they worked at (never that they worked on that project; such work was reserved for whatever PR rockstar PR firm hired)

But all this too could be PR sales pitch to impress; society is full of hearsay to titillate

Or they hire an agency and the agency does all the gray-hat stuff, and apart from the marketing person who hired the agency most of the company probably has no idea what the agency is up to.

Yeah, through multiple layers of approvals. Not shtposting on hacker news.

It is multiple layers of approval, but there is no reason to think they wouldn't approve this. At least not from the limited information I have. The approval is about covering themselves, so if they won't get sued (either because it is legal or they can cover their tracks) they will approve it. There is more than lawsuits they track, but the exact set of things is different for each company and I have no idea what Apple works on.

Thus this could be Apple marketing, or it could be someone independent.

Shit posting looks like natural use of social media so it's actually preferred

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...

“I have worked over 100 of these kinds of campaigns and never had it come back on the client. I’ve been doing viral marketing and reputation management since 2005. =In the past year I’ve worked for a major entertainment network to magnify a rumor within sports entertainment, as well as damage control on a rumor that came out of an actor being hired on a film before the production company was ready to announce that casting.”

If apple indeed use shit posting, there has to be several layers of subcontractors in between for plausible deniability. Apple's own comms guidelines strictly prohibits pay-per-review, manipulative, "shit posting" style practices.

They have social media PR people and influencer shills and all that.

But not for such niche products and such niche use cases.

To promote the latest airpods or iphone, yes.

Sounds amazing, where can I apply for one of these jobs?

> who's job it is to sit on social media and promote these products

Oh shit, I didn't know Marketing exists! Different thing from what OP described.

Companies that ignore everything besides their legacy cash cow tend to go downhill. I'm sure there are at least a few people at Apple who's main concern is marketing the Mac mini, and those people are highly definitely trying to cook up new marketing strategies all the time

I'm sure there are people dedicated to marketing the Mac Mini, but seeing as Apple has had trouble keeping it in stock from demand, I doubt they spend too much on it. And considering Apple is supply constrained, there is no benefit to trying to increase demand above supply levels.

I think the Mac Mini is legit popular and is actually being used for local AI use cases, especially Open Claw.

Beyond that, Apple is at capacity for SoCs and ram, and the Mac Mini is going to have a ceiling of how much of Apple's allotment they are willing to give it.

Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation.

If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider:

1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but something. Maybe drum up demand for products they can’t keep in stock anyway?

2. Media outlets chase clicks, and when fringe media finds a hit, mainstream media follows because you can always write a story about the fact that other people are writing stories. Low cost, proven clicks, nobody yells at you for missing a trend.

Which is more likely? I’ll cheerfully stipulate Apple is pure evil, serves cooked babies in their cafeterias, whatever it takes to discuss based on reason rather than big-evil-corpos.

It’s not complicated psyops. It’s basic marketing.

”Oh wow our product is so amazing we can’t keep up with demand you better buy before we run out”

Exactly, I'm amazed at the naivety on display here.

To be fair, the very reasonable take is that if there was guerilla marketing campaigns, they are most likely being handled by external agencies and not Apple directly.

And, this isn't making them look particularly dumb. It is making them look dumb the way that most people make themselves look "bad" when they list their biggest weakness in a job interview. Silly Apple, not seeing how fantastically great their product is and how much people are dying to have it.

The most serious point in favor of this being organic nonsense is just the sheer lack of any actual evidence that it isn't, but the case is being wildly overstated, in part because we're using the non-standard term "psyop" to describe what I'd consider to be mundane marketing practices.

At this point I feel like there is no reasonable way to draw a conclusion. However, viral marketing like this is common and in fact, incredibly easy. This is done through PR services (and even shadier sources) all the time... I'm a bit surprised people on HN are unfamiliar with how utterly common the practice is, it wasn't new when I first came into contact with the industry over a decade ago. The hallmark of this is very similar articles appearing suddenly through the Internet and in the news. It's often not just random plagiarism. This is why the news is constantly running stories about how suits are back in vogue and other vain crap like that.

do people on here not know that things like forbes 30 under 30 are a pay to play game? do they not know that 90% of car influencer reviews are carefully curated by mrketing agencies? and yes apple is notoriously controlling about it too which is the reason to why it is unlikely to be apple driving this.

30 under 30 is mostly just scammers (see how many end up in prison) so that tracks.

If I had gotten into 30 under 30 I might have sued.

> a complicated psyop

It's not a “complicated psy-op”, promoting viral stories is the basics of marketing in the age of social media…

Complicated psyop? It's called "Personas" and a few of my coworkers wrote a few of them just this morning.

You simply promote or finance marketing materials (blog posts, podcasts, youtube videos) with a clear idea of the kind of people you want to reach, and if your "Persona" (that is, ideal customer or evangelist) model is accurate enough, they will talk endlessly about your product for free without having to directly connect with them.

That's very different from faking a bunch of excited chatter and making up happy customers, which is what the original comment was about:

> Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple [...]

There's nothing masterful or careful about it. If it were, no one would notice it. This is as obvious and sloppy as it gets. No different to startup founders paying social media marketing companies $10-20k to promote their slop products all over X and Reddit with their army of AI generated blogs and news sites and social media accounts. This happens on the daily, and it is not a secret - every founder knows it, and most founders use it at some point. So to think this doesn't happen at larger scales with bigger companies is pure naivety.

It has nothing to do with "big-evil-corpo", it happens at all levels. For some reason you're trying to claim that "big-evil-corpo" are the rare exception, which is ridiculous.

Tbh, I won't be surprised that 1 is true; it does not look that far fetched. Organizing scarcity is already a well-established strategy in the marketing playbook; there are examples of other big organization playing a way longer game to conquer a market (see for instance how Japan became a coffee nation https://www.thetakeout.com/how-nestle-brought-coffee-to-japa...)

> Apple does not have a psyops division

No, but they have marketing people, and marketing people in my experience (even in "big" corporate America) have personal (anonymized, but just created themselves) accounts they do stuff like this on all the time.

> Apple does not have a psyops division

This sounds exactly like the kind thing that someone running a psyop for Apple would say.

This is exactly the kind of paranoid conspiracy thinking I was talking about. If you see red yarn between everything, you're impervious to reality.

Honestly, I'm an Apple user since 1988 and shareholder. I use my full-ass name on hn. I wish they'd give me money to promote the brand, but in reality they have something even more valuable than paid shitposting: authentic word of mouth and devoted users. That comes out of the product, not the marketing department, and it takes years.

>This is exactly the kind of paranoid conspiracy thinking I was talking about.

This sounds exactly like the kind thing that someone running a psyop for Apple would say.

Flawless logic! I can’t believe I got busted again… The other lizard people are going to be so disappointed. I’m already on probation for leaking the fact that the Earth is flat and bungling the JFK thing. Now they’ll probably pull me off the microwave mind reading project too.

This is a beautiful example of a technique called poisoning the well.

I prefer the term "unwitting accomplice", others prefer the term "useful idiot".

Ah yes, have you read Seth Godin's "1000 unwitting accomplices?" In Marketing 101 classes, the first session is usually "Recruiting Useful Idiots."

You seem to have product marketing all figured out!

I was buying my own Mac specifically for LLMs around this same time, didn't care about OpenClaw, but people I knew IRL were immediately asking me about buying a Mac for OpenClaw, and whether they should get a Mac Mini or what, and these were not programmers or tech nerds. There was genuine hype. Macs are lower cost alternatives to Nvidia GPUs.

Yeah, though most people weren't even running local LLMs, they just heard you need a Mac Mini to run OpenClaw so they got one.

I think it might have been a mix of the two to be fair, but probably a lower portion of devs. For example, I have a Macbook Pro with an M4 Pro but in about two more years once I've put aside money for a newer laptop I'll wait for the next "updated" models and buy another Mac just for the inference, the speed improvements and the unified RAM.

> Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand

Most companies have that division. It's called marketing.

Whether it not it takes the precise form that each person here is imagining in their respective heads?

Every large corporation has a psyops division. It's called a marketing department.

Apple has a history of feeding rumors sites fake information to weed out leaks. They take it very seriously.

Wouldn’t put it past them to pay strategic influencers to feed social media fake information to generate hype. As a way to make the leak ecosystem work in benefit of the marketing department (or psyops division if you want to call it that).

> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.

No, Apple is not content with however much it makes from the iPhone. That’s why it stuffed cringeworthy ads in Apple News, filled the App Store screen with ads and is now doing the same with Apple Maps. It’s a company focused on making money through every avenue possible, even if it means being shortsighted and losing the goodwill of developers and users.

and there's a goddam ad at the start of every apple TV show, and macOS forces ads on you via the SETTINGS app! (both such ads are for other apple products ... still, it's an ad)

It doesn't matter how much cash the iPhone does, some people have "boost the sales of the Mac Mini [or other product]" in their OKR.

True, but so what? Is the idea that they sponsored the creation of OpenClaw and Claude Cowork, CIA-style? Or is the idea that this (presumably lower-level, given that they're working on the mini) marketing employee had a large discretionary budget and was able to identify the trend and immediately capitalize on it with no corporate bottlenecks, mobilizing a series of commenters to underscore the narrative that you need a Mac mini to get into AI?

The narrative — ie being associated and seen as an AI-winner — is worth billions of market capitalisation at Apple scale.

I don’t think there’s a direct guerilla marketing division, but I would absolutely bet money that Apple’s marketing/comms team is encouraging creators, influencers, etc to promote Mac Mini and Mac Studio for AI.

And when those teams brief and speak to people, even on confidential terms, they almost expect some things to get leaked; or will keep sharing it with more people until a third party leaks what they want leaked.

So they may seed things like “super confidential, we were internally really surprised by the demand for AI”. Intentionally.

It's just hilarious the degree to which people see a thing happen sometimes and begin to believe, despite not just evidence but plenty of counterfactuals, that it's happening every time.

Might not be in the particular case, but what are your thoughts on the following (just to name a few recent examples): Cambridge Analytica, Net Neutrality, DMCA?

> People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies.

This is absolutely how how corporate America works. I don't know about Apple specifically, but most in companies with a marketing departement, you can bet eating your hat that they do.

I have a friend at Apple, working in retail front lines. He was tasked by his stores' management to put his personal Mac Mini to use with OpenClaw in order to familiarize himself with what can be done with it, and then use that experience to inform his direct recommendations to customers. He even had an internal checklist to fill out once he'd done his own installation.

I think you're radically misunderestimating the power of the retail front lines. Folks leave the Guru Bar with what they see as 'bleeding edge ways to use Apple tech', and Apple know it ..

Obviously they do not, the same way Amazon isn't treating their drivers poorly, it is just third party contractors "surprisingly" not doing their job well.

> Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies.

Of course not, they outsource that.

Also many startups and companies are now building racks of Minis and Studios to automate build pipelines, testing, do local inference, run agents etc. I've personally seen this in at least 3 companies out of the half a dozen I've interacted with. The demand is certainly there.

You're suggesting there is no chance that Apple is engaging in guerilla marketing, which you discredit by referring to as a "psyop" when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice, because they sell a lot of iPhones?

I mean, it's pretty much just blind conjecture that they may be marketing in stealth in the first place, so really who knows on that front. But you gotta be smoking something to think Apple doesn't want their low margin products to sell like hot cakes. I mean sure, they'd love even more for their high margin products to sell like hot cakes (like the Mac Minis that are useful for AI like in this story), but the low margin ones literally make up for it in volume so you'd sure hope they sell well.

They are a trillion dollar company, that wasn't by accident. They are marketing and sales monsters. Arguably of the big companies, they are the ones that have mastered consumer perception the best of any company on Earth. They would like all of their products to like crazy always.

You're right, Apple has a long history with guerrilla marketing, especially gray-area tactics like bots and paid commenters. Even though there is no evidence of this, it "feels" true, so it must be true, right? Why wouldn't they do it, after all? They don't really care that much about protecting the brand, and these types of tactics have zero chance of blowing up in their face.

Even though they can and do pay for the highest-profile placements, they also do shady guerrilla marketing "just in case," because they have a whole lab that just analyzes channel efficiency, and they've discovered that anonymous comments on Reddit in random channels have 8.7x the effectiveness of YouTube ads, especially among the coveted Pale Incel demo.

This is how they got to be a trillion dollar company after all! It was marketing, not product.

Paul Graham discusses this in his essay The Submarine: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

As you say, Apple would not be a trillion dollar company without a great product, but you can build something great and also aggressively market it. Nobody is saying they got where they are just with marketing.

Why do you care so much that this is a totally realistic argument? You don't personally have to like it, it's not about how it makes you feel as a fan of Apple.

Because it is ludicrous and the tin foilers should be called out.

It absolutely isn't. It is only ludicrous if you hold Apple to some weird standard of ethics that they absolutely do not deserve. If you think this practice isn't common, that's purely a matter of ignorance on your part.

Yes, basically. [0]

[0]: Obligatory https://xkcd.com/386/

> when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice

Practiced by Apple? Just because someone is doing it doesn’t mean that every company does it.

Or an agency on their behalf, but either way, there's really no way for us to really know, due to the stealthy nature of this sort of advertising.

Occam's Razor would be that the tens of thousands of marketers that Apple hires (contractors or otherwise) utilize the most obvious and effective strategy for making sales: Spamming the internet and manipulating perceptions. Their marketing personnel don't sit there thinking "well I'm only hired to market the low-margin Macs, so I guess I'll do nothing today."

Your argument is basically: Why would they try and make more money when they can just sit back and get rich off iPhone's.

That's certainly not a tenable position.

> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.

Why would they produce "low-end, low-margin Macs" then?

I know multiple people who bought mac minis just to run claude cowork on them

Oh sweet summer child. These marketing firms(the ones Apple hires) in 2026 are beyond devious.

> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.

That… isn't how capitalism works…

Tim apple already has a few million dollars, why would he want need any more?

He's in a competition with his friends on who gets the highest score.

- Sent from my iPhone

I am using Mac studios for local inference, but not for openclaw. It was simply the best bang for the buck at the time, and the software side of things has gotten even better since then. I haven’t run the pricing comparison but I have a feeling with the direction they’re heading that it’s better to hold off for m6 as it may assuage various bottlenecks if you are latency sensitive.

Reportedly, the M6 will not get pro, max or ultra editions. Instead Apple will go straight to M7 for these.

The Pro, Max, and Ultra chips boil down to different combinations of their "Super", performance, and efficiency cores along with the number of GPU cores. The Max is two Pros bolted together. Thus far they've skipped generations of Ultra chips but Pro and Max versions of all the M-series chips have been released.

I can see them not releasing an M6 Ultra but no reason not to see Pro and Max versions of the M6.

Some reporting seems to reject that btw: https://wccftech.com/apple-m6-pro-m6-max-soic-mh-wmcm-packag...

>It was simply the best bang for the buck at the time,

I wouldn't have a problem with Apple fanboys if they just stated that they like Macs, but for some reason you have no problem with just straight up LYING. Or at least being so deluded that you state things that are so easy to prove false as fact.

I.e, 600 gb/sec is dogshit slow compared to vram speeds.

You could not get 500GB of VRAM for less than $100k at the time. It was the absolute best bang for the buck as far as local inference and fine tuning. I am not sure why you are so hostile when I specifically called out “latency sensitivity” as far as prompt preprocessing and various other bottlenecks. I run Linux.

The reason Im so hostile is because it personally irks me when a technical forum like HN is filled with Apple-slop being passed off as technical discussion. Its fine to like Apple for what it is, the ecosystem, the industrial design, the advantages of dedicated hardware with specialized software to extend battery life. But instead, there is Apple-slop, which is basically starting with the assumption that whatever you can do on Mac is the standard, and that Macs are great because they fit that standard.

Being able to run frontier models at <10 tok/sec is just an excersize in showing that you can afford a Mac. Its useless for any real tasks. Gemma4 is on par with a lot of the older frontier models like Gemini Flash, and you can run that at 100+ tok/sec on a 2x3090 rig which costs way less than even top of the line Mac Studio.

  I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple.

I'm not. I have an M4 Mac Mini running 24/7 so I can use it as my Claude Code machine when I'm on the go.

Why would they do a guerilla marketing campaign now if their Macs are generally sold out despite nearly doubling the Mac Mini price in the last few months?

I don’t get it. You don’t need a Mac mini to use Claude Code on the go, any home server with stable internet is enough. Was it the marketing?

Either they're running Claude Code with a local LLM (technically possible via dev tools albeit unsupported), or they genuinely have no idea why the Mac is good for AI and just bought it because they were told it was good for AI.

The former honestly sounds like a nightmare because the Mac Mini can run some big models but not that big, and Claude Code will guaranteed stuff your context with 35k tokens, and all the Anthropic proprietary tool-deferral and tool-search stuff is meant to be handled inside the inference engine in a way that I don't think any open-source engine like vLLM can support right now (much as I wish it did). So you have a huge context on startup, broken functionality, and an underpowered LLM struggling through it all. Not to mention I have no idea how any of the sidecar LLM stuff is meant to work in that context (e.g. auto-mode classifier and even things like dynamic session naming). Am I missing something?

I don't want to assume it's the latter, I want to be charitable to other people. But.

  Either they're running Claude Code with a local LLM (technically possible via dev tools albeit unsupported), or they genuinely have no idea why the Mac is good for AI and just bought it because they were told it was good for AI.

Neither. I use Claude Code subscription through my Mac Mini when I’m on the go.

I develop using a Macbook primarily. Having a Mac Mini keeps the environment the same when I'm on the go. Plus, any home server would not be as efficient or fast as a Mini with an M4.

Of course it was. I’ve been using Mac minis since they were released and the mania the past year or so is unreal.

So your argument against this being guerilla marketing is that you bought a Mac Mini after seeing the guerilla marketing, to do the thing that you didn't need a Mac Mini to do.

No I bought it over a year before this “marketing”.

I’ve found a new use for it which I’m assuming others have as well.

I'm not so sure. You could literally see configuration options start disappearing from the Mac Mini ordering flow over time as demand increased and supply dried up.

"…but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple marketing bots…"

You could make your case easily if you had some links to these.

(I understand though it's not likely something one remembers at the time to cache away. Still, without that I have little to go on.)

I personally know 5 people using Macs with their unified memory for OpenClaw / Hermes.

Also the demand is really there. Or do you think Apple just removed certain options from sale for fun in stead of RAM being out of stock?

> Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw

This is rather revisionist. A lot of the early OpenClaw publicity was about connecting it to iMessage (which was really only possible on Mac hardware at the time)

It's not. This article is weirdly light on details. The original source article from The Information apparently mentions that companies like OpenAI are buying them up to run RL. So it's yet another case of AI companies buying all the compute.

* I say apparently because The Information wants you to sign up for access to the article, but I found this mentioned in multiple summaries of the article like this one [1].

[1]: https://tech-insider.org/openai-mac-buying-apple-supply-shor...

Apple's marketing isn't that smart. They're very traditional. You give them way too much credit.

Any justification for this claim?

The easiest one to think about is that the larger the company (or division), the more likely there are leaks. Think about how much as leaked in Apple's hardware or software division. If they were doing incredibly underground marketing, someone would've bragged on LinkedIn or to a reporter.

It's not surprising marketing for a large corporation leans toward the bland. This is not the scrappy Apple from the turn of the century.

All historical evidence.

Not exactly guerilla marketing, but decades of traditional marketing bearing fruit in people who fetish-ize Apple products, need to socially signal how cutting edge thy are, and have too much disposable income.

I follow a lot of people on Twitter who were one-upping each other about how much hardware they had bought (now gathering dust0 to run their Claw assistants. Those same people are now buying some toy robot duck?

Additional source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpqGf0m5FaQ

> it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim

can you approximate plausibility by the wait time for a maxed-out config?

The Internet has magnified the "my church leader said that gay people are actually demons" effect. Or "if you throw salt over your shoulder you're protected" or "wolves have alphas of the pack".

People don't fact check in the first place, they don't check that facts came from a trusted source, they don't check if information has changed the last time they got it from a trusted source, etc.

Is it just me or is it scary that it seems to me as if the average person just takes everyone's word for most things, as long as the person telling them is a "trusted source" based only on tribal lines?

It's not, AI labs and scalers are buying up all the mac mini's and mac studios.

There are also all the companies building iOS apps that need mac mini compute clusters for CI/CD because of dumb Apple requirements (ask me how I know..).

But this isn't a new use or a significant market share. Running models is both.

Alex Finn was using and touting Mac Minis hehe

He started that whole trend!

This may be your experience

For mine I was on the fence - waited an hour or so and the delivery date went from early oct to 10-12 weeks so i decided to wait on the 512gb version

The openclaw crowd were just former cryptobros onto their next grift: performative posts about AI that would generate enough views/engagement/ad revenue to pay for the hardware… assuming they were even telling the truth about having it at all.

None shipped anything of value. Same with anyone claiming to be running dozens or hundreds of agents 24/4.

Agreed. It’s also nonsense. You need an NVidia gpu to do any serious work.

This is straight up a conspiracy theory.

In the sense that publishing marketing-driven press releases is a conspiracy between the publishers and the marketing team, I guess?

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