AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

Right now, the small Mac is the powerful Mac mini that a lot of people are buying to run OpenClaw. It’s small. We’ve all likely seen it in person. Well, what if there was a Mac even smaller. Say the size of a soda can or, smaller, the size of a Rubik’s cube. Well, given the success of the MacBook Neo, estimated to ship 4-5 million units this year, it makes sense for Apple to release a Mac desktop base on future iPhone chips that can run MacOS. Given the jump in computing power of each generation of Apple Silicon, these would be perfect computers would be great to as a home computer for the family, especially the kids, or used as local AI servers. Of course, Apple can simply call it the Mac nano but Apple is mostly about looking forwards and the era of iPods like the iPod nano is now history. So, I am sure Apple will stick with the Neo in the future. So, Mac Neo it is. Would you be interested in it? You bet you would! And so would I! Let’s look at the possible uses.

The release of the Macbook Neo could usher in a new era of computing (not just mobile computing and I'll get to that later) with daily routine computing tasks happen on the Apple silicon while heavier tasks like AI is passed through to Apple's servers. The Neo is not only about hitting a price point with a Macbook that is not garbage. I think current Mac users will be very interested in the Neo as well. It may well be the smartest network computer ever. In the 1990s, Larry Ellison of Oracle was pushing a computing device called the "network computer" as a way for computing in the future. He was right, you know. Valued at $500, it was a way to shift the enterprise culture away from Windows and Intel towards and deploy millions of cheaper NC that can network to a cluster of servers over LAN (local area network). Sound familiar?

I vibe coded a local LLM running on my M3 iPad Air using Apple's models and it works. Sort of. I had known that Apple has its own models that run  devices to power Apple Intelligence. How well does it work? Definitely. Am I replacing the app I created instead of ChatGPT or Gemini? No way. Not even close. Not because I created some great AI chat app. In fact, it is missing a few important features that users have come to expect from an AI app. I am still fine-tuning it and I do not know if I will be sharing it with the world because I do not know how Apple feels about building an app around their models for people to use. What I do want to discuss here that it is surprisingly useful.  Let me first say that the LLM is very limited. I do not know whether it is because of the guardrails that Apple put into place on the models or it has something to do with how the app is built. I am still working on that part. What I do know is that I can have a regular conversation with it and ge...