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Comment by ProllyInfamous | Hacker News Reader

The 16GB (base model) M2 Pro Mini, despite its overall awesomeness (running DiffusionBee.app / etc)... does not meet Minimum System Requirements (Apple Silicon requires 32GB RAM).

So now I have to contemplate shopping for a new mac TWICE in one year (never happened before).

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https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI - runs on Mac silicon, can squeeze out SDXL images on a 16gb mac with SSD-1B or Turbo models.

Thank you for this link.

Currently using SDXL (through Huggingface Diffusers) on an M1 16GB Mac. Takes on average 4-5mins to generate an image. It's usable.

Good lord. I can get a 2048x2048 upscaled output from a very complex ComfyUI workflow on a 4090 in 15 seconds. This includes three IPAdapter nodes, a sampling stage, a three-stage iterative latent upscaler, and multiple ControlNets. Macs are not close to competitive for inference yet.

I mean, a 4090 would appear to cost $2000, and came out a year ago; it has about 70bn transistors. The M1 could be had for $700 for a desktop, $1000 as part of a laptop, came out three years ago, and has 16bn transistors, some of which are CPU.

An M3 Ultra might be a more reasonable comparison for the 4090.

24GB cards weren't always $2000. I've seen people on this very forum [1] who brought two 3090s for just $600 each.

Agree the prices are crazy right now, though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37438847

A very fair comment. I use an M2 MBP with max specs. It’s very powerful, but the Nvidia card draws a whole lot more power…

When choosing a machine with non-expandable RAM, you went with the minimum configuration? That's a choice, I suppose, but the outcome wasn't exactly hard to foresee.

At the time, it seemed that ANY upgrade made the M2Pro mini cost-inaffective.

One of my coller Q12023 ChatGPT experiences was having it help me "reason through" which machine was most "upgrade-proof," dollar-for-dollar.

Now in Q42023, I would definitely had made the decision to purchase an M2 Studio (base model) instead — those additional upgrades (VS M2Pro mini config, sim.) were much more cost-effective. Overall, I'm extremely satisfied with my M2Pro base model.

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