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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

I want you to grab 100 people and tell them to set up LM studio and run a qwen model for anything productive. The average person won’t/can’t do this, especially when a better, faster model is a browser window away and (currently the case) is cheap or even free.

I consider myself pretty tech savvy as a non-engineer and I have to spend a lot of time making a local model actually useful. This feels like how everyone acts like it’s so easy for everyone to just adopt Linux.

If they’re lucky they’ll actually get it running, but good luck doing anything useful with it if you don’t know how to set up tool calls for web search and such. Their eyes will glaze over the moment you talk about MCP servers and api keys.

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Models have been useful for actual work for about 10 months now. Do you think no one will come up with the idea of selling an appliance with software preloaded? Like Synology or QNAP, except if it's this disruptive of a market, you can expect Dell, HP, etc. to join in as well.

I did not say the models weren’t useful. I am saying running local models is not turnkey like browser experiences with the big companies and introduces significant friction - and they generally aren’t as fast as good, which is true. Plus it’s a whole skill set to optimize them.

This sounds like a variation of the same problem. Just another form of vendor lock in and exploitation. This is not the same as “running a local model yourself.”

Like you mention synology - they’ve gone the wrong direction the last few years. My employer won’t buy from themfor a reason.

My point is there's apparently a big market here, but it's also new. You didn't have Compaq, Gateway, Dell, Asus, HP, Vaio, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Samsung, Beelink, AOOSTAR, etc. competing in the PC clone market in 1993 yet either. Give it maybe more than a year to develop.

If it's important, I can't see why today's (and tomorrow's) computer vendors wouldn't move into the market. If it's not important, then it's not.

The NAS market is probably small because for most consumers, a single SSD already suffices. But even with that, you can already apparently buy from vendors that sell vanilla TrueNAS preloaded. Just like you can buy OpenWRT routers. Or even open Linux-based retro gaming handhelds designed to mimic a Gameboy Advanced SP. And soon GrapheneOS phones. I assume your employer buys from someone else?

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