The Lenovo ThinkStation PX (a high-end dual-socket Intel Xeon Scalable workstation) supports up to 9 PCIe slots. The exact speeds and lane configurations depend on whether you have one or two CPUs installed, as slots are split between the two CPUs (and some require the second CPU).

This is the full configuration with both Intel Xeon processors installed:
4 × PCIe 5.0 x16 (full height, full length, up to 75W, double-width capable in some positions)
4 × PCIe 4.0 x16 (full height, full length, up to 75W)
1 × PCIe 4.0 x8 (full height, full length, 25W, open-ended)

Total: 9 slots (all full-height).

Single PSU1850WFull output at 200–240V AC input.
At 115–127V: still 1850W.
At 100–110V: limited to 1400–1500W.Dual PSUs – Redundant mode1850W (system total)One PSU acts as backup. The system is limited to the capacity of a single PSU for full redundancy. Hot-swap supported.Dual PSUs – Team mode2350WBoth PSUs actively share the load (no redundancy).
Highest power mode, ideal for heavy GPU/CPU configurations.
At lower voltages (100–110V) output is still capped accordingly.

f the child mentioned didn't give you consent to share details about them, don't.

I thought it was generally accepted that children under the age of 18yrs could not give legal "consent" to anything....?

Until the age of 18, for the most part legally, can't parents speak for and act for their children....?

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

What are the use cases for local AI models that actually require running on macOS? Surely a commodity x86 system is more appropriate?

Is there even the software support for LLMs on macOS?

Actually yes there is...

I'm still learning about this myself, but, from what I understand the M series of chips that Apple has come out with, with it having a CPU, GPU, and shared unified memory....it makes them uniquely capable of running local models on them...decently large models depending on how much you fork over for RAM. These M chips also have a special end unit for "intelligence processing" I think they call it.

The M5 chips just coming out look to be very good at this and it is speculated the M5 Ultra will be a high performance work horse.

Apple may have missed the mark for running AI, but the appear to have hit a home run on the hardware aspect of it.

I've seen demos on YouTube of someone hooking up like 4-5 Mac Studios that were maxed out M3 ultras I think and they were running extremely LARGE LLMs locally and getting cloud level numbers on them.

Of course these were like $10K each boxes.....but the level of model they were running would have cost my MANY more times trying to match them with NVIDIA GPU cards.....

i believe there are OSX friendly tools like ollama that make downloading, and running LLMs quite easy....and of course there's the latest sensation...OpenClaw, that folks are buying up Mac Minis for....to have multiple agents running using models of your. Choice (commercial clound or local) of models and giving them persistent memory, and ability to do a lot of things for you...depending on how comfortable you are with giving said agents long leashes and capabilities....

Do look a bit on YouTube on these topics....it's actually quite interesting.

These M chips are already giving the home user the capability to use models almost as large and on the cutting edge as the big companies.....more than enough for most users.

Right now, there's nothing x86 that can really match them...at least not for the money.

Look for a gaming monitor with no WiFi option

Do they make these in 65" or larger?

If not, that's not really useful....no one wants to have everyone in the family and/or guests huddled around a 25" monitor in the corner of the living room you know....

;)

An actual Pro machine. Just because the 2023 Pro was not a pro machine (It was a MacBook Pro in a cheese grater case), doesnt mean Apple hasn't ever had Pro machines. A Pro machine is a machine like a Lenovo PX or P8. They have dual Xeon, can go to 4TB of ram, and have 3 PCIE-16 slots. Now, some people are going to say "Who needs 4TB of RAM?" and I will reply with: If you have to ask, you aren't the target market for those, and that is kind of the point. Apple has abandoned that target market. It would rather sell iPads to 8 and 80 year olds.

local AI Models

Count the number of "former" intelligence officials on his company's board.

Then search for the many photos of him mouth-kissing his father and son (RIP).

They use both carrots and sticks to control compromised people.

I took mine apart and there were two separate display modules for the 4K screen with ribbon cables I didn't recognize so I just put it back together and stuck in an HDMI streaming stick flashed to LineageOS.

I got one around 2008. They were the best of the non-premium 1080p HDMI screens at the time.

The one I got had slightly better test review scores on display quality than the LG that year. The Sony was 20% better for 3x the price.

It lasted about twelve years and by then a bigger 4K with much brighter colors was half the cost in nominal dollars, so probably 1/4 the cost in real terms.

And by then cheap flashable streaming sticks were available as was pihole and fairly easy outbound NAT rewriting rules to keep the beasts contained.

A tangent on another historian of science and technology I enjoyed taking a course from and who wrote about information technology and who died relatively way too young:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "James Ralph Beniger (December 16, 1946 -- April 12, 2010) was an American historian and sociologist and Professor of Communications and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, particularly known for his early work on the history of quantitative graphics in statistics, and his later work on the technological and economic origins of the information society."

RIP Jim. Thanks for being an excellent -- and kind -- professor. And mentioning me and other students with thanks in your Control Revolution book.

And thanks also introducing me to the 1978 book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought" by Langdon Winner --- which just gets more relevant every day.
https://www.amazon.com/Autonom...
        "This study of the idea of technology out of control makes an important contribution to our understanding of the problems of civilization. The basic argument is not that some persons or groups promote technology against the public interest (true though that is), or even that our technology develops in its own way in spite of all our efforts to control it (also true in some respects). Rather, Winner is concerned with a more subtle effect: the artifacts that we have invented to satisfy our material wants have now developed, in size and complexity, to the point of delimiting or even determining our conception of the wants themselves. In that way, we as a civilization are losing mastery over our own tools.... 'As a source for readings and reflections on this problem, the book is rich and rewarding.... If it has a practical lesson, it is that of awareness: only by recognizing the boundaries of our socially constructed scientific-technological reality can we transcend them in imagination and then achieve effective human action.'"

Winner's book is perhaps a sort of antithesis of "The Soul of A New Machine"? In that sometimes technologists (I'm looking at your OpenAI and cohorts) can get so excited about problem solving and miss the big picture. Related humor:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes...
        "This reminds me of the engineer who is condemned to death, but as his turn approaches they find that the mechanism on the electric chair is no longer functioning. About to send everyone home, the engineer calls out "Wait! I think i can see the problem!""

I heard that Winner did not get tenure at MIT essentially because he suggested that the method of education used there was essentially blinding the MIT students to the social implications of what they were doing. A related book:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
        In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
        The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
        Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Anyway, I am so thankful for people like Jim Beniger, Langdon Winner, Michael Mahoney, and others who provided a larger perspective to technologists on what they were doing.

If I can find fault with "The Soul of a New Machine" from hazy recollections from 40+ years ago I don't think it did that. It's still informative though on how technology -- like now AI development -- can become addictive for techies with both good and bad aspects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      "The book follows many of the designers as they give almost every waking moment of their lives to design and debug the new machine."

It's maybe kind of like the difference between books that glorify warmaking and "winning" versus those that glorify peacemaking and "win/win/win"?

An example of the latter is "To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or an essay by Terry Dobson on Aikido:
https://livingthepresentmoment...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      "My teacher taught us each morning that the art was devoted to peace. "Aikido," he said again and again, "is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate other people, you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it." ..."

Or in a way Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" 1956 short story about wearable networked mobile computing for sharing knowledge that inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext which contributed to the creation of the web.

Or Alfie Kohn's "No Contest: The Case Against Competition":
https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont...

One of the most interesting things I overheard at lunch at IBM Research was something along the lines of "We hire the top people from the most competitive schools -- and then wonder why they can't get along and cooperate."

And I'd add, wonder why many technologists rarely take much time to think about the broader social implications of what they are doing.

And "Soul of a New Machine" -- from what I can remember of it -- exemplifies and celebrates that focused mindset.

I can thank someone (maybe Bruce Maier?) who posted this essay to the Lyrics TOPS-10 timesharing system I used in high school circa 1980 -- for helping me have some reservations about such narrow focus:
"The Hacker Papers [about some Stanford CS students]"
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/te...
      "As much as an essay, this is a story. It is a true story of people paying $9,000 a year to lose elements of their humanity. It is a story of the breaking of wills and of people. It is a story of addictions, and of misplaced values. In a large part, it is my own story. ..."

Also assigned reading in Michael Mahoney's course on the history of science and technology at Princeton circa 1984. Although I had read it already -- and found it inspiring.

RIP Tracy Kidder.

And also RIP Professor Mahoney who died in 2008 at the relatively young age of 69 -- just when a historian is typically getting very productive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://www.dailyprincetonian....

"Histories of Computing"
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/bo...
"Computer technology is pervasive in the modern world, its role ever more important as it becomes embedded in a myriad of physical systems and disciplinary ways of thinking. The late Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer scholar of the history of computing, one of the first established historians of science to take seriously the challenges and opportunities posed by information technology to our understanding of the twentieth century."

It's going to be a rough next decade with ongoing loss of pioneers of personal computing and those who wrote about them or who inspired them. People like Steve Jobs and Doug Engelbart and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon who have passed on years ago. Glad that Steve Wozniak and Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and so on are still hanging in there! A heartfelt thanks to all of them for giving us possibilities -- even if we may not be doing great things with them right now.

"Original architects [Wozniak] of the personal computer hate what it's become..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Steve Wozniak says he's "disappointed a lot" by AI and rarely uses it"
https://www.techspot.com/news/...

t depends on if they send you a tax notice or not. There was an outfit in Ohio that I used to purchase a lot of electronics from. One year I got a note from them listing my purchases, and that I would have to pay taxes on. That was a pain in the ass.

I think they got "caught", or had new accountants or something. But yes - if you can avoid the sales tax, it's a significant discount.

Interesting, I've never received any such notices....but most of my stuff is one off buys...not repeated purchases from a single site...

Touché! Good point on "actually" and whether it is qualified, thanks. I guess that word only fits in relation to there actually being a novel which I was referring to? But I agree I should have worded that better. The word "fictionally" might have been a better choice? Glad your comment sparked some tangential discussion by others.

Believe it or not, I STILL find it pays to compare Amazon to maybe smaller retailers....for shipping vs tax!!!

I find a lot of sellers out there that still do not charge sales tax and some times...that makes it cheaper than Amazon...