Apple Says Mac Studio and Mac Mini Will Be in Short Supply for Months
macrumors.com

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88 points

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tosh

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5 hours ago

74 comments

apexalpha ・ 3 hours ago

As I play more with Agents like Hermes and Openclaw I've come to realise these truly are the new GUI.

I have Radarr and Sonarr running on my homeserver. I switched my model to cloud Claude, pasted the API docs of said apps and told it to make 'search, add, remove, update, and statusupdate' available in a small MCP.

It took 7 minutes, I switched back to my local Qwen3.6 model and I haven't touched the webinterface of Radarr and Sonarr in weeks. I just ask the model.

Everyone now gets a chat with my (telegram) AI bot in stead of relaying requests through me.

I have been looking into a decent local device. DGX Spark, Mac Studio etc... I think I am willing to spend on this, it really does feel like the 'iPhone moment' for me: I am not going back to individual front-ends for everything when my AI bot is a unified frontend for all API based software.

  • echelon_musk ・ an hour ago

    > in stead of relaying requests through me.

    Overseerr is a thing.

    • apexalpha ・ an hour ago

      1) You're missing the point. Overseer can do this, yes. AI model can work with ANY REST API.

      2) How does Overseerr help? I've never really understood it if I could give my family access to Overseerr over a VPN I could just give them sonarr / radarr directly.

  • klueinc ・ 2 hours ago

    How are you handling secrets? I want hermes to do stuff on the internet but I am not enthused about dumping the requried keys in .env.local or using process wrapper services like infisical yet. Encapsulating hermes in a docker sandbox feels slippery and I'm always left thinking if i've hardened my server enough.

    • apexalpha ・ an hour ago

      Openclaw uses the API key for Sonarr / Radarr, no secrets management (yet).

      Though egress is heavily restricted for OpenClaw and everything is behind a FW.

rbanffy ・ 3 hours ago

I was hoping for an M5 mini and Studio ahead of time, but I guess I'll have to wait a little longer.

Maybe by the time they sort it out there will be an M5 Ultra Mac Studio with a full terabyte of RAM.

  • apexalpha ・ 3 hours ago

    If I start the application process now I might have my second mortgage approved by the time said 1TB RAM M5 Ultra is available.

    • yomby ・ an hour ago

      You own a house?!

      • ionwake ・ an hour ago

        The second mortgage is to pay for the first mortgage

      • apexalpha ・ an hour ago

        Might have to trade it in for the new Mac Studio.

bottlepalm ・ 5 hours ago

The Neo as well, I just need a Mac to test with and finding one is ridiculous. Hackintoshes are hell to setup and run like crap. I tried https://www.macincloud.com/ and that was a waste of time. Someone take my money.

  • montebicyclelo ・ 5 hours ago

    Ever considered second hand slightly older gens? Even M1 is still great for many use cases. E.g. often corps are selling them on Ebay, in pretty good condition.

    • morphle ・ 5 hours ago

      Indeed, ton's of refurbished for $250-$300

      • bottlepalm ・ 4 hours ago
        ・ 9 more

        Yea it does look like 5 year old M1's are going for $300 on eBay, but man that's painful a 5 year old machine for that much when you could get a new Neo or Mini for $600, if only you could buy them. I probably should just get the M1, test and sell it back on eBay. Thanks.

        • deaux ・ 4 hours ago

          If you're going to do any kind of work on it I'd choose a 5-year old 16 GB memory M1 over a Neo every single time. 8 GB is what's painful. The CPU difference is very small anyway.

        • MikeNotThePope ・ 3 hours ago

          If a $300 Mac can do the job, a $600 Mac is overkill.

        • brailsafe ・ 4 hours ago
          ・ 5 more

          If you literally just need to borrow one, I'd just buy an Air from Apple directly and then return it within the 14 day window. I'll sometimes do this if I need an extended repair on my personal one, or there's a new mac I want to try.

          • valleyer ・ 4 hours ago
            ・ 4 more

            This is unethical.

            • wildrhythms ・ 19 minutes ago

              Glad to see the hackers have arrived to defend a billion dollar corporation

            • nirava ・ 3 hours ago
              ・ 2 more

              If the return policy explicitly allows "change of mind", I'd say it's in the gray area. Though ofc it isn't sustainable if everyone starts doing this. I assume there's a ((returns:buys)/payment identity) metric to ban the largest offenders.

              Also, there should be some universally accepted way to have access to your data and a secure personal computer in the duration your device is getting repaired.

              • chongli ・ 18 minutes ago

                Also, there should be some universally accepted way to have access to your data and a secure personal computer in the duration your device is getting repaired.

                Yes, exactly. When getting your car repaired there’s loaners or rentals to allow you to keep driving. Why isn’t a loaner computer a standard thing?

        • yreg ・ 4 hours ago

          Neo isn't much better than M1.

  • scboffspring ・ 5 hours ago

    Not sure what happened to you with macincloud, but I used scaleway hosted Mac mini M1 a couple years ago for a self hosted CI server, and it was working very nicely.

    • bottlepalm ・ 4 hours ago

      They don't really advertise that you can install nothing on the machine. It's super restricted.

      • ZiiS ・ 4 hours ago

        I think you can at $50/month

  • hurricanepootis ・ 5 hours ago

    I remember 4 years ago I was able to setup MacOS in a virtual machine. Maybe you can setup an Intel copy of MacOS on a qemu/kvm virtual machine?

    • bottlepalm ・ 4 hours ago

      I tried this, https://oneclick-macos-simple-kvm.notaperson535.is-a.dev/, it wasn't bad for 'one click install' and got the VM running, it was just unusably slow and burning up my machine. Seems like I need graphics acceleration in the VM which doesn't work on my Ryzen GPU - QEMU running on Windows, and I don't want to deal with dual booting. Literally would rather buy a Mac (if I could).

  • morphle ・ 5 hours ago

    If you send me an email I might have a machine or MacOS VM on that machine you can use.

    • bottlepalm ・ 4 hours ago

      Thanks for the offer, think I'm gonna go the eBay route.

  • dyauspitr ・ 4 hours ago

    I don’t even think you can do hackintoshes anymore post Apple silicon right? I remember having one about 10 years ago and it was absolutely fantastic and ran really well. Wish we could do that now so I wouldn’t have to develop apps on my M3 MacBook Air, which constantly runs out of memory and is a huge pain.

    • forsalebypwner ・ 3 hours ago

      You can for now, but in the very near future (macOS 27 I think?) Apple will completely drop support for Intel, and Hackintosh will be dead

wiradikusuma ・ 5 hours ago

I guess the sudden demand is due to OpenClaw? But most people will still use cloud LLMs, right? Anything particular with the Mac Mini that non-Mac lack?

  • zarzavat ・ 4 hours ago

    Not just OpenClaw. The Mac mini is just stupidly good value for a desktop computer, and the RAM prices have only enhanced its appeal.

    Apple doesn't make much of a fuss about it but their chip performance is laughably ahead of the other chipmakers.

    The Mac Mini M4 gets a score of 3788 in Geekbench[0]. The top of the PC processor chart is 3395[1]. It's not even Apple's latest chip!

    PC processors can only keep up by adding more cores, but real world performance in many workloads is enhanced by having a smaller number of higher performance cores.

    [0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

    [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

    • AnthonyMouse ・ an hour ago

      Geekbench is basically trash. People keep using it for comparing Mac performance because many of the things people usually benchmark don't run on Macs.

      But single-number outputs like that are useless. Is the number ~10% higher because it's consistently ~10% faster at everything, or because it's 100% faster on a minority of things and slower at everything else? The first one is pretty unlikely when comparing processors with different designs, and indeed that isn't it:

      https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/4

      https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/5

      https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/6

      https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/7

      The CPU in those charts with a similar TDP to the M4 is the Ryzen HX 370. You can see that the M4 is ahead of it in a few of the tests (C-Ray, DuckDB, PyBench, FLAC) but in even more of them the M4 is at the bottom of the stack. (Only a third of those charts are actually performance; each performance chart is followed by two power consumption charts.)

      And the ~20W TDP is a nice parlor trick (the HX 370 is the only one on the list that competes with it there) but in a desktop CPU that's pretty irrelevant. Whereas if you compare it to the CPUs that can be had for a similar price (e.g. Ryzen 9700X, 65W), it's only ahead in C-Ray and FLAC while losing quite badly in most of the others and subjecting you to unupgradable soldered memory that the PC hardware doesn't.

      Meanwhile doing ray tracing on a CPU instead of a GPU isn't much fun, and FLAC is an audio codec so a ~10% improvement there is probably not going to be a big part of your day if you're not a full-time sound engineer. So does averaging those kinds of things in to make a single benchmark number make sense? Or should you be looking at the results on applications you actually use?

    • ffsm8 ・ 3 hours ago

      If you remove the Mac filter, its performance is not even in the top ten

      Which is obvious if you spent more then half a microsecond thinking about it, because apple silicone barely draws any power - it's performance is fantastic in it's niche, which is squarely within what a home user cares about - but it's not leading on benchmark performance, because that's not what apple designed it for

      The reason its coincidentally good for local ai inference is also just down to the fact the embedded GPU has shared memory access to the system VRAM. That means low performance/throughput but large memory.

      Which is great for home use, but once again not gonna top charts.

      • zarzavat ・ 3 hours ago

        Which top 10 are you talking about? If you mean the top absolute geekbench scores, those are always with the assistance of cryogenic cooling.

  • ashdksnndck ・ 4 hours ago

    Mac mini has first-class access to iCloud, photos, iMessage etc. So if you are deep in the Apple ecosystem you might prefer it for that reason. I have a windows gaming desktop that I could use as a server for openclaw/cowork but I realized I simply don’t trust that system enough to give it access to all the personal stuff I’m giving to the AI. I trust Anthropic and Apple. I don’t trust whatever junk is running on my gaming desktop.

    If you want to run local models, another advantage is Apple’s unified memory architecture. The biggest Mac mini has 64gb ram and Mac Studio has up to 512gb. Compare this little box to what monster Nvidia gpu system you would have to buy to get the same memory there. And how much your PG&E bill would go up. That doesn’t account for the shortage of basic $600 Mac minis though.

  • operatingthetan ・ 5 hours ago

    An M4 mini is overkill just to run OpenClaw. I'm running it on a Pentium J5005 and it's running 20 other services in Docker. I think the main thing was many wanted it to be able to access iMessage. I think people dream of also using the mac to run the LLM but the 16gb ones don't have enough ram.

    • apexalpha ・ 3 hours ago

      When they say 'due to openclaw' they refer to running AI models that openclaw uses, not to openclaw itself.

    • hparadiz ・ 4 hours ago

      The shortage is for the 512, 256, and 128 models.

      • ashdksnndck ・ 2 hours ago

        The basic 16GB Mac mini is also hard to buy. I bought one used not to save money but because I couldn’t find any store online with it in stock.

      • reverius42 ・ 4 hours ago

        Those are the ones that can run the LLMs. Not a coincidence.

    • amelius ・ 4 hours ago

      People are running openclown on microcontrollers.

  • hparadiz ・ 4 hours ago

    You can look up benchmarks. It's different depending on the model of Mac Mini and Model of LLM.

    The take away is that some of the Apple hardware hits a sweet spot for performance and price which may change in the future but for now it's causing a lot of demand so people can run inference without GPUs.

    Also Macs keep a lot of their resale value so you can use them for a while and then sell them for sometimes 80% of their original value.

  • chillfox ・ 4 hours ago

    Affordable ram!

    I recently bought one for my k3s cluster, and it was the cheapest 16g ram I could get by a decent margin.

  • znpy ・ 5 hours ago

    My understanding is that openclaw is only a factor, and a relatively minor one.

    Most likely the limiting factor is the crunch that chip companies are going through.

polyterative ・ an hour ago

Loving my m4 mac studio. I expected this as well

ksec ・ 4 hours ago

It is the SoC, not the memory as reported in the earning call. And lead time for SOC is 3-4 months. i.e even if they decided to increase order in March, if would be at least until July those volumes reaches warehouse ready to be shipped. And that is assuming there are spare capacity from TSMC for Apple to order, right now there is very little to none.

What annoys me most isn't the Mac Studio and Mini. It is the Neo. Someone must have done a poor job in demand planing. ( As well as pricing ). Only 5M unit till the end of the year when they are now increasing it to 10M. And it will likely miss this education's year cycle in the summer.

Hopefully they do better with A19 Pro Neo. Mac could reach up to 400M to 500M usage share. Roughly 25% of PC market.

  • projektfu ・ an hour ago

    It reminds me of when the Mac LC came out. We waited months to receive ours.

  • akmarinov ・ 4 hours ago

    Historically whenever they’ve done lower price products - iPhone SE, the current E editions, etc - they’ve sold poorly, that’s what probably got them.

    The thing is that the Neo is actually useful.

    • joakleaf ・ 2 hours ago

      I disagree.

      I am old enough to remember the iPod nano -- Especially the 2nd generation. They were effectively low-priced and smaller iPods.

      Apple sold millions of these much much quicker than the iPods and iPod minis (which came right before). Especially in 2006, it was _the_ "Christmas gift" just before the iPhone, iPod touch and later iPad mini took over. Possibly Steve Jobs' demo where he showed how they fit into the otherwise useless small jeans pocket helped convince the world.

      The iPod nano effectively wiped out the competing music player market.

      The Neo reminds me of the iPod nano and iPad mini. It is smaller and cheaper version of an existing successful product.

      I think the iPhone SE and E are the outliers.

  • apexalpha ・ 3 hours ago

    >It is the SoC, not the memory as reported in the earning call.

    Is the memory not part of the SoC?

    • fredoralive ・ 2 hours ago

      It’s a separate die, even in chips like the phone ones where it’s in the same package as the SoC.

bajor ・ 4 hours ago

More fomo

  • libertine ・ an hour ago

    Since COVID the FOMO has been turned to 11.

    I wanted to build a gaming PC, and now that's out of the question, even though I can afford to buy one in the current state. I just refuse to participate in this, so I quit.

    There are thousands of great games that run on older hardware that would last me a lifetime of gaming.

    Consumers always get the shit fed to them.

BerkeyMcBerkey ・ 4 hours ago

Opps, our lack of foresight into AI tripped us up, again.

  • amelius ・ 4 hours ago

    This is just a preview.

    At some point even the most economically liberal people will say that enough is enough. Making money and building capital is perfectly okay if you're working hard, but if you use said money or capital against the rest of us (who chose a different life) then we have a problem.

Auzy ・ 4 hours ago

The Mac Studio definitely shouldn't be.

My M2 studio was the only computer I ever owned that had issues with the USBC ports not working with certain cables (and for the price, it should have had better performance).

I've owned a M2 Mac Studio, PowerMac G5, Mac Pro. Every single one had flaws that you would consider inexcusable on PC Hardware priced half that amount.

The PowerMac G5 had terrible video cards (the liquid cooled ones also had issues with leaks, but ignoring that). The Mac Pro also had terrible Video cards (they were PCI-X), but also Fully Buffered ECC ram (which cost substantially more than any other ram)..

Apple still can't even manufacture a proper mouse (who the hell puts a USB C port at the bottom).

It's ridiculous..

If Linux distro's had a way to integrate Android as a first class citizen (like IOS is in MacOS), it would greatly boost the number of apps available in ecosystem, and have a huge impact on MacOS I feel. Waydroid is good, but, it still is too clunky (I'd like to see something more like Wine for Android, where its native)

  • jmalicki ・ 3 hours ago

    But the Mac Studio can run LLMs reasonably faster better than non-enterprise-server setup. That is the only thing that matters at this point - it's an LLM accelerator, not a personal computer, at this point.

  • t-writescode ・ 3 hours ago

    Why ... did you put so much energy into typing this out? That's a lot of energy to put into .... something you don't like and probably shouldn't care so much about.

    Do you wish you could go back to macs?

    • noisem4ker ・ 42 minutes ago

      Forbid they criticize Apple products that are in the very subject of the article.

      Will you be around to police the discussion the next time something having "Microsoft" in the title is submitted and the shit-flinging-at-Windows-and-the-PC-world contest starts regardless to any relevance to the topic at hand?

  • ajvs ・ 3 hours ago

    Valve's Lepton (Waydroid fork) might solve this when it gets released.

  • iLoveOncall ・ 3 hours ago

    Low supply doesn't mean high demand. I don't think many people are buying Mac Studios, so they just lowered production.

_the_inflator ・ 5 hours ago

Apple got so bad with its products, so bad indeed that they took a bet on the low price sector with the Neo and abandoned the powerhouses. It is so funny, because due to the high profit margin as a relative share of the price Apple earns more by selling a few top models than with dozens of Neos.

Tim Cook, the supply chain master leaves house the moment the very reason why he got hired in the first place is in dire straits.

I don’t think that the successor will likely change that, since Cook made sure, no one is remembering Jobs anymore and as top manager won’t pass a reversal of many of his decisions.

So he will lead through a CEO he controls. Only if the new guy takes on the battle in the name of product there might be a chance but this would mean, Cook and the new CEO have to be dismissed. So popcorn times, I think Apple is going to stay as boring as it got, while the quality constantly declines.

  • dwedge ・ 5 hours ago

    The Neo won't sell dozens of models they will take the low end laptop market by storm. I think your comment will age very poorly

    • robertjpayne ・ 4 hours ago

      This exactly. No other laptop comes close on price for the hardware you get. Yeah you may get more ram in a PC but promise you it won’t feel as fast when you’re using it day to day or have as good of a display or battery life.

      • ankurdhama ・ 3 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        In same price range you can get a PC that not only has more ram but also has better multicore performance, better disk speed and better port selection. Yes neo wins on build quality, trackpad, speaker, display and battery life but the PC would also allow you to install any linux distro.

        • 46493168 ・ 7 minutes ago

          So the Neo wins on things people care

    • stingraycharles ・ 4 hours ago

      The Neo is already considered a huge success and is the reason for the scarcity.

  • swiftcoder ・ 4 hours ago

    > so bad indeed that they took a bet on the low price sector with the Neo and abandoned the powerhouses

    The Neo isn't just a bet on low prices - it's a machine that convinces people they can get away with less RAM. In the middle of a pricing crunch, why wouldn't you ship an 8GB machine like the Neo?

    Its a win-win, Apple gets to ship a brand new SKU in volume despite the RAM crunch, and they get to punch into a previously untouched market.

    • lloeki ・ 4 hours ago

      I'm hoping that the success of the Neo and the RAM shortage makes people realise that 8GB should be enough for most tasks without constantly swapping.

      That 32GB or even 64GB is considered a minimum to be able to run some word processing, chat app, fetch remote content, and display funny cat photos is preposterous. In terms of information storage, these are absolutely immense numbers.

      The infinite treadmill of chasing for more RAM and then immediately proceeding to carelessly fill all of it at the first line of code is part of a deeper, wasteful, and self-imposed obsolescence process.

      We don't need more RAM, we need more frugal software.

  • simonh ・ an hour ago

    > so bad indeed that they took a bet on the low price sector with the Neo and abandoned the powerhouses

    Says this on a post about the powerhouses all selling like hot cakes, with many months long waiting times.