I wouldn't expect new minis or studios until the fall at the earliest. maybe not till spring 2027 for m6 max/m5 ultra studio
regardless of when they arrive, they will be a lot more expensive
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Apple Says Mac Studio and Mac Mini Will Be in Short Supply for Months
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I wouldn't expect new minis or studios until the fall at the earliest. maybe not till spring 2027 for m6 max/m5 ultra studio
regardless of when they arrive, they will be a lot more expensive
The M5’s GPU improvements over the M4 are pretty impressive…
The all-new Mac Mini features the game-changing M4. If the M5 took the best-in-class Apple M4-series Mac Mini processors to a whole new level, you can be sure Apple would be the very first to update the Mac Mini because Apple wouldn’t be able to wait to see the incredible things customers are able to do. Fortunately, Apple discovered, literally after shipping the M5 in other products, that the M4 is the best, most powerful M-series processor for the all-new Mac Mini. It truly is the Mac Mini for pros.
In other words, if Apple saw a compelling reason to upgrade the Mac Mini, they would have done so.
they are about the same as m3 to m4, a bit less for pro a bit more for max
left out studio and mini since there are no m5 to compare yet so not fair to compare mbp cooling against mini/studio
Yes, and the M3 to the M4 was also an impressive jump
Anyway, it’s possible you’re right and the mini will skip M5, as it skipped M3, given the M4 is still pretty great. Personally I think we’ll get an M5 Mini, but I wouldnt be shocked if you were right
I cant imagine they wont update the Studio though, especially given both it’s now the only high end workstation and that the highest end is on an M3 SoC
BSDnostalgia
macrumors 6502a
Sadly, you are probably correct. But, Apple has been making an absolute killing on Flash already, so, they could probably absorb the cost jump and still make a profit. But, they probably won't, because Wall Street will punish them if their margins are low. I don't need huge memory but I find it inconvenient to have to utilize secondary storage. I wish they would drop their SSD prices, but, it can't happen now.
Probably. I wonder what would happen if Apple swallowed lower margins and made a big noise about it with investors. Naive, I know.
unfortunately apples only real job is to increase shareholder value
not saying I like it, but everything should be viewed through that lens
splifingate
Contributor
Rumour-Coup: successful AAPL obfuscation, and M5 Mini/Studio available for Sale in 40days!
iamasmith
macrumors 6502a
I ordered a Mac mini Pro with a 1TB SSD as the only upgrade on 17th April which originally had and estimated delivery date of late June/July.. looks like things are freeing up, possibly cancelled orders if folks are anticipating the M5 version. The M4 Pro will certainly be fine for me and I'll be really glad to get the Studio Display off the top of my cupboards where it has been covered with a blanked when it arrived next day after ordering both... this is a 2020 last Intel gen iMac replacement so I'm really looking forward to it.. the iMac I bumped to 32GiB RAM but I figure 24 GiB is fine since I run my own Kubernetes clusters at home and can offload coding AI models to that... really looking forward to the arrival which should now be next Wednesday.
apple4everOG
macrumors member
I will respectfully disagree. The M5 is a substantial performance improvement over the M4.
Nothing at the moment. I think the benchmarks speak for themselves.
(Edited for tone)
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IvyKing
macrumors 6502a
Besides a noticeable improvement in performance, the M5 also brings another level of memory protection.
BSDnostalgia
macrumors 6502a
Shareholder value for the next 10 years, or, shareholder value for the next couple of quarters? Putting my investor hat on, I want to invest in companies that are sustainable over 10 years or more. I'm not interested in timing the market.
Well, this is too bad for my college's TV/radio studio. They're looking to replace their last two 27" Retina Intel-equipped iMacs with M4 Max-equipped Mac Studios, with MacOS 27 dropping Intel support, but it's not easy lately... They do already have one Mac Studio, and a lab full of souped-up M3 iMacs for student use, along with M4 Mac Minis in the radio/podcast production rooms, but they want to make sure their Apple Silicon transition is complete before MacOS 27 comes out. We're already planning to have another digital media lab in the Fine Arts building replace their 27" Retina iMacs with souped-up M4 iMacs, but of course those are still more easily available than the Mac Mini and Mac Studio currently are.
I know this is an old post, but I just came across it.
If what Cook said really is the case, then why did they remove the high-memory options from the Mac Studio? Doing so wouldn't ease demand for SoC production, but it woud ease demand for memory (unless the high-memory options were so popular that they were the main source of demand for the Studio).
Could be they stopped ordering as much memory for the M4* and M3U chips in anticipation of M5, and then the M5 production got backed up
throAU
macrumors G4
Nah, not just that; people want an affordable apple platform to run openclaw on using cloud LLMs that has access to imessage, calendar, etc.
that’s why even low memory minis are hard to get.
throAU
macrumors G4
I have a hybrid too, but still never pay attention to the price of fuel with my modified 500 wheel hp v8.
It costs what it costs.
JPack
macrumors P6
Cook didn't say memory wasn't a factor, only that the primary constraint was SoC.
Most of the highest density options were removed, i.e. options that use 16GB or 32GB chips. For example, M4 mini with 32GB (2 x 16GB).
Apple also took the opportunity to remove the lowest margin product, the 256GB storage M4 mini. This is not because they can't find 128GB chips, but simply because Apple remains backlogged even after forcing buyers to go 512GB. So why leave profit on the table?
I doubt they'll replace the base Storage with 2TB, more likely 1TB, since it's 512 now, and they'll probably want to stay close to $2K for the Base Model.
Apple always moves slowly on RAM and Storage to protect their fat margins
OK, but this still doesn't explain why Apple removed the highest RAM options from the Studio and the Mini, which was my original question.
If it truly were the case that the main constraint was SoC's rather than RAM, then Apple would have retained the high-RAM options in the Studio, so that their limited SoC's could be used for higher-profit items. Yet they did the opposite, removing the high-RAM options.
I.e., Apple did exactly what you'd expect them to do if RAM were the primary constraint.
Maybe for other products, which are higher-volume and lower RAM (like the Neo or Air), the SoC's are more of a constraint than the RAM. And since they sell a lot more of those, maybe that's what Cook was thinking of when he made his statement. But that doesn't appear to be the case for the Studio.
JPack
macrumors P6
The most plausible explanation is Apple wants to triage their margins which are under attack. By increasing base storage and removing high RAM options, they killed two birds with one stone.
Your assumption that the high RAM options are higher profit for Apple is probably incorrect. AI data centers are buying the highest density and capacity modules they can get. Apple's memory list prices haven't changed. Rather than take large margin hits on low-volume configurations, or reprice them upward and invite bad press, Apple just removed them.
The current environment means low RAM options are where Apple makes money. It certainly doesn't cost $200 to go from 16GB to 24GB even in today's conditions.