CWallace
macrumors G5
How long can you wait? Gurman implies we may not see them till late 2026 or early 2027.
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Base Mac Mini Sold Out From Apple Online Store
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How long can you wait? Gurman implies we may not see them till late 2026 or early 2027.
JPack
macrumors P6
Strange, you can order them in China and Hong Kong.
I wonder if this is a Vietnam thing since U.S. market Macs are assembled there.
I wonder if this is a Vietnam thing since U.S. market Macs are assembled there.
Most are not running AIs locally. They're running agent harnesses that connect with cloud AIs.
goobot
macrumors 604
Companies who manufacture these components must first satisfy demand for consumer products before supplying demand for companies looking to build massive server farms to operate AI.
Black_Mage
macrumors 6502
If you are happy with the Mac Mini you ordered, keep it. That's my advice. In the future, keep an eye on this page. https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
QuarterSwede
macrumors G4
That’s not how supply chain works.
Hmm, companies can sell to the highest bidder and they do.
goobot
macrumors 604
Yes I know that is what happens and the massive increase in demand is why this is a problem. It is the job of the government to know when enough is enough tho. Should we let companies buy all the water too because there is high demand for it?
Ok. I’m interested to hear more.
How does a bulk memory or GPU reseller in Hong Kong or hell, even Nvidia determine who is and who isn’t building an AI datacenter with their order?
Are they supposed to tell their company stakeholders that they rejected maximizing their profit because the buyer admitted to building an AI with it?
And what if the buyers all lie?
And that is also a problem with Hersey's, Walmart and other conglomerates buying up water for their bottled water business.
goobot
macrumors 604
I never once suggested companies self regulate which is why I said the government should step in. And if you're suggesting that countries like the US don't know what is happening on massive plots of land then idk what to say to that.
hovscorpion12
macrumors 68040
That is a picture of a Mac Mini. The Mac Studio has the SD card on the front.
Yea unavailable in European markets too... hopefully new M5 mini very soon. Need to replace my M1 mini and its awful bluetooth problems.
Step in how?
No, they don’t know what’s happening on every plot of land or warehouse. No government does!
I’m literally responding to what you literally wrote about “passing a law” requiring them to “sell to consumers first.”
I think a demand-side approach to increase supply would be better.
Pass laws to license data centers, regulate their imports, set up routine inspections, and limit the amount of equipment that they can buy, maybe requiring they prove that they have enough electricity to power the hardware.
No electricity, no bulk order of GPUs. Demand goes down.
minik
macrumors demi-god
That's 5 to 6 weeks ETA.
At the U.S. store, I looked at one base or 512GB storage upgrade model last week. The ETA was 4 to 5 weeks.
Chanocmty
macrumors newbie
Something tells me that we will not be getting an M5 Mini and instead we'll get an A18+ or A19 Mini. Hope I'm wrong on this one cause I really want an M5 one. Or will we get a Mac Neo even lowered priced than a Mac Mini? That´ll be crazy.
Gemma 4 31B will use more than 64GB of memory FWIW. I've been doing a lot of testing lately and depending on what you're doing it can hit 80-90gb wired.
Some user quantized version will may be lower but I have to use what ships from the creators for what I'm doing.
Tdude96
macrumors 6502a
True, the advantages a lot of them see with a Mac mini are that it's tiny, it runs headless, and it sips less power than a light bulb.
Honestly, the ones with more RAM make a lot of sense for always-on, privacy-centric local AI. The buy-in price and the electricity use are tiny in comparison to a Windows machine. I would think a 32 or especially a 64 GB Mac mini would allow you to easily run a decent reasoning agent (Qwen 3.5 or Gemma 4 or similar), with some headroom for other models if needed, and only dip into APIs rarely if ever. LLMs aren't really my jam, but I would think there are a variety of Mac mini configs that would work well for agents, local or over API.
Except in this case the "out-of-stock" status wasn't applied to all the Minis at once, but instead hit the higher-RAM configs first.
If this were due to an imminent refresh, wouldn't Apple have applied that to all the Minis at once?
Or, when Apple has done a model refresh in the past, have they staggered the out-of-stock status among different configs within that model?
If not, that would suggest this is due to a shortage rather than a refresh decision.
Though that would not preclude that there's also a refresh coming, if Apple sourcing for the LPDDR5X-9600 used in the M5 is better than that for the LPDDR5X-7500 used in the base M4 and the LPDDR5X-8333 in the M4 Pro and Max
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I find it fascinating this Mac mini is popular for local AI models. Without even knowing this was a trend, I bought mine explicitly for local AI mid-last year. Nothing crazy, just to speed up my speech to text, do advanced text processing and the occasional question.
Depends what you need it for and whether you can do without until the new one drops.
Might need to take that thing off your face! That looks like a Mac mini to me. Albeit a very large closeup.