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Base Mac Mini Sold Out From Apple Online Store

Macalicious2011 said:
You are wrong. Mac mini will continue to sell out. It's the cheapest and most effective hardware for running llms locally. An equivalent pc setup is 2-4x the money at least and consume much more electricity.

Demand for mac mini will only grow as openai and Anthropic are lowering quotas for their fixed monthly plans. It's now becoming cheaper to buy a 48-64gb mac mini than pay $500-1000 per month in api credits.

I have ordered a mac mini and will order more before apple increase prices.
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openclaw isnt a local llm. lol
 
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Nothing adds up to the story of memory shortage: MacMini and MacStudio are a very small percentage of the total Mac Sales, so it's not that stopping their sales is having any sort of impact on memory availability for laptops. And the iMac sales are very much higher, yet it is available with any memory configuration.
 
Strangely, all variants and out of stock and show a delivery time of 9th of June on the UK store.

What date is WWDC again?
 
Macalicious2011 said:
Don't consumers use their phone or a laptop as a computer?

Apple would not offer 128GB or 256GB or unified RAM and neural cores on the Mac mini for consumers to watch YouTube videos in 1080p. It's not just a computer but a highly space and power efficient server.

Label it whatever you want buy a Mac mini with high RAM is a bargain for me as a business owner. I replaced 5 software engineerings with cloud based LLMs and look forward to building out a farm of 3-5 Mac minis that will operate Task - code - test- iterate loop for several work streams.

I also love the fact that you can chain Mac minis. I will use Exo software for distributed inference across several Mac mini for LLMs that are too big to fit into the RAM of a single one.

Will get a nice rack like this one:

View attachment 2624331

Then in 12-18 months something like this depending on stock availability:

View attachment 2624333
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Did you buy base model ones? I once had 2 in an exo cluster back in December when it first came out but it dissapointed me so I returned one of them. I found out during my experimentation that RDMA only worked over TB5, and being that I had 2 base model ones, they only had TB4. Over Ethernet it was just slow, plus the base M4 and only 22gb of pooled ram probably wasn’t worth it anyway.
 
M3Stang said:
Yeah that’s true. I sold my 14” M4 max macboook pro about a month ago on marketplace for a couple grand and have the Neo to hold me over till I decide to (or heck even can) get something else. I used my max for just browsing Reddit and watching YouTube and tbh the Neo and my existing mini have kept me perfectly happy. I just play with llms as a hobby anyway and gaming stays in my gaming pc. I have an AI server I built with a 3090 Ti I had laying around from a. Couple years ago plus a 2080 so while only 32 gb of vram it’s still fun. I even used a couple raspberry pi’s I had in a drawer as docker servers where I can run my containers. All this stuff is just personal fun/learning anyway for me.

I did also get an iPad A16 and dare I say, I have used it more lately than either Mac just to browse on MR and Reddit and watch YouTube lol. Work provides me a beefy windows laptop for my development work, so as far as personal computers go, I guess I don’t really “need” a max again but will probably find myself gravitating to one again. I only got the max for my 3 display and the desire to replace my gaming pc. While crossover was great and I could play most single player games I threw at it, I still couldn’t play Valorant/arc raiders on the go at lan parties, so it stayed back anyway. I use GFN sometimes at lan parties now for arc raiders.

Full circle not sure if I really need anything else, just want it. I thought of getting an M4 max studio but realized I probably wouldn’t use it much anyway as it still has the same gaming limitations and it doesn’t have the display that the pro had for consumption.
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different scenario for me in that the studio is my main computer and does everything I need for work, music and gaming. I don't have a separate gaming rig or a tablet

I traded my m4 pro 16" to my wife for her 2017 13" MacBook Pro, so I have that for browsing on the couch or recipes in the kitchen


the only other machine I have is 2018 mini which recently replaced a 2012 as our home server
 
I got the 64 GB m4 pro version with the 10G nic when it was initially released. Little did I know that demand would fly thru the roof a mere 18ish months later.
 
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Aries79 said:
Nothing adds up to the story of memory shortage: MacMini and MacStudio are a very small percentage of the total Mac Sales, so it's not that stopping their sales is having any sort of impact on memory availability for laptops.
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MacMini and MacStudio are also a very small percentage of the total Mac revenues so if you so have a chip shortage then you're going to prioritise making $1100 MacBooks over $600 Minis. So, for example, delaying manufacturing a new M5 Mac Mini until you've met the demand for M5 MBAs is perfectly plausible.

The M5 Minis, Studios, iMacs and a replacement for the M4 iPad are expected Real Soon Now, so production of the M4 models will be winding down - if not already stopped. Apple will have tried to anticipate sales so that stocks will last until the new machines are available.

Have to postpone M5 Mini launch because the M5 RAM needed for MBPs (or any other reason)? Result: you run out of M4 Minis before the M5 is ready.

Have to raise the price or change the spec of M5 Minis vs. M4 Minis because RAM and SSD prices have gone up (or, again, any other reason)? Result: you don't want to accept orders at the old price points that are going away, so you refuse orders rather than give free upgrades. Note: base MBA price has gone up with M5 although you do get more storage.

Aries79 said:
And the iMac sales are very much higher, yet it is available with any memory configuration.
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So?
That could just mean Apple made more M4 iMacs before winding down for M5. Maybe the iMac launch wasn't planned until later, so they made an extra batch. Maybe the iMac is skipping straight to M6? Who knows?

For an international enterprise like Apple, higher sales likely make the logistics easier & demand easier to predict - electronics manufacturing is hugely sensitive to economies of scale. Also makes it harder to guess how many high RAM/Storage spec Minis to make, since they are a harder sell & you lose more if stock is unsold.

Supply, manufacturing and distribution chains are complicated and depend on a lot of things. Impending new models and industry-wide component shortages & price-rises are both likely to be factors. People seem to be inventing a lot of simplistic false dichotomies here.
 
theorist9 said:
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.
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theorist9 said:
If this were due to an imminent refresh, wouldn't Apple have applied that to all the Minis at once?
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The smaller the sales, the harder the logistics.

If a shop sells an average of 10 16GB Minis and 0.5 64GB Minis a week its pretty clear which is going to be the hardest for which to anticipate sales and keep in stock & which will lose the most if it ends up unsold. That effect is going to ripple all the way up the distribution chain.

If Apple underestimated how many higher-RAM configs they needed to make in the last batch, they'd normally fulfil the orders from the next batch & make customers wait a few weeks. If there is an imminent refresh there isn't going to be a next batch. If prices have gone up since the order was placed, they won't want to hand out free updates... (and the high-RAM models might be going up a lot).
 
goobot said:
If all this is due to the ai garbage, governments should really step in and require companies to fulfill consumer demand first and let ai companies get the leftovers rather than the other way around
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The memory shortage is being driven by summer demand. Consumers are voting for the AI by buying it and clicking on it. Do you think these companies are building out new data centers because the existing ones have idle time and are not being used? People here want "smarter Siri," and that means more chips to build more data centers.


This is all driven by where consumers are spending money. OK, they are spending it indirectly by buying devices like Macs and iPhones that in turn depend on big buildings filled with servers, but the money flows from consumers regardless of the indirect path.

Did you use a spell checker on the post you wrote? (I did.) And if so, you are contributing to the consumer demand for more AI.
 
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theluggage said:
MacMini and MacStudio are also a very small percentage of the total Mac revenues so if you so have a chip shortage then you're going to prioritise making $1100 MacBooks over $600 Minis.
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The revenue per sale from a Mini is for sure higher than the revenue from a MacBook Air, and the revenue from a MacBook Studio is higher than the revenue from a MacBook Pro.

Also, each MacMini or MacStudio sale will drive sales of overpriced Keyboard, Mouse and even Apple Displays.

Given that the Mac Studio and Mac Mini combined are estimated at just 3% of Apple Mac sales, it makes no sense to stop them for months in order to sell the same amount of MacBooks.
 
theluggage said:
If Apple underestimated how many higher-RAM configs they needed to make in the last batch, they'd normally fulfil the orders from the next batch & make customers wait a few weeks. If there is an imminent refresh there isn't going to be a next batch. If prices have gone up since the order was placed, they won't want to hand out free updates... (and the high-RAM models might be going up a lot).
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Makes sense—but, in practice, has Apple done this in the past when there was an imminent refresh (make the higher-tier models unavailable for order before doing the same for the lower tier)?

I'd asked that earlier, since that would be the best evidence that this could be due to an imminent refresh.

Of course, that doesn't tell us there will be an imminent refresh, since there's another plausible explanation—that this is due to supply chain shortages.

After all, the same thing seems to be happening to the Mac Studio (high tiers unavailable, low tiers 2-3 months out), and the Gurman prediction is that those won't be getting a refresh until later in 2026. [Though maybe that rumor is wrong, and we'll be getting both M5 Studios and Minis in the next couple of weeks; that would be surprising.]

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