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

The shortages are caused by memory manufacturers in Asia having supply chain problems, and the pending strike at Samsung, right?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Loving my m4 mac studio. I expected this as well

More fomo

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

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)

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.