Missing Macs - What NO ONE is Telling You! M4 Mac mini shortage
/ icavedave
Apple is RUNNING OUT of Desktop Macs!
If you’ve been following the world of the Mac recently you may have noticed that Apple’s website has a few gaps - the base Mac mini M4 - no longer listed - High Unified Memory Mac Studios - Missing! So what’s going on? Is this the rampocalypse finally biting Apple, or is there more than meets the eye here?
If you listen to the majority of voices right now, Apple has had to delete products like the base 16gb/256gb M4 Mac mini because they make better margins on the 512gb version that sells for an extra $200 on their site and they don’t have the memory chips available to make both. And absolutely, the margins will certainly be better on those. But they also deleted the highest end M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512gb of Unified memory too. Which would have some of the best margins, but would also stop two sales of a lower config I guess. Apple also dropped the 32gb M4, and the 64gb M4 pro Mac minis.
And even with all those deletions, you’re looking at 10-12 weeks before Apple can get one shipped to you. It does look pretty cut and dry, right? Well maybe not. We have an event in about 4 weeks time, WWDC, and Apple’s notebooks, other than the Neo have all already switched over to the M5 generation of processors, and there seems to be no issues with those in terms of memory shortages, or long ship times.
No, I think the story here is that Apple had already wound down the vast majority of their production on the M4 (and M3 Ultra) generation of desktops based on the normal level and distribution of demand that they see. Usually a week or so out from an event we see these shortages and long shipping dates happen, which everyone uses as evidence of an update just around the corner. Here’s another clue that all is not what it seems. You can have whatever spec of iMac you like, and it ships in 2-4 days, or you can pick it up at the Apple Store. Same M4 chip, same memory.
But here’s the thing - there have been a couple of ends of the market grabbing Apple’s headless desktops - at the lower end, the base Mac mini is a steal if you want to tie in an AI iMessage chatbot into your business’s system and it’s an incredible deal if you’re looking to run local large language models for training or development on smaller projects. At the other end of the scale - 512gb of unified memory on a Mac Studio gives more memory available to a GPU that’s running AI calculations than anything else on the consumer market - and in a very power efficient little box.
At the start of this year and pretty much since the M4 Mac mini arrived, you’ve seen people stacking them up to run local models because Apple’s hardware is excellent for this, especially with the neural engines and accelerators in the GPU cores in the latest generation chips.