- Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio suffer long shipping delays
- This applies to models with more than a base level of RAM.
- It is apparently the consequence of the rise of AI and the popularity of local AIs, in particular OpenClaw, which is causing, or at least contributing to it.
If you were thinking about ordering a Mac mini with lots of RAM from Apple, then you might have to wait, and that’s even more true for the Mac Studio.
Tom’s Hardware noticed a post on
The theory is that people are realizing the potential of AIs running locally (i.e. on their own PC, rather than accessing them in the cloud) and this is being driven at a rapid pace by the popularity of the OpenClaw AI agent (among other factors).
Therefore, people look for a PC with a powerful enough RAM load to run such local AIs. Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio, which you can load up with lots of memory, are good candidates for the job. (It should be noted that RAM has a correspondingly high cost.)
If we look at the Apple store in the US today, the evidence is pretty clear. The entry-level Mac mini with the vanilla M4 chip is available for immediate shipping in its 16GB format, but if you want 24GB or 32GB of RAM, you’ll have to wait two to three weeks for delivery.
With the Mac mini M4 Pro model, you’ll also have to wait two to three weeks for the PC to arrive, with the only exception again being the base model, in this case the lower-tier CPU with 24GB of RAM, which can ship immediately.
For Mac Studio, the wait is even longer. With the PC having the top-tier M4 Max variant, if you want this model with 64GB of RAM, there is currently a four to five week delay. Choose the 128GB model and you’ll be drumming your fingers for five to six weeks before your Mac Studio appears. (Disclaimer: Finger drumming for extended periods of time is not recommended.)
The M3 Ultra version of Mac Studio, with a whopping 512GB of RAM, also shows a shipping delay of five to six weeks from Apple. All of these delivery times are accurate at the time of writing, but may have changed by the time you read this.
Analysis: mini mania
The Mac mini, equipped with a large amount of RAM, is a great solution for running an AI locally, with that unified memory (shared by the CPU, NPU and GPU) which is really agile and ideal for these types of tasks.
And this is apparently being reflected in sales of these compact computers, and also in the more robust Mac Studio. As Tom’s points out, there are a growing number of companies using “Mac Studios clusters and clusters” that are “perfect for long-running agency assignments and local private LLMs” (large language models, or AI).
While there are clearly fairly long timelines for ordering Macs with RAM, we can’t conclude that this is entirely due to a local AI boom. But something is clearly happening along those lines, and it won’t help if Apple faces supply pressures right now in terms of securing memory inventory. (And even Apple’s enormous resources will start to creak at some point.)
If we see this trend continue, it’s not hard to imagine where this is all going: these Macs will become very expensive (which is true with the RAM crisis), and maybe even be hard to get.
In short, if you were thinking about purchasing a Mac mini (or even a Mac Studio) with more memory than the base, you might want to think about pulling the trigger sooner rather than later.
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