Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 133 posts

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

#31

Post by lloeki »

swiftcoder wrote: post #16
_the_inflator wrote: post #5

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 st…

> so bad indeed that they took a bet on the low price sector with the Neo and abandoned the powerhouses The Neo isn't just a bet on low prices - it's a machine that convinces people they can get away with less RAM. In the middle of a pricing crunch, why wouldn't you ship an 8GB machine like the Neo? Its a win-win, Apple gets to ship a brand new SKU in volume despite the RAM crunch, and they get to punch into a previo…

I'm hoping that the success of the Neo and the RAM shortage makes people realise that 8GB should be enough for most tasks without constantly swapping.

That 32GB or even 64GB is considered a minimum to be able to run some word processing, chat app, fetch remote content, and display funny cat photos is preposterous. In terms of information storage, these are absolutely immense numbers.

The infinite treadmill of chasing for more RAM and then immediately proceeding to carelessly fill all of it at the first line of code is part of a deeper, wasteful, and self-imposed obsolescence process.

We don't need more RAM, we need more frugal software.

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

#32

Post by akmarinov »

ksec wrote: post #15

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.…

Historically whenever they’ve done lower price products - iPhone SE, the current E editions, etc - they’ve sold poorly, that’s what probably got them.

The thing is that the Neo is actually useful.

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

#33

Post by brailsafe »

bottlepalm wrote: post #20
morphle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, ton's of refurbished for $250-$300

Yea it does look like 5 year old M1's are going for $300 on eBay, but man that's painful a 5 year old machine for that much when you could get a new Neo or Mini for $600, if only you could buy them. I probably should just get the M1, test and sell it back on eBay. Thanks.

If you literally just need to borrow one, I'd just buy an Air from Apple directly and then return it within the 14 day window. I'll sometimes do this if I need an extended repair on my personal one, or there's a new mac I want to try.

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

#34

Post by chillfox »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #3

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?

Affordable ram!

I recently bought one for my k3s cluster, and it was the cheapest 16g ram I could get by a decent margin.

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

#35

Post by dyauspitr »

bottlepalm wrote: post #2

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 don’t even think you can do hackintoshes anymore post Apple silicon right? I remember having one about 10 years ago and it was absolutely fantastic and ran really well. Wish we could do that now so I wouldn’t have to develop apps on my M3 MacBook Air, which constantly runs out of memory and is a huge pain.

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

#36

Post by robertjpayne »

dwedge wrote: post #12
_the_inflator wrote: post #5

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 st…

The Neo won't sell dozens of models they will take the low end laptop market by storm. I think your comment will age very poorly

This exactly. No other laptop comes close on price for the hardware you get. Yeah you may get more ram in a PC but promise you it won’t feel as fast when you’re using it day to day or have as good of a display or battery life.

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

#37

Post by valleyer »

brailsafe wrote: post #33
bottlepalm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea it does look like 5 year old M1's are going for $300 on eBay, but man that's painful a 5 year old machine for that much when you could get a new Neo or Mini for $600, if only you could buy them. I probably should just get the M1, test and sell it back on eBay. Thanks.

If you literally just need to borrow one, I'd just buy an Air from Apple directly and then return it within the 14 day window. I'll sometimes do this if I need an extended repair on my personal one, or there's a new mac I want to try.

This is unethical.

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

#38

Post by amelius »

BerkeyMcBerkey wrote: post #22

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

This is just a preview.

At some point even the most economically liberal people will say that enough is enough. Making money and building capital is perfectly okay if you're working hard, but if you use said money or capital against the rest of us (who chose a different life) then we have a problem.

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

#39

Post by zarzavat »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #3

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?

Not just OpenClaw. The Mac mini is just stupidly good value for a desktop computer, and the RAM prices have only enhanced its appeal.

Apple doesn't make much of a fuss about it but their chip performance is laughably ahead of the other chipmakers.

The Mac Mini M4 gets a score of 3788 in Geekbench[0]. The top of the PC processor chart is 3395[1]. It's not even Apple's latest chip!

PC processors can only keep up by adding more cores, but real world performance in many workloads is enhanced by having a smaller number of higher performance cores.

[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

[1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

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

#40

Post by deaux »

bottlepalm wrote: post #20
morphle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, ton's of refurbished for $250-$300

Yea it does look like 5 year old M1's are going for $300 on eBay, but man that's painful a 5 year old machine for that much when you could get a new Neo or Mini for $600, if only you could buy them. I probably should just get the M1, test and sell it back on eBay. Thanks.

If you're going to do any kind of work on it I'd choose a 5-year old 16 GB memory M1 over a Neo every single time. 8 GB is what's painful. The CPU difference is very small anyway.
Post reply on HN