Mac mini shortages are starting to happen — and the OpenClaw AI boom is a key reason | Daily Reports Online
- Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio are suffering from long shipping delays
- This pertains to the models with more than a baseline level of RAM
- It’s seemingly the consequence of the AI boom and popularity of local AIs, notably OpenClaw, which is causing, or at least contributing to it
If you were thinking of ordering a Mac mini with lots of RAM from Apple, then you could be in for something of a wait – and that’s even more true for the Mac Studio.
Tom’s Hardware noticed a post on X from Alex Finn, the CEO of Creator Buddy (an AI tool), who observed that: “Something big is happening. First Mac Minis. Now Mac Studios. Completely sold out. When I bought 2 Mac Studios a month ago, my wait was 14 days. Now the wait is 54 days.”
The theory is that people are catching on to the potential of AIs that are run locally – meaning on your own PC, rather than accessed in the cloud – and this is being driven ahead at a fast pace by the popularity of AI agent OpenClaw (among other factors).
So, people are looking for a PC with a beefy enough loadout of RAM to run such local AIs. Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio, which you can load up with an absolute ton of memory, are good candidates for the job. (The RAM comes at a correspondingly high cost, it should be noted.)
If we look at the Apple store in the US currently, the evidence is plain enough to see. The base Mac mini with the vanilla M4 chip is available for immediate dispatch in its 16GB form, but if you want 24GB or 32GB of RAM, you’re looking at a wait of two to three weeks for delivery.
With the Mac mini M4 Pro model, you are also going to be waiting two to three weeks for the PC to arrive, with the only exception being the base model again – in this case, the lower-tier CPU with 24GB of RAM, which can be sent out immediately.
For the Mac Studio, the wait is even longer. With the PC that has the M4 Max higher-tier variant, if you want this model with 64GB of RAM, there’s currently a delay of four to five weeks. Go for the 128GB model, and you’ll be drumming your fingers for five to six weeks before your Mac Studio shows up. (Disclaimer: finger drumming for extended periods of time is not recommended.)
The M3 Ultra version of the Mac Studio, with a whopping 512GB of RAM, is also showing a five to six week shipping delay from Apple. All of these delivery timeframes are accurate at the time of writing, but may have altered by the time you read this.
Analysis: mini mania
The Mac mini, packed with a whole load of RAM, is a great solution for running an AI locally, with that unified memory (shared by the CPU, NPU, and GPU) being seriously nippy and ideal for such tasks.
And this is seemingly being reflected in sales of these compact computers, and the beefier Mac Studio, too. As Tom’s points out, there’s a growing number of companies that are using “clusters and clusters of Mac Studios” which are “perfect for long-running agentic tasks and local private LLMs” (Large Language Models, or AIs).
While there clearly are some pretty long lead times for ordering RAM-packed Macs, we can’t jump to the conclusion that this is entirely due to a local AI boom. But there’s clearly something going on in that respect, and it’s not going to help if Apple is facing supply pressures at this point in terms of securing memory inventory. (And even Apple’s huge resources will start to creak at some point).
If we see this trend continue, it’s not difficult to imagine where all this is headed – these Macs are going to get very expensive (which is true with the RAM crisis as it is, anyway), and maybe even difficult to get hold of at all.
In short, if you were mulling the purchase of a Mac mini (or indeed a Mac Studio) with more than a baseline amount of memory, you might want to think about pulling the trigger sooner rather than later.
The best laptops for all budgets
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course, you can also follow TechRadar on YouTube and TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.
