alt.hn

5/1/2026 at 6:20:33 AM

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

 https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/30/mac-studio-mac-mini-constrained-months/

by tosh

5/1/2026 at 8:43:13 AM

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.

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 10:24:23 AM

> in stead of relaying requests through me.

Overseerr is a thing.

by echelon_musk

5/1/2026 at 3:52:25 PM

People just text me their request, you want me to setup yet another *arr service to have people setup accounts or me sending passwords around that's not behind my safe VPN and is the only thing connected to my home network that i would expose and it's setup different so my maintenance is different and more work and people wont remember the password or account and blah blah blah.

Yeah I'll just have them text me and I'll paste that into my AI chat and it'll be done.

by bakies

5/1/2026 at 4:57:17 PM

> you want me to setup yet another arr service to have people setup accounts*

Authentication to Overseerr is done with a Plex account. No new accounts.

by echelon_musk

5/1/2026 at 10:49:51 AM

1) You're missing the point. Overseer can do this, yes. AI model can work with ANY REST API.

2) How does Overseerr help? I've never really understood it if I could give my family access to Overseerr over a VPN I could just give them sonarr / radarr directly.

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 1:20:45 PM

Expose Overseerr over HTTPS either from your home network or on a free VPS which has the tunnel into the home network where Radarr and Sonarr live. This is simpler for users to go to a website instead of having to also use a VPN.

This of course assumes you already have Plex or Jellyfin exposed to the public internet without a VPN.

If you're already forcing users to use a VPN for Plex/Jellyfin then hosting Overseerr locally and making it accessible over the VPN should be trivial.

by echelon_musk

5/1/2026 at 3:54:22 PM

Overseer runs on plex's media port? Plex has the media port 32400 NAT hole-punched, but none of my other webservices are exposed outside my VPN.

by bakies

5/1/2026 at 4:32:08 PM

Do what I do and use the tautulli sqlite3 database to get the IP addresses of Plex users and then add them to an ipset filter in nftables/ip tables that whitelists them to access an nginx proxy serving Overseeerr on port 443. It's glorious. I'm sure any LLM can cook this up for you.

by echelon_musk

5/1/2026 at 5:10:58 PM

> How does Overseerr help

It's nicer to use than Sonarr / Radarr, and a single interface for people to learn. It has suggestions for people that need that. There's also MCP for it, so instead of setting up N MCPs for Sonarr / Radarr / The Next Arr, you set one up for Seerr.

You can also link people's Plex Watchlist. So the whole request / add to Sonarr/Radarr can be done from anywhere they use Plex.

by c-hendricks

5/2/2026 at 6:16:05 AM

Overseerr is a write-only access to your Radarr/Sonarr library, so e.g. the user cannot accidentally delete a movie or choose to download a lower quality version.

by yegle

5/2/2026 at 6:53:57 AM

Sounds great, but if my family wanted to access a web-ui in stead of shooting me a message in natural language I could also give them the Radarr / Sonarr UI.

Currently the profile is fixed. I guess they can delete movies but I can re-downlaod in 5 min so not a massive problem. I'm on a rolling-delete schedule anyway as my hard drives fill up quickly.

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 12:57:05 PM

There is no GUI in anything you're saying. How is this 'the new GUI'?

by ulfw

5/1/2026 at 2:14:41 PM

I have a similar set up. I communicate/chat with the Hermes agent via Matrix chat client.

So rather than having to go to a bunch of different websites or apps to get things done, I've linked them all to Hermes (via skills) and chat with the Hermes agent on my phone.

I want a movie? I just say download XYZ. Shows up in Plex 5 min later.

I want to research something with multiple different perspectives? Rather than going to OpenWebUI and using that, I just asked a Hermes agent to examine an issue from multiple different viewpoints and get back to me with a conclusion.

by dumbmrblah

5/1/2026 at 3:03:38 PM

It's the next paradigm in how people interact with computers.

by bitwize

5/2/2026 at 6:54:29 AM

100%. It's so natural, even to complete noobs that's it's hard to go back.

by apexalpha

5/2/2026 at 9:42:37 PM

Except it's not. Even though us commandlinebros made fun of GUIs back when they came out, GUIs still have the property of being precise and unambiguous (to the machine, to the human requires design finesse and clear guidelines). There's no "Oopsie-boopsie! I made a little fucky-wucky and accidentally your entire production database, even though you told me not to do that!" with a CLI or GUI. With CLI and GUI, screwups of that sort are entirely PEBKACs. The fucky-wucky factor needs to be controlled in LLMs so that it's possible to communicate your exact intent to the machine and get the expected result every time. Of course if that's ever achieved we will have reinvented command processors "with extra steps".

by bitwize

5/1/2026 at 6:39:08 PM

Is a webapp with a frontend not a GUI? Thats what I meant.

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 2:35:55 PM

Why not just use https://seerr.dev/

Using an ai for that is pretty wasteful.

by dawnerd

5/1/2026 at 3:53:28 PM

What if I tell you u can use the agent directly with seerr. That way you don't have to make or maintain skills/mcps for each of the services.

OP said he does local inference, and you are complaining about 'wastefulness'. OP brought the request service to where his friends already were. For them, this is probably the better solution. Seerr cannot expose itself to discord/telegram and requires users to have another account. I mean, sure you can have the AI code those too.

There are plenty of ways to solve problems, and some people do it differently. Sometimes, just to see if it works. This is a good thing. Not everyone has the time nor inclination to maximize efficiency.

by nickthegreek

5/1/2026 at 6:26:38 PM

> Seerr cannot expose itself to discord/telegram and requires users to have another account

Seerr can use Plex accounts, assuming people are using OPs Plex library, there's no new accounts needed to be made.

> OP brought the request service to where his friends already were ...

Another thing Seerr can do is scan the watch lists of any connected Plex accounts, so assuming the friends are already using Plex, they'd already have access to it.

> Not everyone has the time nor inclination to maximize efficiency.

Wasn't that a thing LLMs were supposed to help with?

by c-hendricks

5/1/2026 at 12:28:58 PM

Your setup sounds awesome can I ask - would a high powered mac studio help yoru setup alot or not really? Im just wondering whether i truly need to upgrade from a 32gb macbook air to a studio with 256gb ram or , if thats just overkill for the models we have ( also the studio would be a m2 which is years old now).

by ionwake

5/1/2026 at 6:46:49 PM

Well i run the new qwen3.6 or gemma4 now. I have a 48gb ram Macbook but its from work, so not really meant to be serving models 24/7.

And then for ‘big’ work I tend to switch to a cloud offering. With a 128gb mac I would be 100% offline probably.

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 9:47:21 AM

How are you handling secrets? I want hermes to do stuff on the internet but I am not enthused about dumping the requried keys in .env.local or using process wrapper services like infisical yet. Encapsulating hermes in a docker sandbox feels slippery and I'm always left thinking if i've hardened my server enough.

by klueinc

5/1/2026 at 10:48:30 AM

Openclaw uses the API key for Sonarr / Radarr, no secrets management (yet).

Though egress is heavily restricted for OpenClaw and everything is behind a FW.

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 3:48:50 PM

Oh man what a great idea! Stealing that. Don't even have to ask you to share I'm sure I can nearly one-shot the same service for myself. :)

by bakies

5/1/2026 at 8:37:57 AM

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.

by rbanffy

5/1/2026 at 8:55:33 AM

If I start the application process now I might have my second mortgage approved by the time said 1TB RAM M5 Ultra is available.

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 10:27:22 AM

You own a house?!

by yomby

5/1/2026 at 10:49:54 AM

The second mortgage is to pay for the first mortgage

by ionwake

5/1/2026 at 10:50:35 AM

Might have to trade it in for the new Mac Studio.

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 6:50:40 AM

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.

by bottlepalm

5/1/2026 at 7:02:52 AM

Ever considered second hand slightly older gens? Even M1 is still great for many use cases. E.g. often corps are selling them on Ebay, in pretty good condition.

by montebicyclelo

5/1/2026 at 11:55:44 AM

Mac prices on eBay are sort of bizarre. Back when I was looking (when you could still purchase a new one in a reasonable timeframe) many of the higher end listings cost as much or more (!) then just getting them from Apple. I ended up buying an Apple certified refurbished Mac Studio for less than the comparable eBay listing.

Not sure who’s buying these or if it’s just people dreaming about finding a rube.

by bayesnet

5/1/2026 at 7:05:55 AM

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

by morphle

5/1/2026 at 7:23:55 AM

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.

by bottlepalm

5/1/2026 at 8:07:43 AM

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.

by deaux

5/1/2026 at 9:22:18 PM

Yeah but the base Mac Mini comes with 16GB. So getting that for $600 instead of a very clapped out M1 for $300 seems worth it. That's what I thought when I was browsing on ebay, anyway.

by harambae

5/1/2026 at 12:18:30 PM

They are similarly good. In fact I prefer my M1 MBA to the newer models because of its shape.

by solarkraft

5/1/2026 at 8:23:51 AM

If a $300 Mac can do the job, a $600 Mac is overkill.

by MikeNotThePope

5/1/2026 at 5:59:49 PM

You’re thinking about these M series macs like they’re computers from the 2010s.

A M1 MacBook Air will perform virtually identically for most if not all laptop computing class tasks.

by awakeasleep

5/1/2026 at 7:36:14 AM

Neo isn't much better than M1.

by yreg

5/1/2026 at 1:47:55 PM

In my personal experience, 13” M1 MacBook Air, 15” M4 Macbook Air, M4 Pro Mac Mini, and MacBook Neo, the Neo is the fastest for single threaded and strictly CPU bound tasks. E.g. calculating 200x200, 1000 max iterations Mandelbrot fractals it does ~785 in ten seconds compared to ~760 on the M4s and somewhere in the 600s for the M1.

Given its RAM size I’m not going to be spinning up VMs, but in terms of general purpose computing it’s more than adequate. And, out of the box, you get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, video editing, digital audio, web browser, and a bunch of other things. Xcode is free. This is easily a laptop you can buy and use for years in 90% of settings.

by wang_li

5/1/2026 at 4:30:53 PM

I'm not really sure why your neo is performing better than the M4.

The M4 and the neo share the same CPU architecture but the M4 has 4 performance cores at 4.4ghz, while the neo has 2 performance cores at 4ghz.

The neo also does not have any CPU heatsink so it thermal throttles after only a few seconds:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/MacBo...

by windowsrookie

5/1/2026 at 4:53:43 PM

Yes, all the M-series have more cores, they often have better thermal management, and they have more memory bandwidth. (The the Neo still has crazy high bandwidth.) But, for a single threaded, strictly compute task that runs in 10 seconds, it outperforms the M4 cores. I don't know why, I'm just sharing my experience.

The actual code I am using for this is:

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <sys/time.h>

    int gettimeofday(struct timeval *tp, void *tzp);

    int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
      double xmin, xmax;
      double ymin, ymax;
      double x, y, xs, ys;
      int max_iter;
      int i, px, py;
      int width, height;
      volatile double wx, wy, t;
      double start, now;
      struct timeval tv;
      int count;

      xmin = -2.0;
      ymin = -1.5;
      xmax = 1.0;
      ymax = 1.5;

      max_iter = 1000;
      width = 200;
      height = 200;

      xs = (xmax - xmin) / (double) width;
      ys = (ymax - ymin) / (double) height;

      gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
      start = (tv.tv_sec * 1000000.0 + tv.tv_usec) / 1000000.0;
      count = 0;
      now = start;
      while (now - start < 10.0 /* && count == 0 */) {
        for (y=ymin, py = 0; py < height; py++, y += ys) {
          for (x=xmin, px = 0; px < width; px++, x += xs) {
            wx = 0.0;
            wy = 0.0;
            for (i=0; i < max_iter && (wx * wx + wy * wy) < 4; i++) {
              t = wx * wx - wy * wy + x;
              wy = 2 * wx * wy + y;
              wx = t;
            }
          }
        }
        gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
        now = (tv.tv_sec * 1000000.0 + tv.tv_usec) / 1000000.0;
        count ++;
      }
      printf("%d iterations in %.2f seconds.\n", count, now - start);
    }

by wang_li

5/1/2026 at 1:04:06 PM

M1 is even better in some ways, like it has Thunderbolt ports (plural even!).

by kalleboo

5/1/2026 at 4:17:26 PM

The only place where it seems unequivocally better for mainstream use is hardware AV1 decode.

(If I were building a Jellyfin server today, I'd probably use a MacBook Neo.)

by Marsymars

5/1/2026 at 7:45:46 AM

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.

by brailsafe

5/1/2026 at 8:01:25 AM

This is unethical.

by valleyer

5/1/2026 at 10:38:43 PM

That's not what the employees say! Though it's a rare thing for me to do, it's not like I'm doing something shady, and they're quite happy to say things like "Well, give it a try, if it's not for you, return it", which I'm sure leads to customer comfort and increased sales. Usually I'm also genuinely trying a different product than the one I have, and get to evaluate whether it's any good.

As far as I'm concerned, if I can't work because they have my laptop for a week, especially because I pay for AppleCare and have to leave it with them, it's not much different than an insurance policy that lends me a rental car while mine's in the shop.

by brailsafe

5/1/2026 at 8:21:15 AM

If the return policy explicitly allows "change of mind", I'd say it's in the gray area. Though ofc it isn't sustainable if everyone starts doing this. I assume there's a ((returns:buys)/payment identity) metric to ban the largest offenders.

Also, there should be some universally accepted way to have access to your data and a secure personal computer in the duration your device is getting repaired.

by nirava

5/1/2026 at 11:22:04 AM

Also, there should be some universally accepted way to have access to your data and a secure personal computer in the duration your device is getting repaired.

Yes, exactly. When getting your car repaired there’s loaners or rentals to allow you to keep driving. Why isn’t a loaner computer a standard thing?

by chongli

5/1/2026 at 4:14:08 PM

My local library will loan you a Chromebook for up to three weeks (three weeks reserved, can extend if there's availability) at no charge.

by Marsymars

5/1/2026 at 4:57:45 PM

That’s fantastic for people in the Chromebook ecosystem. They can log in and away they go! Not so great for us in the Apple ecosystem though.

by chongli

5/1/2026 at 11:20:55 AM

Glad to see the hackers have arrived to defend a billion dollar corporation

by wildrhythms

5/1/2026 at 12:18:46 PM

Glad to see the people who do not understand tragedy of the commons have arrived.

by lotsofpulp

5/1/2026 at 10:51:42 PM

I don't think this situation qualifies, or maybe it's on the border. This seems more akin to using all of the bandwidth provided to me by one of a few companies coordinating together to extract as much as possible from their customers. Apple's had a policy like this for ages, if it wasn't more profitable than not for them, then they'd have done something about it under the miserly rule of the outgoing CEO.

Some people occasionally returning products—that they intended to keep or not—is not like all of the energy grid being consumed by data centers, nor is it like all of the wetlands being paved over for suburbs.

by brailsafe

5/2/2026 at 3:36:39 AM

Im also against this practice but both of you can be understanding the facts the same and still coming to opposite conclusions. Thats the whole point of the tragedy of the commons!

by awakeasleep

5/1/2026 at 10:32:58 PM

> billion dollar corporation

Multi-trillion dollar corporation*

by brailsafe

5/1/2026 at 7:58:02 AM

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.

by dyauspitr

5/1/2026 at 8:39:57 AM

You can for now, but in the very near future (macOS 27 I think?) Apple will completely drop support for Intel, and Hackintosh will be dead

by forsalebypwner

5/1/2026 at 4:15:22 PM

What issues did you have with macinacloud? In was considering using that to build and sign some dmgs and test my app and would love to know what your experience was like

by Reviving1514

5/1/2026 at 6:07:16 PM

Ok, I actually tried MacinCloud again and had much better luck. Instead of the pay as you go plan which you need to spend $30 minimum on, I got the $60 dedicated server which allows me to install software, and in turn I was able to test my software without buying a Mac, yay!

by bottlepalm

5/2/2026 at 1:53:51 PM

Hah funny I ended up giving it a go and ended up having a lot of trouble - connection issues, display issues, etc. They tried rebooting the machine but no luck.

Just bough a used mac today!

by Reviving1514

5/1/2026 at 7:05:28 AM

Not sure what happened to you with macincloud, but I used scaleway hosted Mac mini M1 a couple years ago for a self hosted CI server, and it was working very nicely.

by scboffspring

5/1/2026 at 7:19:46 AM

They don't really advertise that you can install nothing on the machine. It's super restricted.

by bottlepalm

5/1/2026 at 7:34:35 AM

I think you can at $50/month

by ZiiS

5/1/2026 at 7:43:02 PM

You're right! That pay as you go plan burned me, $30 to not install any software, but with the dedicated server I can, and I was able to successfully test my app, thanks! You saved me a lot of time and money!

by bottlepalm

5/1/2026 at 6:58:32 AM

I remember 4 years ago I was able to setup MacOS in a virtual machine. Maybe you can setup an Intel copy of MacOS on a qemu/kvm virtual machine?

by hurricanepootis

5/1/2026 at 7:18:29 AM

I tried this, https://oneclick-macos-simple-kvm.notaperson535.is-a.dev/, it wasn't bad for 'one click install' and got the VM running, it was just unusably slow and burning up my machine. Seems like I need graphics acceleration in the VM which doesn't work on my Ryzen GPU - QEMU running on Windows, and I don't want to deal with dual booting. Literally would rather buy a Mac (if I could).

by bottlepalm

5/1/2026 at 2:42:40 PM

You need Mac hardware for this but I run a MacOS VM on Parallels, not connected to my iCloud account. I think it’s nice for OpenClaw and CI.

by mitjam

5/1/2026 at 7:05:09 AM

If you send me an email I might have a machine or MacOS VM on that machine you can use.

by morphle

5/1/2026 at 7:24:39 AM

Thanks for the offer, think I'm gonna go the eBay route.

by bottlepalm

5/1/2026 at 6:58:29 AM

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?

by wiradikusuma

5/1/2026 at 8:05:54 AM

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

by zarzavat

5/1/2026 at 10:48:12 AM

Geekbench is basically trash. People keep using it for comparing Mac performance because many of the things people usually benchmark don't run on Macs.

But single-number outputs like that are useless. Is the number ~10% higher because it's consistently ~10% faster at everything, or because it's 100% faster on a minority of things and slower at everything else? The first one is pretty unlikely when comparing processors with different designs, and indeed that isn't it:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/4

https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/5

https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/6

https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/7

The CPU in those charts with a similar TDP to the M4 is the Ryzen HX 370. You can see that the M4 is ahead of it in a few of the tests (C-Ray, DuckDB, PyBench, FLAC) but in even more of them the M4 is at the bottom of the stack. (Only a third of those charts are actually performance; each performance chart is followed by two power consumption charts.)

And the ~20W TDP is a nice parlor trick (the HX 370 is the only one on the list that competes with it there) but in a desktop CPU that's pretty irrelevant. Whereas if you compare it to the CPUs that can be had for a similar price (e.g. Ryzen 9700X, 65W), it's only ahead in C-Ray and FLAC while losing quite badly in most of the others and subjecting you to unupgradable soldered memory that the PC hardware doesn't.

Meanwhile doing ray tracing on a CPU instead of a GPU isn't much fun, and FLAC is an audio codec so a ~10% improvement there is probably not going to be a big part of your day if you're not a full-time sound engineer. So does averaging those kinds of things in to make a single benchmark number make sense? Or should you be looking at the results on applications you actually use?

by AnthonyMouse

5/1/2026 at 1:36:45 PM

How are we supposed to trust these charts when it can't even be bothered to specify which Apple Silicon chip it's testing? The Mac Mini comes in two versions.

by philistine

5/1/2026 at 9:43:14 PM

The different versions have different names. One is called M4, the other is called M4 Pro. The name tells you they tested the former and it has only the one CPU configuration.

The Pro has more P-cores and fewer E-cores (8/4 or 10/4 instead of 4/6), but even the 10/4 configuration starts at $1399 instead of $799 and for the extra $600 you can move from the 9700X to the 9950X3D (16 P-cores) and have $200 left over.

by AnthonyMouse

5/1/2026 at 8:35:24 AM

If you remove the Mac filter, its performance is not even in the top ten

Which is obvious if you spent more then half a microsecond thinking about it, because apple silicone barely draws any power - it's performance is fantastic in it's niche, which is squarely within what a home user cares about - but it's not leading on benchmark performance, because that's not what apple designed it for

The reason its coincidentally good for local ai inference is also just down to the fact the embedded GPU has shared memory access to the system VRAM. That means low performance/throughput but large memory.

Which is great for home use, but once again not gonna top charts.

by ffsm8

5/1/2026 at 8:46:18 AM

Which top 10 are you talking about? If you mean the top absolute geekbench scores, those are always with the assistance of cryogenic cooling.

by zarzavat

5/1/2026 at 2:07:55 PM

Sure, the top ten may be using highly advanced cooling.

And the fact that's possible should've already proven that Apple's decided on trade-offs that did not enable bleeding Edge performance, hence not going to top benchmarks.

But aside from that amount of transfer ability you should've been able to manage, you're ignoring that apple silicone is still being beat on all performance benchmarks even with stock settings.

Apple chose a performance profile for their chips, and it's not "highest performance while sacrificing cooling and energy usage". Others did. And apple did well not chasing benchmarks, as that'd be the epitome of idiocity for their target market. They're not targeting high performance servers with massive cooling setups. They're targeting mobile workstation and entertainment devices.

They do not have any need for bleeding Edge performance trade-offs. They need power efficiency and enough performance to feel snappy on all workloads people will run on these devices - which isn't benchmarks. because none of their users _need_ highly sustained processing power. its just not something they'd ever target.

and im not even adressing the fact that geekbench is notorius for being absolutely shit at showing actual processing power.

by ffsm8

5/1/2026 at 7:34:52 AM

Mac mini has first-class access to iCloud, photos, iMessage etc. So if you are deep in the Apple ecosystem you might prefer it for that reason. I have a windows gaming desktop that I could use as a server for openclaw/cowork but I realized I simply don’t trust that system enough to give it access to all the personal stuff I’m giving to the AI. I trust Anthropic and Apple. I don’t trust whatever junk is running on my gaming desktop.

If you want to run local models, another advantage is Apple’s unified memory architecture. The biggest Mac mini has 64gb ram and Mac Studio has up to 512gb. Compare this little box to what monster Nvidia gpu system you would have to buy to get the same memory there. And how much your PG&E bill would go up. That doesn’t account for the shortage of basic $600 Mac minis though.

by ashdksnndck

5/1/2026 at 7:07:14 AM

An M4 mini is overkill just to run OpenClaw. I'm running it on a Pentium J5005 and it's running 20 other services in Docker. I think the main thing was many wanted it to be able to access iMessage. I think people dream of also using the mac to run the LLM but the 16gb ones don't have enough ram.

by operatingthetan

5/1/2026 at 1:16:44 PM

You can run nullclaw etc on a Pi zero. People who are paying big $ are mostly trying to run local LLMs.

Personally, I would rather pay a few bucks for Qwen or just use gemma4 which runs on a potato. But I guess we are all different.

by throwa356262

5/1/2026 at 7:11:29 AM

The shortage is for the 512, 256, and 128 models.

by hparadiz

5/1/2026 at 9:14:48 AM

The basic 16GB Mac mini is also hard to buy. I bought one used not to save money but because I couldn’t find any store online with it in stock.

by ashdksnndck

5/1/2026 at 7:31:31 AM

Those are the ones that can run the LLMs. Not a coincidence.

by reverius42

5/1/2026 at 8:44:57 AM

When they say 'due to openclaw' they refer to running AI models that openclaw uses, not to openclaw itself.

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 7:32:35 AM

People are running openclown on microcontrollers.

by amelius

5/1/2026 at 7:05:36 AM

My understanding is that openclaw is only a factor, and a relatively minor one.

Most likely the limiting factor is the crunch that chip companies are going through.

by znpy

5/1/2026 at 7:10:44 AM

You can look up benchmarks. It's different depending on the model of Mac Mini and Model of LLM.

The take away is that some of the Apple hardware hits a sweet spot for performance and price which may change in the future but for now it's causing a lot of demand so people can run inference without GPUs.

Also Macs keep a lot of their resale value so you can use them for a while and then sell them for sometimes 80% of their original value.

by hparadiz

5/1/2026 at 7:49:15 AM

Affordable ram!

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

by chillfox

5/1/2026 at 5:39:43 PM

Back in January, I was debating whether to buy an M3 Ultra Mac Studio or waiting for the M5 version, which many believed would be announced two months later.

The 192GB M3 Ultra was on sale at the local Microcenter for $200 below what Apple's own site advertised. Since I knew the RAM shortage would significantly increase the price of the M5 Studio when (or if) it finally did come out, I decided to buy the M3. Time has shown that was the right decision.

by tomwheeler

5/1/2026 at 7:11:33 AM

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.

by ksec

5/1/2026 at 7:45:01 AM

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.

by akmarinov

5/1/2026 at 9:58:30 AM

I disagree.

I am old enough to remember the iPod nano -- Especially the 2nd generation. They were effectively low-priced and smaller iPods.

Apple sold millions of these much much quicker than the iPods and iPod minis (which came right before). Especially in 2006, it was _the_ "Christmas gift" just before the iPhone, iPod touch and later iPad mini took over. Possibly Steve Jobs' demo where he showed how they fit into the otherwise useless small jeans pocket helped convince the world.

The iPod nano effectively wiped out the competing music player market.

The Neo reminds me of the iPod nano and iPad mini. It is smaller and cheaper version of an existing successful product.

I think the iPhone SE and E are the outliers.

by joakleaf

5/1/2026 at 12:55:59 PM

I think the outliers have burned them more recently and even Apple loses historical memory over time.

That said I remember everything you said and 100% agree - the nano killed everything around it. It’s been awhile since Apple had a similar home run; not an excuse for the clear lack of vision/leadership but a factor nonetheless.

by Royce-CMR

5/1/2026 at 10:39:45 AM

It reminds me of when the Mac LC came out. We waited months to receive ours.

by projektfu

5/1/2026 at 8:45:48 AM

>It is the SoC, not the memory as reported in the earning call.

Is the memory not part of the SoC?

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 10:10:16 AM

It’s a separate die, even in chips like the phone ones where it’s in the same package as the SoC.

by fredoralive

5/1/2026 at 7:37:08 PM

Ah, right. I always thought a SoC was just a cpu * gpu and ram. Full package.

by apexalpha

5/1/2026 at 2:59:28 PM

TSMC needs to get that phoenix fab churning out M5 cores pronto

by someguydave

5/1/2026 at 7:39:05 AM

Rightly deserved

by touristtam

5/1/2026 at 12:29:36 PM

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

by mark_l_watson

5/1/2026 at 3:43:30 PM

AI companies are buying up huge quantities of memory and the memory manufacturers have decided to prioritize those purchases over the consumer market. And Micron decided to just shut down their Crucial brand completely.

by dabinat

5/1/2026 at 2:37:31 PM

More the ai bros buying them up and scalpers trying to make a quick buck. There’s a bunch on marketplace now with a couple hundred in markup.

by dawnerd

5/1/2026 at 10:35:23 AM

Loving my m4 mac studio. I expected this as well

by polyterative

5/1/2026 at 7:15:07 AM

More fomo

by bajor

5/1/2026 at 10:43:39 AM

Since COVID the FOMO has been turned to 11.

I wanted to build a gaming PC, and now that's out of the question, even though I can afford to buy one in the current state. I just refuse to participate in this, so I quit.

There are thousands of great games that run on older hardware that would last me a lifetime of gaming.

Consumers always get the shit fed to them.

by libertine

5/1/2026 at 7:29:30 AM

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

by BerkeyMcBerkey

5/1/2026 at 8:03:23 AM

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.

by amelius

5/1/2026 at 8:09:21 AM

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)

by Auzy

5/1/2026 at 8:23:19 AM

But the Mac Studio can run LLMs reasonably faster better than non-enterprise-server setup. That is the only thing that matters at this point - it's an LLM accelerator, not a personal computer, at this point.

by jmalicki

5/1/2026 at 8:18:30 AM

Valve's Lepton (Waydroid fork) might solve this when it gets released.

by ajvs

5/1/2026 at 8:32:07 AM

Low supply doesn't mean high demand. I don't think many people are buying Mac Studios, so they just lowered production.

by iLoveOncall

5/1/2026 at 2:52:31 PM

He said higher than expected demand. If he lied on an earnings call that's a prosecutable offence.

by simonh

5/1/2026 at 4:12:43 PM

It can be true of the overall demand between the 2 products, since the Mac Mini is indeed very much in demand, but false for the Mac Studio individually.

by iLoveOncall

5/1/2026 at 4:30:28 PM

In theory maybe, but I think he’d be on thin legal ground doing that. It seems more likely that lack of availability of minis would push people up the product range, and I don’t see why we would expect a drop in Studio demand. Is there any reason?

by simonh

5/1/2026 at 8:24:30 AM

Why ... did you put so much energy into typing this out? That's a lot of energy to put into .... something you don't like and probably shouldn't care so much about.

Do you wish you could go back to macs?

by t-writescode

5/1/2026 at 10:58:46 AM

Forbid they criticize Apple products that are in the very subject of the article.

Will you be around to police the discussion the next time something having "Microsoft" in the title is submitted and the shit-flinging-at-Windows-and-the-PC-world contest starts regardless to any relevance to the topic at hand?

by noisem4ker

5/1/2026 at 7:00:46 AM

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.

by _the_inflator

5/1/2026 at 7:08:49 AM

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

by dwedge

5/1/2026 at 7:59:15 AM

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.

by robertjpayne

5/1/2026 at 8:40:06 AM

In same price range you can get a PC that not only has more ram but also has better multicore performance, better disk speed and better port selection. Yes neo wins on build quality, trackpad, speaker, display and battery life but the PC would also allow you to install any linux distro.

by ankurdhama

5/1/2026 at 11:33:02 AM

So the Neo wins on things people care about

by 46493168

5/1/2026 at 7:37:05 AM

The Neo is already considered a huge success and is the reason for the scarcity.

by stingraycharles

5/1/2026 at 7:12:05 AM

> 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 previously untouched market.

by swiftcoder

5/1/2026 at 7:41:20 AM

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.

by lloeki

5/1/2026 at 12:11:21 PM

I am curious. Where did you learn about 64 GB being considered minimum for those things ? I have never heard this.

I am able to do all of those things pretty fine with 16gb ram cheap msi laptop.

by mert-kurttutan

5/1/2026 at 10:28:53 AM

> so bad indeed that they took a bet on the low price sector with the Neo and abandoned the powerhouses

Says this on a post about the powerhouses all selling like hot cakes, with many months long waiting times.

by simonh