- Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio suffer from long delivery delays
- This applies to models with more than a base level of RAM
- It is apparently the consequence of the AI boom and the popularity of local AIs, especially OpenClaw, which causes or at least contributes to it
If you were thinking of ordering a Mac mini with lots of RAM from Apple, you could be waiting a bit – and that’s even more true for the Mac Studio.
Tom’s Hardware noted a post on X from Alex Finn, 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 running locally – ie on your own PC, rather than accessed in the cloud – and this is being driven at a rapid pace by the popularity of AI agent OpenClaw (among other factors).
So people are looking for a PC with a heavy enough load of RAM to run such local AIs. Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio, which you can load up with a ton of memory, are good candidates for the job. (The RAM comes at a correspondingly high price, it should be noted.)
If we look at the Apple Store in the US at the moment, the evidence is clear enough to see. The base Mac mini with the vanilla M4 chip is available for immediate shipment in its 16GB form, but if you want 24GB or 32GB of RAM, you’re looking at a two- to three-week wait for delivery.
With the Mac mini M4 Pro model, you’ll also 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-end CPU with 24GB of RAM, which can ship right away.
For Mac Studio, the wait is even longer. If you want this model with 64GB of RAM, there is currently a four to five week delay with the PC that has the higher-end M4 Max variant. 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 is not recommended.)
The M3 Ultra version of the Mac Studio, with a whopping 512 GB of RAM, also shows a delivery delay of five to six weeks from Apple. All of these delivery time frames are accurate at the time of writing, but may have changed by the time you read this.
Analysis: mini mania
Packed with a whole load of RAM, the Mac mini is a great solution for running an AI locally, where the unified memory (shared by the CPU, NPU and GPU) is seriously smart and ideal for such tasks.
And this is apparently reflected in the sales of these compact computers, and also the more powerful Mac Studio. As Tom’s points out, there are a growing number of companies using “clusters and clusters of Mac Studios,” which are “perfect for long-running agent tasks and local private LLMs” (Large Language Models, or AIs).
While there are clearly some pretty long lead times for ordering RAM-packed Macs, we can’t jump to the conclusion that this is solely due to a local AI boom. But something is clearly happening in that regard, and it won’t help if Apple is facing supply pressure at this point in terms of ensuring memory inventory. (And even Apple’s vast resources will begin to creak at some point).
If we see this trend continue, it’s not hard to imagine where all of this is going – these Macs are going to be very expensive (which is true with the RAM crisis being what it is), and maybe even hard to get hold of at all.
In short, if you were considering buying a Mac mini (or indeed a Mac Studio) with more than a basic amount of memory, you might want to consider pulling the trigger sooner rather than later.
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