Anecdata: Ordered my Mac mini M4 Pro (48GB) on April 1. Was told it wouldn't be available until June 4 but it just came in yesterday—a full month early. So I think there is an "underpromise; overdeliver" thing happening with current orders. Will be curious to see what happens with the Mini M5 release this year.
The base mac mini I got has been one of the best tech purchases I've ever made, and of course as soon as I wanted another [loaded] machine for more serious work this happens.
It's absolutely wild that Apple's desktop machines now cap out at less ram than their portables which can't sustain an intensive workload without throttling!
People may not remember, it is ~1980 all over again. There was a massive 'chip' shortage back then were the mini-computer company I was at and many others could not get chips they needed.
In fact, chips were kept under lock and key to prevent theft. But there was a massive theft there were 20,000 chips were stolen.
The Mac Mini and Studio are due for an update in the coming months, a part of this is also probably that they’d rather save memory to build up their next gen model inventory rather than current gen ones?
It seems like M3U 512GB RAM was a unicorn we won't ever see again :( Many skipped buying it with the hopes of a 768GB-1TB M5U but it looks increasingly unlikely.
I'm really interested to see what Apple eventually does. I don't think Apple will ever again be at all interested in releasing something as genuinely capable at a reasonable price point: my expectation is they are working real hard on new things that they can and will charge vastly more for, that include not just amazing bandwidth but ridiculous cores too, that justify enormous colossal price points (above and beyond the unbelievable cost of ram+nand).
There's some really wild patents on some wild systems architectures here, spanning 2021 to 2024. A lot of this can definitely go into an Ultra like design, but there's definitely broader possibilities here, that I expect they're now working furiously on. https://bsky.app/profile/ogawa-tadashi.bsky.social/post/3mif...
It's just so hard for me to come to terms with what a post-consumer Apple would be like! The Ultra chips are the mini-computers to the mainframe, and in this arena, they need to scale up and move upmarket and I cannot imagine how weird it would be to be an Apple that is so torn like that: that is still the worlds favorite consumer computing, but that also is selling mini-data-center like things, at phenomenal price.
Eventually if component prices ever settle that will be a commanding position to be in, to sell widely from, to have architecture for: but for the next half decade? A torn Apple.
A lot of discussion surrounding the ram shortage seems to imply that it will recover, but AI companies slurping up ram for training hasn't gone down and probably won't ever. Is there any signs that the situation is improving or is this just the new normal?
These don't have normal ram, right? The ram is part of the die of the processor? So... what's going on? They're keeping the chips for themselves? They're moving production to other lower memory configurations? But why? That's where demand is? Probably more demand at higher memory though?
I'd buy one or two but I can't stick them in a Colo because they don't have LOM or dual power supplies but I've been seriously thinking about buying one and just keeping it at home and having my Colo servers talking to it for local deepseek.
Not a high priority though considering how cheap deepseek is.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 36.1 ms ] threadIt's absolutely wild that Apple's desktop machines now cap out at less ram than their portables which can't sustain an intensive workload without throttling!
In fact, chips were kept under lock and key to prevent theft. But there was a massive theft there were 20,000 chips were stolen.
There's some really wild patents on some wild systems architectures here, spanning 2021 to 2024. A lot of this can definitely go into an Ultra like design, but there's definitely broader possibilities here, that I expect they're now working furiously on. https://bsky.app/profile/ogawa-tadashi.bsky.social/post/3mif...
It's just so hard for me to come to terms with what a post-consumer Apple would be like! The Ultra chips are the mini-computers to the mainframe, and in this arena, they need to scale up and move upmarket and I cannot imagine how weird it would be to be an Apple that is so torn like that: that is still the worlds favorite consumer computing, but that also is selling mini-data-center like things, at phenomenal price.
Eventually if component prices ever settle that will be a commanding position to be in, to sell widely from, to have architecture for: but for the next half decade? A torn Apple.
I'd buy one or two but I can't stick them in a Colo because they don't have LOM or dual power supplies but I've been seriously thinking about buying one and just keeping it at home and having my Colo servers talking to it for local deepseek.
Not a high priority though considering how cheap deepseek is.