Marco Arment1d ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@bealex/116297678513693440

I'm guessing:

- The M5 Mac Mini hasn't shipped yet because the Texas factory isn't ready yet

- Tons of people bought them in the last two months to run AI agents, and Apple's manufacturing estimates weren't prepared for the spike

- The highest-RAM configurations are even more squeezed by memory shortages

(Although the M5 MBP can be ordered with max RAM with an estimate of April 8–15. But that's probably different RAM, and in a product that Apple makes in greater and more predictable volume.)

Show threadMarco Arment

Apple was cutting Mac Mini prices through reseller discounting all last summer and fall. One might conclude that the M4 Mac Mini wasn't a particularly strong hit.

And then OpenClaw happened.

Mar 26 at 9:58pmIvory for Mac
Show threadGraeme K1d ago
@marcoarment Only the base config. The Air base config is always on sale for discounts too; I think that’s just their standard practice now. My wife’s M3 Air was $750 at Amazon when it was the current model at a base price of $1099.
Show threadChris Gervais 🎸🥁💻1d ago

@marcoarment I think they even said in that WSJ video about their manufacturing plants that it was a relatively low volume product, which is why making it in the US was viable.

I think OpenClaw is a tire fire but I’d get one to run Claude Cowork on (don’t sleep on its subagent capabilities).

Show threadMieszko Ślusarczyk1d ago
@marcoarment is 16GB RAM enough to run anything related to it?
Show thread🌈D. 'Xalior' Rimron-Soutter1d ago
@spitfire @marcoarment openclaw runs on a 2GB raspberry pi :)
Show threadMieszko Ślusarczyk1d ago
@Xalior @marcoarment ah, I thought they were running some models locally. Why get a Mac for something like that if a Pi (or probably any dumb terminal) can run it?
Show thread🌈D. 'Xalior' Rimron-Soutter1d ago
@spitfire @marcoarment the same can be said for many daily computer actions, why don’t you use a Pi for those? ;-)
Show threadMieszko Ślusarczyk1d ago
@Xalior @marcoarment I mean the process can be ran on a cheaper computer, so why get a much more expensive one for that? And Pi is not cheap either - getting terminal like computer (like a used Dell Wyse 5070) or an N100 based one is much cheaper and can probably get the job done. If it’s headless does it matter whether it runs macOS or not?
Show thread🌈D. 'Xalior' Rimron-Soutter1d ago
@spitfire @marcoarment does it matter if YOUR DESKTOP runs MacOS? It’s all just a preference.
Show threadDavid Lynch1d ago
@marcoarment I'm kind of surprised -- everyone seemed pretty excited about it at the time. I traded in my M1 mini for one, even (it was good timing, since the M1 still had a great value selling it back to Apple)...
Show threadMachiel1d ago
@marcoarment sad how we are all supporting OpenAI though