Dorothy

The Mac mini is one of the smartest products in Apple's lineup, and one of its most enduring. Born in 2005, it was the cheapest and easiest way to dip a toe into the Mac world for a mainstream that was just warming up to Apple. The iPod was just three years old, Windows was king and Apple was still recovering from its '90s slump. The "Get A Mac" ads wouldn't start for another year, and the $499 Mac mini was a small, well-made (if underpowered) machine you could hook up to your existing keyboard, mouse and display. In the intervening years, the price has fluctuated, but always tied to that notion of a machine well under $1,000 you could buy guilt-free.

There’s no official launch date for the final public release of macOS 27, but with today’s Mac announcements, it should arrive no later than their September 22nd ship date.

In a briefing on the Mac Studio, Apple even discussed the ability to connect multiple Mac Studios together over Thunderbolt 5 to run frontier-level LLMs with over a trillion parameters locally, allowing the four systems to share memory. Hypothetically, that allows you to run models locally on a Mac that just weren't possible before. Apparently, four Mac Studios can even be connected in this way to run over a standard wall outlet.

While the M5 Ultra is designed for professionals doing compute-intensive work like complex 3D rendering, visual effects, and running frontier AI models, the Mac Studio with M5 Ultra will no doubt appeal to hobbyist AI developers as well. But Apple’s M6 chip is more geared toward these everyday users, according to the company.

Not that the price increases come as a surprise. We’ve been going through a huge price shock, oversimplistically dubbed “RAMageddon,” thanks to ongoing component shortages. Semiconductor fab resources have been increasingly reallocated toward whatever’s ultimately the most profitable. Right now, that means anything critical to AI, notably data centers. And that pressure carries all the way down the supply chain, resulting in volatile prices for all other electronics.

The Mac mini and Mac Studio occupy two distinct points in Apple’s lineup of desktops, but lately, they’ve had something in common: They’re popular for local AI inference and software development thanks to the advantages of their unified memory architecture and the fast CPUs and GPUs on their systems-on-a-chip.