Apple won't have enough Mac minis or Mac Studios for anyone who wants one — and that won't change until at least late summer.
The company confirmed on Thursday that its new M4 Ultra chip is in short supply, leaving the high-end Mac Studio and refreshed Mac Mini with nowhere near enough inventory to meet demand. Apple attributed the shortfall to both manufacturing constraints and what it called "unprecedented interest from AI developers." Executives on the earnings call used the phrase "several months" multiple times without offering a specific timeline.
This is a rare supply chain stumble for Apple, which has spent decades perfecting just-in-time manufacturing. The M4 Ultra, with its focus on on-device machine learning capabilities, has become something of a cult favorite among hobbyists running local AI models — a market Apple didn't explicitly target but clearly benefited from.
If you've been waiting to pick up a compact desktop for local AI experiments, the wait continues. Competitors like Dell and HP are seeing similar pressure across their workstation lines, suggesting this is an industry-wide squeeze rather than an Apple-specific failure.