Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio have become unlikely AI powerhouses, and the company simply can't keep them in stock. Tim Cook told analysts Thursday that it will take "several months" to catch up to demand.
"We just under-called the demand," Cook said on the Q2 earnings call, according to TechCrunch. "We're not at the point where we're saying this [constraint] is going to end anytime soon."
The shortages are severe. Multiple configurations of the Mac mini are listed as "Currently Unavailable" on Apple's own store. The top-end Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM has been delisted entirely. Lower-end Studio models require up to twelve weeks for delivery.
Apple sold $8.4 billion worth of Macs in the quarter ending March 28, beating Wall Street expectations of low $8 billion. Mac revenue grew 6% year-over-year, with Apple's total revenue hitting $111.2 billion, a 17% increase. The surprise culprit: AI workloads running locally. The M4 Mac mini, in particular, has become a favorite for running models like OpenClaw.
"The Mac mini was the top-selling desktop in China," Cook said, a market that has been caught up in an AI frenzy.
The $599 MacBook Neo, introduced in early March, is also supply constrained. Schools like Kansas City Public Schools have started dropping Chromebooks for the Neo.
Cook said Mac had its best launch week ever for first-time customers.
Memory costs are making matters worse. Cook warned of "significantly higher memory costs" in the June quarter, driven by a global RAM shortage as chipmakers prioritize AI server memory over consumer devices.
TSMC's 3nm process is a bottleneck, shared between Apple's chips and AI accelerators.
Apple expects supply constraints to persist through the June quarter, with "less flexibility in the supply chain" as a compounding factor. Cook pointed to a larger issue: going to TSMC for more chips isn't simple because the foundry has limited advanced node capacity.
Enterprise demand is also accelerating. Cook noted that companies like Perplexity have adopted Mac as their preferred platform for building enterprise-grade AI assistants. The supply-demand imbalance on Mac mini and Studio models is so deep that even third-party resellers are running dry, leaving marked-up units on eBay as the only option in many cases.
