Mac mini starting price goes up to $799, may be hard to get for “months”

A $799 Mac mini ordered from Apple’s website today will take five or six weeks to show up at your door.

“Higher-than-expected demand”

Current Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the situation on Apple’s Q2 earnings call last week as part of a larger conversation about how Apple is navigating component shortages, and he partly blamed the shortage on the popularity of those desktops among users looking to run AI agents and other tools locally.

“Both [the Mac mini and the Mac Studio] are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted, and so we saw higher-than-expected demand,” said Cook. “We think looking forward that the Mac mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance.”

Cook wasn’t specific about what components were driving the Mac mini and Studio shortages, though he did say that generally, “availability of the advanced [manufacturing] nodes our SoCs are produced on” was constrained, and “we have less flexibility in the supply chain than we normally would.” In other words, it has become harder for Apple to go to TSMC and ask for more chips because TSMC doesn’t have the spare manufacturing capacity. Cook said these constraints “primarily” affected the iPhone, though, and only affected the Mac “to a lesser extent.”

As we wrote last month, the extent of the shipping delays can probably be blamed on multiple factors. AI-related demand for the desktops and chip shortages are probably factors, but Apple is also said to be planning replacements for both systems with Apple M5-series chips later this year, and it’s common for models to see their ship times slip when replacements are imminent. Cook’s “several months” estimate could easily include the introduction of new models, plus whatever time Apple needs to catch up to pent-up demand afterward.