Mac mini shortages are starting to happen — and the OpenClaw AI boom is a key reason
Mac mini shortages are starting to happen — and the OpenClaw AI boom is a key reason
Publish Date: 2026-02-17 14:00:00
Source Domain: www.techradar.com
- Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio are suffering from long shipping delays
- This pertains to the models with more than a baseline level of RAM
- It’s seemingly the consequence of the AI boom and popularity of local AIs, notably OpenClaw, which is causing, or at least contributing to it
If you were thinking of ordering a Mac mini with lots of RAM from Apple, then you could be in for something of a wait – and that’s even more true for the Mac Studio.
Tom’s Hardware noticed a post on X from Alex Finn, the CEO of Creator Buddy (an AI tool), who observed that: “Something big is happening. First Mac Minis. Now Mac Studios. Completely sold out. When I bought 2 Mac Studios a month ago, my wait was 14 days. Now the wait is 54 days.”
The theory is that people are catching on to the potential of AIs that are run locally – meaning on your own PC, rather than accessed in the cloud – and this is being driven ahead at a fast pace by the popularity of AI agent OpenClaw (among other factors).
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So, people are looking for a PC with a beefy enough loadout of RAM to run such local AIs. Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio, which you can load up with an absolute ton of memory, are good candidates for the job. (The RAM comes at a correspondingly high cost, it should be noted.)
If we look at the Apple store in the US currently, the evidence is plain enough to see. The base Mac mini with the vanilla M4 chip is available for immediate dispatch in its 16GB form, but if you want 24GB or 32GB of RAM, you’re looking at a wait of two to three weeks for delivery.
With the Mac mini M4 Pro model, you are also going to be waiting two to three weeks for the PC to arrive, with the only exception being the base model again – in this case, the lower-tier CPU with 24GB of RAM, which can be sent out immediately.
For the Mac Studio, the wait is even longer. With the PC that has the M4 Max higher-tier variant, if you want this model with 64GB of RAM, there’s currently a delay of four to five weeks….
