Link: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/30/apple-unexpected-mac-mini-and-studio-demand/

AI devours yet another category of resources.

They built their M series chips with this use case in mind. The shared high bandwidth memory was perfect for this.

Glad I was able to grab an M4 Mac Mini earlier this year before all this.

It's MacOS that's now the problem

You can lock it down. Don't log in to apple services or install the stock LLM, add and configure Lulu, run open source apps, install homebrew, and so forth.

I guess we can expect some fire sales of used macs some 7-12 months from now?

APFS is slow, system monitor pegs your CPU as subagents spawn many processes, sandboxing is decent but nowhere near what Linux can do. If you want to run AI agents 24/7 and as fast as possible, Linux is the next level by far. Apple is a hardware company. Their software gets nerfed by company policy and chronically underfunding their teams.

I never needed a Mac mini but looks like I’ll be holding onto my M1 MBP until the wheels fall off. The prices are insane now.

My M1 13” MacBook Pro is starting to show the flex gate issues :(