Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner stated on the corporate’s earnings name on Thursday that it may take “a number of months” to fulfill skyrocketing demand for the Mac Mini, the corporate’s compact however mighty, screen-free desktop laptop. Prepare dinner’s remarks come after coders decided in latest months that the Mac Mini was the right machine for agentic AI duties.
“On the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, each of those are superb platforms for AI and agentic instruments,” Prepare dinner stated on the earnings name, in response to analyst questions. “And buyer adoption of that’s occurring sooner than we anticipated.”
The information comes amid one other record-setting quarter for the corporate. iPhone gross sales got here up shorter than anticipated, although demand for the iPhone 17 has been tremendous excessive, and Apple’s subscription companies enterprise has continued to develop.
Apple confronted provide constraints on each the iPhone and the Mac product line this quarter. iPhone shortages are being pushed largely by a restricted provide of the superior chips that energy the telephones. However as Prepare dinner made clear, not less than two various factors are driving shortages in Apple’s Mac enterprise: The fast adoption of generative AI and sudden demand for the corporate’s new, colourful, and extra reasonably priced MacBook Neo laptop computer.
Mac gross sales are sometimes a fraction of what iPhone gross sales are—$8.4 billion this quarter, in comparison with practically $57 billion in gross sales of the iPhone—and the Mac Mini, particularly, is a fraction of that. However with the launch of OpenClaw earlier this 12 months, an open-source AI software, Mac Minis started flying off the cabinets as a result of they provide each sufficient energy and a devoted computing atmosphere for agentic AI duties.
Some keen prospects have already been ready months for his or her Mac Minis. MacRumors reported in early March that Apple had stopped promoting a configuration of the pc that included 512 GB of reminiscence. As of final week, the bottom mannequin of Mac Mini was entirely sold out.
Prepare dinner, and his soon-to-be-successor John Ternus, additionally addressed Prepare dinner’s transition out of the CEO position later this 12 months. Prepare dinner stated on the earnings name that it’s the “proper second” to step into the chief chairman position for a “variety of causes,” together with that Apple is well-positioned financially and that its upcoming product highway map is “unbelievable.” He known as Ternus a “particular person of exceptional character and a born chief.”
Ternus then joined the decision for a minute to vouch for Prepare dinner as a enterprise chief and to guarantee traders he’d take a equally deliberate and considerate strategy in main the corporate. He, too, talked about the corporate’s highway map.
Each males had been scant on particulars round this supposedly very thrilling product highway map, however hopefully, it consists of extra … highway Macs.
