Apple ramping up Mac mini production in Houston to meet demand for Clawbots is wild. When were Mac minis a hot commodity before three weeks ago?
Apple ramping up Mac mini production in Houston to meet demand for Clawbots is wild. When were Mac minis a hot commodity before three weeks ago?
> to meet demand for Clawbots is wild
This is not in response to OpenClaw. It takes a long time to plan a new manufacturing facility.
The Mac Mini is a natural place to start training at a new facility because it's their simplest product.
Mac Minis are also around 1% of Apple's device sales. Even with an OpenClaw-inspired burst of sales, it's still a small part of their volume.
> Mac Minis are also around 1% of Apple's device sales.
Apple doesn't break out the Mac sales by product, but the latest estimates is it's 5% [1] of total Mac sales.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/23/mac-mini-us-manufacturi...
> Apple doesn't break out the Mac sales by product, but the latest estimates is it's 5% [1] of total Mac sales
Right, but it's closer to 1% of total device sales like I said in my comment.
Macs are only part of their device lineup, of course.
> Right, but it's closer to 1% of total device sales like I said in my comment.
That’s correct.
This is to appease pumpkin potus and his merry band of idiots
Update: For the record I do hate the POTUS. He’s ruined our reputation around the world. Allowed things like USAID to die removing aid from millions leading to many deaths. He’s incompetent and very stupid which will likely get us killed either in some war or in the next pandemic. Tarrifs are a tax. Congress raises taxes. If you support his right to tax without congress then go live under a king. I’m an American. We don’t want kings. Need I go on?
And hating POTUS for what he’s doing to the country is my right as an American. We weren’t perfect. But we were at least respected. Now the world laughs at us.
He works for me. And you. And he’s doing a garbage job at his job. Why continue to give him a free pass. Would you give someone like this in your team a pass?
Here’s hoping his managers (congress) fires him (impeaches) him.
The same thing could be said after polishing with AI and it will be a fact
As stated, it is offensive
You need to do appeasement as needed. Business is business.
Your ability to rationalize would make you a king in a true failed state where might makes right and appeasement actually works. Stand for something or you’ll fall for anything like justifying the moron in chief.
So what? Even if you hate who the president is, it is in the best interest of everyone that the president does a good job. Wanting the president to fail and millions to suffer is scorched earth hatred, not strategy.
This President isn't doing a good job on really any level. Its not that I want anyone to fail, it's that the President today is currently in a state of failure, and those failures like enriching himself can have long term devastating effects on our society.
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How many American Citizens have to be murdered and how many human rights have to be violated before it is a bad job?
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Obama managed to deport many without the vitriol or the killing of American citizens. Are you a one issue voter? Just showing a blind eye to everything so long as no brown folks cross into this country?
According to the LA Times, that statistic is misleading: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-2014... (“A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data… On the other side of the ledger, the number of people deported at or near the border has gone up — primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s deportation statistics.”).
I believe that the premise of the immigration laws is correct—that exceeding certain levels of immigration harms society for various reasons that have nothing to do with protecting sunscreen sales—just as Clinton and Obama claimed to do.
Again, you can disagree with the premise. But my entire life I saw presidential candidates promise to fix this particular problem, and Trump succeeded.
If they were cooked then they're cooked now. "Trump succeeded" remains unsupported by the same logic. Good shot on the googling and 12 year old article though.
No, it’s not the same logic because there’s two different numbers: border crossings versus deportations. Nobody is saying the numbers are “cooked.” Just that you have to understand the methodology to compare Obama and Trump.
The LA Times article explains that the deportations number includes deportations of people who were caught shortly after illegal crossing. During Obama, there were a large number of border crossings. So anyone who got caught shortly after crossing was counted as a deportation. But border crossings dropped to nearly zero under Trump. That drives down the deportation numbers. The low hanging fruit is gone.
This is the same as saying to a woman in an abusive relationship: “it’s in the best interest of the kids and the family and everyone else that you put on a happy face and make it look like he’s a good husband and father even if he beats you”
Even if you hate the orange guy, there's something to be said for his approach of using threats to achieve results instead of carrots like tax breaks.
Haha very telling that this is what you find laudable. Onshoring manufacturing … it’s a low margin low skill (relative) industry compared to the services and things of the modern economy. We import goods made cheaper in other countries and benefit from it in consumer surplus… that the educated here on HN can invert a tree or whatever the latest leet code garbage is being asked in interviews but never took and economics class or basic ethics is beyond me.
If you were correct, it would be trivial for Apple to reshore the manufacturing. But it’s not. Because what China has proven is that, when you outsource the “low margin low skill” stuff, everything going up the chain will follow. China used its low-margin low skill work to bootstrap the rest of the stack, and now they can make air to air missiles with range exceeding US missiles: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-first-close-...
Margin is the wrong way to look at it. Law and finance are high margin work. But lawyers won’t help you win a war.
> China used its low-margin low skill work to bootstrap the rest of the stack, and now they can make air to air missiles with range exceeding US missiles: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-first-close-...
We’ve got to get you some better sources, mate. This is a straight-up Russian propagandist pretending to operate out of the UK while having a mailing address in South Korea.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/military-watch-magazine-bias/
Fact check websites are tankie propaganda. But this particular point about air to air missiles is well attested.
> Fact check websites are tankie propaganda.
Notice that this doesn’t contradict your link being shoddy. Blindly reiterating Russian propaganda is very patriotic of you.
> But this particular point about air to air missiles is well attested.
Please don’t pretend that I was disputing the expected range of the PL-17; that’s clearly not the point I raised.
Business will continue to business. POTUS is a failed businessman many times over who only increased his wealth by whoring himself to our enemies be extorting our allies.
I’m on the right side of history. Are you?
I mean, now he's just straight up taking money from the treasury.
They're definitely more popular right now, but they've been a winner since M1.
Great performance, quiet, efficient.
It would be tough to get a windows machine at that price that gets anywhere close on performance, especially if you consider the cost of electricity.
Great parent/grandparent machines, home servers.
> It would be tough to get a windows machine at that price that gets anywhere close on performance
Not that tough. I paid $299 for a Ryzen 5800h mini PC last year, which roughly lands in the same performance bracket.
Would have considered the Mac Mini, but the AMD box has much better Linux support.
> a Ryzen 5800h mini PC last year, which roughly lands in the same performance bracket [as a Mac mini].
Not really. And this is before the M5 Mac mini which ships later this year.
Putting it together in desktop‑mini form factors:
- Raw CPU: M4 is much faster single‑core, generally faster multi‑core at lower power.
- GPU: M4’s iGPU is roughly 2×+ Vega 8 and more modern.
- Memory subsystem: M4 has far higher bandwidth and unified memory, ideal for integrated GPU and many modern workloads.
- Efficiency/noise: M4 wins by a large margin; much higher perf per watt.
- Compatibility: 5800H wins if you need bare‑metal x86 OSes like FreeBSD or specific x86‑only software stacks.
- 5800H: 35–54 W configurable TDP in laptops; mini‑PC implementations often run it fairly hot to maintain clocks.
- M4 in Mac mini: ~24 W base TDP, ~40 W boost, but getting clearly higher performance per watt.
Let's assume the 5800H consumed 50W and the mini consumed 0W and both ran 100% utilization all year at $0.20/kWh.
The mini would save $87/year. That's a 3.5y breakeven assuming no reinvestment.
The M4 is from 2024, the 5800h is from 2021. You should be comparing against the M1 or M2, which was Apple's actual competitor at that performance bracket and time period.
You bought the 5800h last year, and provided last year's price paid for it. That makes the 2024 Mac mini more relevant than the models that weren't being made or sold last year. Unless you'd like to dig up what that 5800h system cost back in 2021, to put that into context against a Mac mini from back then?
The Beelink mini PC I bought MSRPs at $600, but it comes with a 500GB NVMe drive. In Apple's pricing scheme, that puts it equivalent to a $800 Mac Mini configuration.
To reiterate, this is absolutely a comparable machine to the Mac Mini in terms of performance. Maybe not your ideal configuration, but I had $300 and a limited patience for Asahi development.
> To reiterate, this is absolutely a comparable machine to the Mac Mini in terms of performance.
Reiterating is not the appropriate response after someone has already detailed many ways in which the performance a 5800h is not in the same league, none of which you have even attempted to refute.
The more truthful claim you could have made is that you don't need the extra performance (far more plausible, given that you bought a new machine with a four year old chip), or that you needed storage capacity more than you needed performance.
Even if the mini is more power efficient at $600 base, saving $300 upfront pushes out the breakeven point.
I think there was a rush during the early Intel transition because they were dirt cheap computers you can upgrade yourself and even dual boot Windows. I feel like there was another big bump for them as a set top boxes to run XBMC or something. Might be wrong though. M1 release also saw the Mini's be a cheap entry point to seeing what Apple Silicon could do.
The first Intel Mac minis came out in the era of Front Row, Apple's attempt to turn every Mac into a media center computer. They had IR sensors and remotes. I had one hooked up to my TV, which was a big step up from the first gen AppleTV.
Plex started as a Mac-only XBMC fork during this era. There were also apps like Remote Buddy which let you control pretty much everything with the simple remote that came with the Mac. Apparently Remote Buddy still exists and works with the current gen Siri Remote.
Even to this day there aren't really a ton of options for a non-devkit, non-router arm64 machine that you can use as a desktop workstation.
I was happy to see that x64 mini computers have really come along. Some of the units from China are really impressive with some exposed full PCI-E buses.
Arm64 is still limited for sure, but with Snapdragon and Windows finally committing to ARM I think the future is bright for that. Just not here yet.
A thunderbolt 3 connector is 4 PCIe lanes, isn't it? I know there can be compatibility gaps, but there are definitely TB-connected enclosure boxes available. NVMe connectors are also 4 PCIe lanes, and I believe any of those can be broken out and used for whatever (m.2 cellular data modems for example).
Are you thinking of plugging in actual consumer expansion cards, or are you wanting the lanes broken out on some kind of riser where they can go to hardwired stuff on a carrier board?
Thunderbolt isn't literally four PCIe lanes; Thunderbolt can encapsulate and carry PCIe traffic, and Thunderbolt controllers are typically connected with four PCIe lanes, though the amount of PCIe traffic a Thunderbolt link can carry is not necessarily as much as four PCIe lanes.
Directly exposing literal PCIe signals cuts out the pair of expensive Thunderbolt controllers.
This is not for Clawdbot, this is a re-run of the 2019 strategy where Apple promises to manufacture a low volume of high-margin PC enclosures on US soil.
They mention Mac mini! They have like 3 other desktop lines going, and they mentioned the mini!
Also: "In Houston, workers assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S."
Advanced AI servers!
> They mention Mac mini! They have like 3 other desktop lines going, and they mentioned the mini!
Mac Mini is their simplest product. It's the natural place to start training at a new facility.
> Advanced AI servers!
Yes, they have their own AI servers.
Do they now? I assume they use them internally for something like Private Cloud Compute?
> Mac Mini is their simplest product.
How can it be simpler than the Apple TV?
Everyone else (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc) has boring plain AI servers.
Apple invented Advanced AI Servers! So much more advanced!
Just like in the 2000s when the G4 Mac was a "supercomputer".
>With its next-level AI capabilities, it has become an essential tool for everyone from students and aspiring creatives to small business owners.
Seems to me this part of the PR release is a reference to claudbot/openclaw. What else could it be referring to?
Apple has been taking about Apple Silicon's AI capabilities for the past few years, particularly around Apple Intelligence.
Not even a maxed Mini with 64GB of ram is useful for local inference related to OpenClaw, that is not the reason people are getting a Mini for that, they get the base model with 16GB because it’s the cheapest device that can interact with your iCloud data (reminders, iMessage, etc).
How about Apple Intelligence having been in almost every press release from the last year?
If you genuinely can't find out what they are referring to, you've been on HN too long.
That’s not the reason.