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Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
- ErneX 8mo ago> Pricing for the 256GB configuration has also increased, from $1,600 to $2,000
- znpy 8mo agoApple recently introduced rdma support in mac os. They are probably trying to push those people buying the 512gb configuration towards buying more of the 256gb configuration and clustering them together.
- PostOnce 8mo agoA consumer computer company is not going to push people towards building a miniature HPC cluster. Closest we'll ever get to that is multiple GPUs for video games.* *Nvidia is no longer a primarily consumer company, so all the other GPU stuff is no counterpoint
- MaxikCZ 8mo agoOne could argue that if you are buying 512gb RAM machines you are not a typical consumer.
- PostOnce 8mo agoBut you're also in the tiny minority of Apple customers, because most people who need 512GB of RAM are not looking at Apple products.
- istenesimi 8mo agowhat else!?
- znpy 8mo agoApple isn’t really a consumer company. It does both consumer and enterprise stuff. Just look at all the fleet management stuff it does for ios and mac os. And besides that, high end macbook prod and studios are workstation-class computers, not consumer-level computers.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoIt’s definitely a consumer company when you compare it to Microsoft.
- znpy 8mo agoThe comparison is completely irrelevant.
- hylaride 8mo ago> A consumer computer company Apple isn't a just a consumer computer company. Both iPhones and Macs have very large business markets. In fact, I'd argue that the primary reason Apple hasn't locked down MacOS as much as iOS is that it'd absolutely kill the demand from software developers.
- 8mo ago
- storus 8mo agoWeren't 512GB models selling like hot cakes to the complete surprise of Apple? Wait time was up to 3 months last time I checked. Glad I got mine last October.
- appreciatorBus 8mo ago“Like hot cakes” is relative. > The 512GB Mac Studio was not a mass-market machine—adding that much RAM also required springing for the most expensive M3 Ultra model, which brought the system’s price to a whopping $9,499. Number of people willing the number of people willing to spend $10,000 on a computer is pretty tiny. Maybe they are common enough in HN circles, but I doubt any one at Apple is losing sleep over them.
- dangus 8mo agoOf course, $10,000 workstations for a corporation working on AI products might just be a necessary tool. Just a guess, but I think it’s entirely possible that Apple sold through the full production run that they intended for this generation of the machine and they don’t want to order a new batch before the next generation of processors come out. I have to think that Apple is close to replacing the M3 Ultra with an M5 Ultra or something of the sort.
- storus 8mo agoA retailer told me they sold more 512GB RAM MacStudios than any other type. N=1 I know but still...
- __patchbit__ 8mo agoThere is a $6 thousand value add service to configure your Mac Mini with AI and have that accessible over iMessage.
- rattray 8mo agoCurious, what do you use it for?
- pera 8mo agoI was just looking to buy a Raspberry Pi 5: the 8GB one is now 58% more expensive than last year; that's more than what I'm willing to pay.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- abnercoimbre 8mo agoWhat will you do? eBay?
- pera 8mo agoMaybe if I can find an unused one, still not sure tbh... Or I might go for an alternative SBC from AliExpress and compromise on CPU
- pjmlp 8mo agoOld Android phones might also be an option, depending on the use case.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoI cant personally comment on them since I havent grabbed them yet but these are two Pi clones I was considering: Radxa Rock 5C and Orange Pi 5 I would do research on them because they are a similar form factor and usually cheaper for more memory… the software will be different.
- benbojangles 8mo agoi'm running qwen3.5:0.8b on my orangepi zero 2w, low token/s but it still runs. I think i paid around £14 for it over a year ago but now the same board is double price. I wouldn't buy a computer right now of any kind. It's a bubble.
- giancarlostoro 8mo ago
- mkl 8mo agoI'm trying to work out if I should buy a 48GB M4 Pro Mac Mini now, or wait for M5 Pro ones later this year. For AI/ML purposes, mostly. As far as I can tell, the new M5 MacBooks didn't go up much or any for the same amount of RAM?
- deelowe 8mo agoI don't expect the ram situation to get any better soon if that's what you're asking.
- discordance 8mo agoDepends what kind of AI/ML purposes you are intending to work on
- mikkupikku 8mo agoAt this point is the performance advantage of Apple CPUs even worth it if you can't upgrade the ram itself? I'm thinking you might be better off building a PC and putting the absolute bare minimum RAM in it, with plans to swap that out with good stuff in a year or two once the RAM market stops being insane.
- htsh 8mo agoare we sure the RAM market will stop being insane in a year or two or could this be the new norm?
- onli 8mo agoWhy should it be the new norm? We have an abnormal situation now, of massive amounts of investor money being poured into unprofitable bets, that this time had the side effect of eating up hardware components. There are two possible outcomes: 1. Yes, it's the new normal, then production capacity will be increased and prices fall. 2. No, it's not the new normal, the bubble pops and component prices come crashing down when buyers default etc. Option 2 has been the normal outcome of these situations so far. But sure, questions remains how long all of this will take.
- bombcar 8mo agoThey may be trying to sell through the existing CPU before a launch (soft or not) of the M5-based versions (though I've heard the rumor is there will be no M5 Ultra and we might be looking at an M6 Ultra later in the year).
- caseyf7 8mo agoThere will absolutely be an M5 Ultra. Gurman has confirmed it.
- halJordan 8mo agoThat means little and less
- reactordev 8mo agoThis is most likely the case. They ended their production run and have inventory (or so they thought). Now with the rush for LLM power, they sold out of them and they no longer have that inventory. This was a surprise to their bottom line AND their supply chain logistics plan! I’m sure they wanted to order more but were priced out for the increase in ram costs. Apple probably decided it wasn’t worth it until they revamped the architecture (and put a larger order in this time around). I’m not a buyer but I suspect that’s what’s playing out right now behind closed door meetings.
- Terretta 8mo agoRegret on a $10k desktop rendered obsolete for purpose (the 512GB of RAM only has so many applications) months later is not a great look. It's good long-term brand value thinking to close the regrets window earlier. Definitely “Caution” stage: https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/mac-studio/ https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/mac-studio/
- pstuart 8mo agoPerhaps not? Think of all the Chrome tabs you could keep open at one time!
- cyanydeez 8mo agoJust got a strix halo ROG Z13 this month with soldered UMA memory, 128GB LPDDR5X-8000. It cost ~$3k. Amazon is selling 128GB memory kits @ 5600MHZ for $3k. I think there might be a market failure guys.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoIt’s only a failure if manufacturers don’t respond by increasing capacity.
- cyanydeez 8mo agoThis is like believing there's unlimited, instant-on capacity. The same type of "we can just tariff whatever we want, and magically, the market will figure it out". That makes sense for a few products, but not something that takes billions of dollars, multiple factories, etc to produce.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoThat is true. Apart from all the other times demand for memory has exceeded supply. You can't compare it to tariffs because the cheaper alternative to investment is to bribe your politicians.
- Aurornis 8mo ago> Amazon is selling 128GB memory kits @ 5600MHZ for $3k. 128GB memory kits are not $3K. Closer to half of that. Amazon is not a good source of RAM pricing.
- freedomben 8mo agoWhere would you recommend sourcing RAM?
- Aurornis 8mo agoNewegg has 128GB kits from quality vendors at $1500: https://www.newegg.com/crucial-pro-128gb-ddr5-5600-cas-latency-cl46-desktop-memory-black/p/N82E16820156418 https://www.newegg.com/crucial-pro-128gb-ddr5-5600-cas-laten...
- chiph 8mo agoI think it's unlikely that Apple is paying the spot price for memory. They almost certainly negotiate delivery/price contracts in advance. Maybe the contract for the chips used in the 512GB model will expire soon?
- ajross 8mo agoEven if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoNot if their margin on the completed product is higher than the potential profit on the memory. My guess is they are doing this because they make more money selling two 256GB devices than they do on one 512GB device.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- don_neufeld 8mo agoOr they believe the long term value of two customers is bigger than one. It can be about more than the single sale.
- Faaak 8mo agoThat doesn't take into account the profit generated by selling the mac in itself
- thfuran 8mo agoOr the fact that if they sell all their RAM without putting it in devices, they won’t be able to sell devices, and some portion of their customer base will leave their ecosystem, possibly forever.
- Culonavirus 8mo agoIt's not a shortage, it's a cartel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY
- Alifatisk 8mo agoThe video is 1 and half hour long. It's a whole documentary. Very detailed and well thought out, but too long for me at the moment. I'll see if its possible to get a summary somehow.
- ahurmazda 8mo agoaside: YT has a AI/summary option (unless creator opts out). Look for the sparkle button. Personally, it gets me 80% there most days.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoI haven't watched up the video but I went way too into the weeds of the ram crisis. I am not sure what the video suggests. This is my own understanding of the things after I got way too invested in why does OpenAI need all of this ram all of a sudden. (On a random tuesday) My understanding is TLDR: The stargate project had OpenAI,Oracle,Softbank etc. Softbank got the money from Japanese bank loan[0] at low interests rates and actually scrambled to find the 20 Billion $ (they commited combined with oracle to around 500 billion $) (Btw The datacenter thing is being done in a similar fashion by Oracle) Almost all of that money when given to OpenAI was used/(will be used?) to commit 20% of the Ram supply of the whole world at a more expensive package because these companies just package ram in different order to get "AI ram" and then Micron shuts down the consumer brand (Crucial) This has now caused Ram prices to spike 5 times the cost in a couple of months back. Also, the inflation is happening in hard drive and just Nand in general. The largest impacts I can see that is that even companies like google were scrambling to find Ram. I find this to be one of the larger reasons why they might need so much ram all of a sudden. I mean Google and Anthropic were needing Ram but not 20% of it and not committed in such a way and I am not sure if datacenters are even being built for ram to be stored[1] OpenAI datacenters in Argentina for example is operated by such a shady company that came like 1-2 years ago IIRC. So a 500 Billion $ Project is just picking any random companies ... Yea no, I have the belief that they don't trust it themselves especially when a company is scrambling for money. All of this does feel very cartel/monopoly-ish to me to push the competitors out of the market or the people running open source models out of the market and another benefit of it for OpenAI all was that we normal everyday people get impacted too and I am sure that when they made such a large decision, they must have internally thought about it but we all know the morality of OpenAI now after the DoD deal. But I don't think that google and other companies are that impacted by it all it seems as well. Only the average consumer and Hosting providers (Thus seeing OVH,Hetzner raise prices for example). The average AWS/GCP/Azure makes enough money that they might not even raise money for sometime and they'll be fine having another additional benefit that more people worried about increasing prices would go to Microsoft Azure/GCP/AWS even more so. Edit: Gamers are being pushed out of consoles and everything too and some are saying seeing the cloud connection and AWS coming out and saying that we want Gamers on cloud (paraphrasing) as meaning that its all done to move everything to cloud. I do believe that this might be only half the story as OpenAI does benefit from everything moving to the cloud (somewhat) but its done even more to prevent competition in the whole genre as well. I believe that they thought about it and treated it as a plus point but before all and everything, it helped them thought that it can help them maintain their flimsy lead in AI models as more and more catch up by having a more monopolistic lead by stifling competition by rising prices 5 times. Gamers and normal people were just the largest casuality in this crossfire. I was thinking in the past month when I found all this that damn, OpenAI's morality sucks and they did all of it on purpose And then they had the department of defence* deal and the whole controversy surrounding it so yeah, that too. OpenAI doesn't want your benefit. It wants its profit and when these are conflict, OpenAI doesn't care a cent about you, not anymore than the cent that you give it. [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/softbank-seeks-record-loan-of-up-to-40-billion-for-openai-stake https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/softbank-... [1]: https://www.shacknews.com/article/148208/oracle-openai-texas-data-center-expansion-scrapped https://www.shacknews.com/article/148208/oracle-openai-texas...
- lenerdenator 8mo agoNow how am I supposed to develop Electron apps and use Chrome? In all seriousness, though, as one of the uninitiated, what would be the value of hosting LLMs on a machine like this that has a lot of memory that you pay for up front versus some sort of VPC-based approach?
- groundzeros2015 8mo agoHave you seen how much GPUs cost to rent? Note that this memory is shared between CPU and GPU.
- robotresearcher 8mo agoOne factor is that you may not be in a position to push your working data to a third party service, for security or legal reasons.
- rbshamsu 8mo agoComplete privacy, security, control and customization.
- saurik 8mo agoSo, the question I wonder: is that it for this tier? Will we even see a 512GB variant of the next model?
- ganoushoreilly 8mo agoI suspect they'll still want to offer it given the push they've been making over the last year with RDMA. My guess is the 512gb or larger studio will largely be a byproduct of the systems they're designing for their own AI efforts in the datacenter. I don't think this is the end of it for the longer term.
- benbojangles 8mo agoYou can keep your 512gb mac studio i'm running qwen3.5:0.8b on an Orangepi zero 2w and learning just as much as they are.
- zitterbewegung 8mo agoThe Mac Studio highest config was a great value for AI workloads though at least for inference and no one is reporting this….
- knollimar 8mo agoDon't you need two 512GB ones for unquanted latest chinese models?
- redman25 8mo agoFor consumers, there's little reason to run unquanted, especially for large models which take less of a hit from quantization. I'm running a 200b model at Q3 with very little degradation. A 1000b model would see even less change.
- zitterbewegung 8mo agoGetting 512 GB of ram at the price point is cheaper than everything else. That’s why Apple stopped production to divert for the M5 ultra.
- hu3 8mo agoYes and the result of this $10k endeavour is a much slower a dumber model than any SoTA $20/mo API. On top of the maintenance burden to keep software/models updated.
- marcuskaz 8mo agoInventory is tight too, if you look at delivery/shipping times for Mac Studio and Mac Mini, I'm seeing April/May
- kmfrk 8mo agoA lot of people also got into buying Macs for OpenClaw, so demand is probably up as well.
- copperx 8mo agoWhat's the deal with the Mac Mini and Openclaw? a vps is a better alternative. is it because iMessage?
- andai 8mo agoYou do actually need to run it on a Mac, if (and only if!) you require integration with Mac-only software. But the main factor is probably just "all the cool kids are doing it" ;)
- kube-system 8mo agoiMessage… and safari. Browsing the web from a headless vps has hurdles.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago> safari. Browsing the web from a headless vps has hurdles Hooking things up to puppeteer maybe? You can use pupeteer to then use the chromium control remote (debug?) option iirc which uses websockets underneath the hood Then you can connect this from your pc or theoretically any Control server. Surprised to not hear much work on that front now that you mention it.
- kube-system 8mo agoThe CDP debugger is easily detectable client side and many websites will flag your traffic as undesirable
- Sathwickp 8mo agoWas bound to happen, it never found the market fit
- hx8 8mo agoI'm sure the margin was great for the ones it sold.
- api 8mo agoI’ve been in tech for a long time and have seen RAM shortages and price spikes before. This one’s fairly bad but they resolve in 1-3 years.
- pixl97 8mo agoYa, how's that working out for GPU's?
- api 8mo agoIt’ll take longer for two reasons. One is that it’s a more complicated part with tougher fab requirements. Two is that it’s not a commodity. AMD can’t make nVidia GPUs. They have to design their own. Everyone has patents and trade secrets and copyrights. Patents expire and knowledge diffuses but that adds another time lag. AMD and Intel are fully aware of the demand and are working on it. RAM is a commodity. Totally interchangeable standard part. Also simpler to fab, thus quicker and easier to scale up. Oh, and I’d like to add: everyone is afraid it’s a bubble that will pop. Nobody wants a bunch of stranded capex. That has also happened before many times. So that puts brakes on it too.
- groundzeros2015 8mo agoThe cure for high prices is high prices.
- layer8 8mo agoTwo years remaining at least this time, according to current fab planning.
- reenorap 8mo agoI've been in tech for ~40 years now and I've never seen anything like this. The downstream repercussions on consumer products that have no access to cheap memory is devastating and is an extinction level event for most low-cost providers of cell phones, tvs, etc.
- TMWNN 8mo ago
- GeekyBear 8mo agoThe rumor from Gurman is that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio ships in the first half of this year. This may just be a sign that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is shipping sooner rather than later, as it's common for Apple to push out ship dates for soon to be replaced products. We do have leaked benchmarks showing that the M5 Max outperforms the M3 Ultra currently shipping in the Mac Studio, so buying an M3 Ultra Studio right now would be a terrible idea.
- aleph_minus_one 8mo agoSlightly off-topic side remark: Every mathematician and computer scientist should feel deeply confused that the M... Ultra is more powerful than the M... Max. Why? Because if something is the maximum, there doesn't exist anything larger/better. :-)
- user_7832 8mo agoThis thing has been going on for a while unfortunately. If I told you "Here's an "air", a vanilla, and a "pro"", what would you expect? The vanilla is base, air is lighter, and pro is nicer, right? Well, for iPads, the base has (had? Haven't closely followed them for a while) an older CPU for some reason. And the Air is actually a "Pro-lite", rather than a weight optimized version. Don't get started on where the mini sits, or what happens if you want "nicer" features like 60hz+ displays in a small form factor... a feature that budget android tablets have had for years.
- GeekyBear 8mo agoThey should use something simple, like AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395?
- hu3 8mo agowhataboutism doesn't make it any better, you know
- calf 8mo agoNot really, Max is to violet as Ultra is to ultraviolet, as in something exceeding an established category (visible light)
- guerrilla 8mo agoI wonder if the war with Iran could actually fix the RAM shortage. If this continues it really could put a damper on datacenter rollout.
- kube-system 8mo agoHow much of the capital investment that’s fueling the current expansion is already allocated?
- guerrilla 8mo agoNo idea. Let's assume not all of it.
- mv4 8mo agoI tried finding a 128 - 256GB Mac Studio online and most options would not be shipped for at least "8-10 weeks".
- j45 8mo agoMore likely that the M5 Max Studio is coming out. the M5 Max Macbook Pros just came out. Also the 512 GB ssd version has a slower SSD than anything 1 TB and up. The new SSDs on the M5 I believe are much faster and what's coming likely will receive that. There's no doubt there's a ram shortage, and price increases, and the biggest companies in the world lock in their pricing well in advance, and the remaining leftovers are where the consumers experience shortages.
- tencentshill 8mo agoThis is 512GB RAM, not SSD. Kind of insane that has to be differentiated now.
- j45 8mo agoTotal read error on my part, thanks. I guess it gives more credence to stitch a few more of them togther in the meantime.
- 827a 8mo agoIMO its more nuanced. They're likely in production ramp-up of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio, for release in the next ~3 months; they have pre-purchased bins of memory from the supply-constrained major memory supplies; and they need as much as they can get because they want to push an M5 Ultra config to 768gb to continue the "you can run local models" story that the M5 Max Macbook Pro started telling last week. Going beyond 512gb and into 768gb memory is something of a threshold that will allow Apple to claim local capability for significantly more models. Qwen3-235B, Minimax M2.5, and GLM 4.7 could kind of run with no quantization on 512gb, but they'll comfortably run at 768gb. DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM 5 may also work at some level of quantization.
- taf2 8mo agoI hope you are right
- criddell 8mo agoIs Apple telling the "you can run local models" story, or is it third parties?
- wahnfrieden 8mo agoYes Apple promotes local model capabilities in their marketing
- 827a 8mo agoYes: > A powerful Neural Accelerator is built into each GPU core of the M5 family of chips, which dramatically speeds up AI tasks like image generation from diffusion models, large language model (LLM) prompt processing, and on-device transformer model training. [1] [1] https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/
- bytesandbits 8mo agoApple
- bytesandbits 8mo ago
- lbreakjai 8mo agoNot related, but why is the word "quiet" or "quietly" suddenly everywhere?
- mlvljr 8mo ago[dead]
- tom_ 8mo agoAlso mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513 - see the article section: "Quietly" and Other Magic Adverbs. Presumably the LLM writing style rubbing off, assuming the LLM hasn't been used to create the content in the first place.
- functionmouse 8mo agoseems like people are using words like "the", "and", and the letter "e" a lot also. It must mean that everyone is a robot.
- TiredOfLife 8mo agoThat word has been used to turn any action into big evil conspiracy for a long time.
- brcmthrowaway 8mo agoWhy can't RAM be done inhouse? It's probably simpler than a CPU.. right?
- Yeabu369 8mo ago[dead]
- devonkelley 8mo ago[dead]