| ▲ | arthurcolle 5 hours 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? |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | alwillis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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... | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | gigatexal 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | kshacker 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | gigatexal 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | gjsman-1000 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | bastardoperator 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | He’s done a great job on immigration. Migrant border crossings are at the lowest level in 50 years: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/02/02/migrant-e.... And we had the first year of net negative outmigration in decades. Now, you might disagree on whether blocking immigration from unsuccessful countries is a good thing or not. Maybe you disagree that those immigrants will bring the problems of their home countries to the U.S. But many prior Presidents have promised to do this and until Trump they have all failed. | | |
| ▲ | NetMageSCW 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How many American Citizens have to be murdered and how many human rights have to be violated before it is a bad job? | | |
| ▲ | rayiner 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | At least as many as the war on terror, which Obama prosecuted vigorously. | |
| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | gigatexal 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | rayiner 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | rayiner 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | gigatexal 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | gigatexal 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | Fergusonb 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | alwillis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | caminante 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | bigyabai an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | wtallis 17 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | caminante 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Even if the mini is more power efficient at $600 base, saving $300 upfront pushes out the breakeven point. |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | arthurcolle 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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! | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | LoganDark 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Do they now? I assume they use them internally for something like Private Cloud Compute? | |
| ▲ | jeffbee 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Mac Mini is their simplest product. How can it be simpler than the Apple TV? |
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| ▲ | chihuahua 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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". |
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| ▲ | sigmar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >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? | | |
| ▲ | minimaxir 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Apple has been taking about Apple Silicon's AI capabilities for the past few years, particularly around Apple Intelligence. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | gjsman-1000 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | jajuuka 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | al_borland 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | mikepurvis 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | jajuuka 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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