Apple expects supply shortages of the Mac mini and Mac Studio to continue for several months.
According to a Tom's Hardware report, Apple CEO Tim Cook (팀 쿡) said this on a conference call after the company's earnings release. "Demand for AI workloads is exceeding manufacturing capacity. As demand surges to run local AI agents such as OpenCLo, orders for models equipped with higher-capacity memory have jumped, which is a major reason for the supply shortage," he said.
Local AI runs models directly on personal devices rather than on remote cloud servers. Privacy concerns, reduced latency and rising cloud inference costs are increasing interest among developers and companies in processing AI on devices.
Tom's Hardware said the reason the Mac mini and Mac Studio are particularly in demand for AI development is the Apple Silicon architecture.
Unlike general desktop systems that separate CPU and GPU memory, Apple's unified memory architecture supports more efficient access by AI models to large shared high-bandwidth memory, Tom's Hardware said.
Chi-gyu Hwang
delight@d-today.co.kr