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Posted by haunter 16 hours ago

Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston(www.apple.com)
531 points | 518 commentspage 6
resters 9 hours ago|
China's secret to rapid industrial growth in tech has been to invest in the low end, not the high end. Trump has it all backwards. An Apple factory in Texas may be good politics for Trump, but it has zero or negative impact on the competitiveness of the US and creates/amplifies existential risks companies face due to US political forces.
kombine 15 hours ago||
Wasn't going to buy one before, not going to buy one now.
epolanski 15 hours ago||
They have been saying this since almost a decade.
alwillis 14 hours ago||
Apple will spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years — https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...

Apple Manufacturing Academy opens in Detroit on August 19 — https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/07/apple-manufacturing-a...

Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud — https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

buzzerbetrayed 15 hours ago|||
They’re literally opening a new 20,000 square foot facility I Houston. So I’m not sure what your comment implies, but it takes time to build things like that.
iamtheworstdev 15 hours ago|||
i guess he's wondering if they finally managed to secure a domestic screw producer or they're if importing them from China?
adolph 14 hours ago||
Houston is a net exporter of screw [0]. But in seriousness, Houston has domestic production of fasteners etc for oil and gas as well as NASA.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Screw

stevehawk 3 hours ago||
it's a reference to the last time Apple tried this in Austin, their production was throttled due to the inability of their screw supplier to meet demand.

https://mashable.com/article/apple-mac-pro-screw

epolanski 15 hours ago|||
Sure, they pledged 100B under Biden and 200 under trump..to produce a bunch of Mac minis.
NetMageSCW 14 hours ago||
Did you read the Press Release?
epolanski 4 hours ago||
Yes
newsclues 15 hours ago||
They have made some machines in the us, like the Mac Pro

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/09/apples-new-mac-pro-to...

general_reveal 15 hours ago||
Was it such a sin that our electronics were made in the East? Was the west truly deprived and the east really abused? It’s nearly the end of of our lifetime (+-100 years is a margin of error), so the fact for our lifetimes is that our electronics got made there.

What is the final judgement about this?

TulliusCicero 15 hours ago||
"Sin" is the wrong framing, but outsourcing most of your capability to actually make stuff can definitely cause problems for a country.

For example, on a military level, the US is concerned about how rapidly China is catching up in naval capacity, China is building new warships far faster than the US can. And it's hard not to notice that China's overall shipbuilding capacity is more than 200x higher than America's.

The US has a lot of pride over having been "the arsenal of democracy" in WW2, and it's well known that a huge part of why the US was effective in that war was sheer mass: the US simply made much more war 'stuff' than any other combatant. But if the US was to get in a shooting war with China today, it would likely be China that would enjoy an advantage in production scale, with the US trying to make do with fewer vehicles and munitions.

general_reveal 15 hours ago||
Tactical error then. I suppose I was hoping someone would make the human plea that the barter was mostly a net good for our lifetimes. Our neighbors made our clothes. You suggest tactically this a problem, but I’m wondering if we managed to live peacefully and goodly this way?
notepad0x90 15 hours ago||
The same reason Europeans are moving away from US tech right now. You can't bury your head in the sand and pretend geopolitics is imaginary.
arthurcolle 15 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?
Aurornis 15 hours 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.

alwillis 14 hours ago|||
> 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 12 hours ago||
> 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.

gigatexal 15 hours ago|||
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 15 hours ago|||
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 14 hours ago||
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.
gjsman-1000 15 hours ago|||
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 15 hours ago|||
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 14 hours ago||
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 14 hours ago|||
How many American Citizens have to be murdered and how many human rights have to be violated before it is a bad job?
rayiner 13 hours ago|||
At least as many as the war on terror, which Obama prosecuted vigorously.
gigatexal 14 hours ago|||
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 14 hours ago||
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.

rayiner 15 hours ago||||
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 14 hours ago||
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 14 hours ago||
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.

TimorousBestie 8 hours ago||
> 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/

rayiner 44 minutes ago||
Fact check websites are tankie propaganda. But this particular point about air to air missiles is well attested.
gigatexal 14 hours ago|||
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?

platevoltage 7 hours ago||
I mean, now he's just straight up taking money from the treasury.
Fergusonb 15 hours ago|||
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.

bigyabai 15 hours ago||
> 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 14 hours ago|||
> 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 14 hours ago|||
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 12 hours ago|||
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 11 hours ago||
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?
bigyabai 10 hours ago||
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.

wtallis 8 hours ago||
> 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.

caminante 14 hours ago|||
Even if the mini is more power efficient at $600 base, saving $300 upfront pushes out the breakeven point.
bigyabai 15 hours ago|||
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.
arthurcolle 15 hours ago|||
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 15 hours ago|||
> 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 15 hours ago|||
Do they now? I assume they use them internally for something like Private Cloud Compute?
jeffbee 15 hours ago|||
> Mac Mini is their simplest product.

How can it be simpler than the Apple TV?

chihuahua 14 hours ago|||
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".

sigmar 15 hours ago|||
>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 15 hours ago|||
Apple has been taking about Apple Silicon's AI capabilities for the past few years, particularly around Apple Intelligence.
gjsman-1000 15 hours ago|||
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.

jajuuka 15 hours ago||
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.
al_borland 14 hours ago|||
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 15 hours ago|||
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 11 hours ago||
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.

mikepurvis 8 hours ago||
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?

wtallis 8 hours ago||
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.