Waiting 9 to 10 weeks for an M4 Mac mini 24GB
For a college student in the Philippines, the M4 Mac mini with 24GB of memory and 512GB of storage costs about PHP 56,990, or around $1,000, through Apple’s Education Store. The current laptop has an Intel i5-13420H, an RTX 2050 with 4GB of video memory, and 16GB of memory, so a new computer is not urgently needed.
Apple shows a 9 to 10 week delivery estimate, which means the Mac mini would likely arrive around the start of the next school semester. Upcoming classes include , data mining, , neural networks, computer vision, foundation model integration, foundation model fine-tuning, and MLOps.
The plan is not to train large locally, but to experiment with , Ollama, RAG projects, tools, and personal projects. The decision is whether to order now and accept the long wait, or wait for possible back-to-school deals or a future M5 Mac mini announcement.
Key points
- The M4 Mac mini configuration is 24GB of memory and 512GB of storage.
- The education price is about PHP 56,990, or roughly $1,000.
- Delivery is estimated at 9 to 10 weeks.
- The current laptop is still usable, so the purchase is not urgent.
- The main use case is , Ollama, RAG, AI tools, and personal projects.