Two Months and Six Days for a Cube

I ordered an M4 Mac mini on the 28th of April. It arrived on the 3rd of July. That's sixty-seven days, which I've been rounding up in my head to "two months and six days" because it sounds more dramatic and I've earned a bit of drama over it.

I'm not going to pretend the wait was Apple's fault in any interesting way. No supply chain scandal, no backorder horror story. I just ordered it, and then the world continued to happen at its usual pace while a small aluminium cube sat somewhere between a factory and my desk, apparently in no hurry.

Turns out It Wasn't Just Me

I went and checked afterwards, because sixty-seven days felt like a specific kind of long, and it turns out I'd ordered directly into a memory chip shortage. By early April, reporting on the Mac mini and Mac Studio delays had already found that a Mac mini with an M4 Pro chip and 64GB of RAM was showing an estimated shipping window of sixteen to eighteen weeks, while even the base model with 16GB of RAM was facing about a month's delay. My configuration isn't the Pro chip and isn't 64GB, but the same pressure reached down to where I was sitting – the plain M4 mini at 24GB of RAM was separately reported as sitting at a ten to twelve week shipping estimate around the same point in April, which lines up with almost exactly when I placed the order.

The cause wasn't Apple sitting on a refresh, or at least not primarily. It came down to a genuine memory chip shortage, with AI infrastructure demand pulling manufacturing capacity towards the high-capacity memory used in data centres and leaving less for consumer devices, and analysts at the time suggested the constraint could run all the way into 2027 given how long it takes to bring new fabrication capacity online. Apple didn't do buyers in my storage tier any favours either – they removed the 256GB storage option entirely , making 512GB the new entry point for the M4 mini, which is the tier I'd ordered regardless, so I ended up funnelled into the same queue as everyone who'd had no choice about it.

So: not a fluke, not a courier being slow, just an unhelpful few months to want a specific amount of unified memory. Satisfying to have that confirmed rather than just assumed and complained about anyway.

The Cube of Computing

It shipped on the 2nd of July, which is the point at which waiting stops being abstract and starts being a countable number of hours. I posted that it'd been shipped with slightly more exclamation marks than I'd normally allow myself. By the next afternoon it was sitting on my desk in its box, and I called it the Cube of Computing, which is not a joke I workshopped, it just arrived fully formed the way the actual box did.

For anyone who wants the actual tech specs : base M4 chip, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 24GB unified memory, 512GB SSD. Not the Pro, not the top memory tier, just the sensible middle ground between "basic user" and "I need to remortgage for this." Small but genuinely appreciated detail: two of the USB-C ports are on the front now, which after years of reaching around the back of the M2 to plug something in feels like Apple finally noticed how people actually use a desk.

And it's fucking tiny. 12.7 by 12.7 centimetres, five centimetres tall, 0.67 kilogrammes. My iPhone 15 weighs 171g, which makes the mini's 670g sound hefty by comparison until you remember it's a full desktop computer weighing about as much as four phones stacked up – properly light for something this powerful. It's smaller than my keyboard. I've unboxed phones that felt more substantial in the hand. The M2 wasn't a large machine either, and I already knew that half of it was empty space in the first place – iFixit's teardown found the logic board only fills about half the internal volume, the rest is just fan and air. So it's not even a fair fight; the M2 was mostly hollow to begin with, and I say that with love for a computer I'm about to trade in.

I said to my mum, "how the fuck did humanity go from massive mainframes to this in a lifetime???", which is the kind of thing that only properly lands once the object's in your hands rather than on a spec sheet. Told my boyfriend something similar the next day, a bit more deadpan about it: "honestly had to double check it was on my desk earlier because yesterday felt like a fever dream." The desk space alone is the real win, though – on a desk that's only 1m by 0.5m to begin with, the difference between the M2's footprint and the M4's is genuinely noticeable, not just a nice-to-have.

Cracking It Open, Hypothetically

I haven't actually opened the thing – it's doing a job, not agreeing to a teardown – but iFixit did, and it's worth setting next to what I said about the M2 being mostly hollow.

The headline number is the case itself: the M4 mini measures 5x5 inches, down from the previous 7.5x7.5 inches, which is the kind of shrink that shows up on a desk, not just a spec sheet. That volume didn't just vanish – it got reclaimed. Where the M2's logic board reportedly left half the interior as fan and air, the new design has an all-new cooling system where the circular bottom grille both pulls in cool air at the front and ejects hot air at the back, with the air routed through layers in between. The power supply, which used to be a boxed-off module eating space, is now unenclosed and sitting at the top of the internal stack, right beneath the Apple logo, which Apple says keeps the power circuitry above the components rather than below them so the chip doesn't get pre-heated by it. The power button moved to the bottom back-left corner as a consequence of all this reshuffling, which people made a surprising amount of noise about at launch. I'm not bothered by it. It's not as much faff as the initial reaction suggested – you find it once and then your hand just knows where it is.

Storage is the one genuinely interesting change for anyone thinking about longevity. The SSD is modular and can technically be swapped after purchase – iFixit moved a 512GB drive between two M4 minis successfully, though the M4 and M4 Pro models use different, physically incompatible NAND modules, so it's not a universal upgrade path, just a slightly less final one than before. RAM gets no such mercy: it's soldered directly onto the M4 package itself, same as every other Apple Silicon Mac, which is why I ordered the 24GB I actually wanted rather than planning to add it later.

iFixit's overall verdict landed at a repairability score of 7 out of 10, citing easy-to-remove components, swappable storage, and Apple's detailed repair manuals, and suggested the mini could see at least a decade of use. Which is a strange thing to feel reassured by on day one, but I'll take it – the M2 lasted long enough to make that gap I mentioned audible, and I'd rather this one get replaced for being outpaced than for falling apart.

Setup Plans, Revised on the Spot

I'd been telling myself I'd do a proper direct Migration Assistant transfer from the M2 to the M4 – cable between the two, watch the progress bar, feel very professional about it. Then I remembered I don't own two monitors, and direct transfer wants you looking at both machines at once in a way that's considerably harder to manage one-handed with one screen doing double duty. So the actual plan, arrived at the morning it turned up, was rather less romantic: Time Machine backup off the M2, restore onto the M4, and let the two-monitor fantasy die quietly where it belongs.

It worked. I'm typing this on the result. The faff I was trying to avoid turned out to be avoidable simply by admitting I didn't have the hardware for the version of this I'd been picturing.

What Happens to the M2

The M2 isn't being kept around as a spare. It's going into trade-in, cash back, done – no staging it for homelab duty, no keeping it warm for parts of the dev work that don't need the newest silicon the mini's actually got – M5's out in other Macs by now, but the mini hasn't been refreshed yet, so M4 is still the ceiling here. Once the Time Machine restore had actually taken and I'd confirmed the M4 had everything it needed, there wasn't a good argument left for holding onto a second mini I wasn't going to use for anything. So it goes, and the M4 takes over everything. Which, at the moment, is mostly Chronicler.

Chronicler is the Kotlin PaperMC / Folia plugin I've been building – an in-game newspaper generator that feeds server events to an LLM and gets an article back. Repo's here if you want to watch the audit-and-fix pass happen in real time. I've been doing an audit-and-fix pass on it: thread-safety issues, blocking HTTP calls sitting on game threads where they have absolutely no business being, the general category of problem that doesn't show up until someone's server actually has players on it and everything stutters at once. None of that needed a new machine specifically. But I'd rather do that kind of work on hardware that isn't also two Mac generations behind, and now it doesn't have to be.

The LLM side of Chronicler has been its own small saga. I've set up co/core , the graze.social team's project, as a custom provider in OpenCode , and I'm still fighting the API more than I'd like to admit publicly – I said as much a few days ago, that I just need it to work with Chronicler and I'm struggling with the integration. That's not a new-Mac problem. That's a me-and-the-documentation problem, and no amount of extra RAM fixes it. But I'd like to say a genuine thank you to everyone running models for co/core in the meantime – that project doesn't work without people volunteering the compute, and I don't think that gets said often enough.

The Bit I Wasn't Planning to Mention

The wait for the mini wasn't happening against a quiet backdrop. Eleven days before I placed the order, I had an actual VP shunt failure – the medical device, not a metaphor – and at some point around then also nearly had a panic attack over a completely unrelated tool called Jasper, which in retrospect was clearly not really about Jasper. The M4 wasn't planned as a treat until after that, but it ended up being exactly that: something to look forward to and eventually unbox after a fortnight that had genuinely earned it. I'm mentioning it because pretending the M4 was just an ordinary purchase would be dishonest, and it wasn't. The Cube of Computing exists partly because of a fortnight that had other, considerably less fun things happening in it. I'd rather say that plainly than let this read like nothing else was going on.

It also wasn't purely sentimental. The M2 had genuinely started hitting a ceiling. It's a fantastic machine for basic tasks – I've no complaints about it as a general-purpose mini – but I'm not a basic user, I'm a developer, and the gap between "fine for browsing and email" and "fine for compiling, running a Minecraft server, and having an LLM provider open at the same time" is a real one. The M2 was starting to make that gap audible, in the way a fan spinning up mid-build usually does.

Two Months, Six Days, One Working Restore

So: it's here, it's set up, Time Machine did the job the direct cable transfer would have done with fewer excuses required, and Chronicler has a faster machine to be audited on than it did last week. The M2's on its way out the door for trade-in credit rather than sitting around gathering dust as a just-in-case machine. The sixty-seven days weren't interesting. The having of the thing, now that it's finally sitting on the desk instead of somewhere in transit, mostly just is.