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The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has unveiled a 1:1 scale visual replica of the famous Cray-1 supercomputer from 1976. Instead of sourcing expensive, cutting-edge tech to run the system, the creative team powered the project with 30 2012-era Mac Minis. Developed over 18 months, the project serves as a 50th-anniversary tribute to the Cray-1 and Apple's founding.
Mac Minis from over a decade ago might not seem like the obvious first choice for building a cluster supercomputer, but when networked together, the developers can orchestrate the 64 active processing cores into a combined 1.3 teraflops of performance in their most recent tests. The museum reportedly achieved 1.5 teraflops previously using all 70 available cores, prior to one node going offline. Benchmarks were obtained using a custom matrix-multiplication Python script. Five PCs are quad-core i7s, and the remaining 25 are dual-core i5 models. Except for two units from 2014, the rest of the array dates to 2012.
The replica is a valuable tool for museum-goers to understand the shifts in computer architecture since 1976. The original Cray-1 used vector processing, applying a single instruction to multiple data elements simultaneously, whereas the replica distributes work across independent processors in a parallel cluster. The peak theoretical performance of the original Cray-1 was approximately 160 megaflops. What was originally a purpose-built research machine has been re-created with consumer hardware that's vastly more capable than the machine that inspired it.
The Mac mini and Mac Studio occupy two distinct points in Apple's lineup of desktops, but lately, they've had something in common: They're popular for local AI inference and software development thanks to the advantages of their unified memory architecture and the fast CPUs and GPUs on their systems-on-a-chip.
Today, Apple announced new iterations of both desktops, along with two new chips: the M6, the first 2nm chip in Apple's M-series lineup for Macs, and the M5 Ultra, now the most powerful chip in the lineup for most things—especially AI workloads.
The Apple Macintosh is more than 40 years old, but it's still going strong, and its recent success was significant enough that Apple CEO Tim Cook called it out during the company’s earnings call last week. In particular, Cook credited the new low-cost MacBook Neo, which Apple says is attracting a fair number of new Mac buyers rather than simply prompting upgrades from previous customers.
But Cook also noted that the Mac’s success was being held back somewhat by “supply constraints… on several Mac models,” which was exacerbated by “less flexibility in the supply chain” than Apple was used to; the company also expects to pay “significantly higher” prices for RAM than it has been so far. In other words, shortages of everything from RAM to storage to advanced chipmaking capacity are making it harder for Apple to produce as many Macs as it can sell.
Sites that track Apple news currently post multiple times a month about Mac shortages, noting each time Apple removes a Mac mini model from its online store and religiously reporting on shipping estimates for the MacBook Neo. But because those spot checks only account for Apple’s inventory at a moment in time, I did what I sometimes do when I want to back up vibes with empirical data: I made a big spreadsheet (the full thing is here; only a few representative snippets appear in the article below).
Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops have been increasingly difficult to buy over the course of the year—multiple configurations are listed on Apple's site as "currently unavailable," which almost never happens, and others will take weeks or months to ship if you order them today. A top-end version of the Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM was delisted from Apple's store entirely.
Now, the $599 entry-level Mac mini has also been removed from Apple's store. The cheapest Mac mini you can currently order from Apple costs $799, which gets you an M4 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage.
This isn’t technically a price hike; Apple has charged the same amount for these specs since launching the M4 Mac mini in late 2024. But now that the basic model with 256GB of storage has apparently been discontinued, it’s no longer possible to buy a Mac mini for its original $599 starting price unless you can find stock left over at some third-party retailer somewhere.
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