2011 Mac Mini and MacBook Coming Soon; Supply Shortages Hit European Apple Stores (Updated)

Posted on April 23, 2011 by AppleBitch



The Mac mini and MacBook may be about to undergo a refresh with a new 2011 model as stock shortages hit Online Apple Stores in many European countries including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and France. The delivery times for the Mac mini or the MacBook in these countries has slipped in the past day from 24 hours to 2 days. As such, it is possible that Apple is winding down stock levels in preparation for the launch of new model.  Currently it seems as if the Mac mini is experiencing greater shortages throughout Europe, but the shipping times for the MacBook in some European Stores have slipped over the past day or two.

The Mac mini is due for an update with the last update taking place in June 2010. The MacBook last received an update in May 2010. The new models would be expected to incorporate the new Thunderbolt interface as well as the new Intel processors with Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, as introduced with the recent refresh of the MacBook Pro.

With shortages also being seen in the iMac, it is likely that Apple are unifying the entire Mac line-up to include the new Thunderbolt interface as well as taking advantage of the latest Intel processors.  We originally predicted a new model of MacBook would be released in April 2011.

Update: We have been told by someone familiar with the matter that it may or may not be a Store issue.  Notably however, Amazon UK is also showing drastic shortages of the Mac mini and MacBook.  It’s a funny one folks.

Refreshing

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  • IM UK

    I am like many people waiting to upgrade my Mac Mini. (I have the 1.83GHz Core Duo.)

    The main reason for waiting is that the Sandybridge processors are capable of so much more than the Core 2 Duo, especially if OSX has routines written in the future to harness that capability. I bought one of the very last non intel notebooks for my wife, and the intel ones came out about two weeks later. Not going to be obsolete by apple a second time. (Ok, the iPad 2 was only a few weeks after mine, but that was a present…)

    I hear what others are saying about optical drives. Mine rarely gets used at all, (other than I sometimes like to buy CDs rather than download. Amazon has little price difference, and my interest in acoustic roots has less MP3 available to buy.) it gets used to rip those in and not much else at all.

    My external hard disk has most of the data but likes to go to sleep so I am used to waiting for it to wake up before the Mac can access it. A second drive internal, spinning whilst the main one spins sounds so much better, (a SSD for OSX and main programs better still…) All available if you buy a Mac with a screen and pay for the privilege, but if the Mac Mini had such options available, it would be more of a success for them, not just against other Macs, but against the cheaper powerful desktop PCs with Win7 which, if it were around a few years ago, would have prevented Apple from having so many ex PC customers.

  • Nigel Tufnel

    Dual hard drives in a Mini? That’s wacky. Will there be an SSD option?

    • cv

      Dual drives isn’t all that wacky. I have one and I’m enjoying the second drive far more than I’m missing the internal optical drive (I have cheapie external optical).

      The way the Mac mini is used, there are a lot of enterprise customers who have zero need for the optical drive.

      Who knows if we’ll see an SSD option? It’s quite possible, but we’ll never know for sure until it shows up at Apple.com.

      • Nigel Tufnel

        Ah, you know I hadn’t noticed that the dual-hd version dropped the optical drive. When I say wacky, I don’t mean useless, I actually really like the idea. Just seems odd to have a high-performance option like that in a Mini (the “lowest-end” of the desktop Macs). But yeah, I can totally see it being useful. It’d be great to have a small SSD boot drive (let’s say 32 GB) combined with dual hard drives (at least until SSD capacities get larger).

        What’s really interesting to me here is I think this is the beginning (along with the MacBook Air) of Apple officially killing off the optical drive. In 5 years, I’ll be surprised if we see new Macs shipping with them and I don’t think we’ll ever see a Blu-ray Mac. They took a lot of heat at the time for killing the floppy drive, but it was the right thing to do and the time of the optical drive is close to the end. With today’s computers getting increasingly smaller, lighter, thinner, and more mobile, the optical drive simply takes up too much space, as well as adding cost for people who, in many cases, will never use it.