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The M4 Pro Mac mini industry shortage shouldn't affect your CI. Apple pulled the base model from its store and discontinued the 32GB config. What's still available ships in weeks with some configs months out. Resellers are asking $979 for $599 machines and Tim Cook confirmed the constraints will last several more months. This all paints a pretty grim picture, and if your CI depends on new Mac hardware, the shortage is already in your pipeline.

Last year, Nathan Hillyer's iOS platform engineering team at ForeFlight had self-hosted Mac hardware in their office, two engineers keeping them alive, and a codebase with over 2 million lines of Objective-C, Swift, and C++. Every Xcode update was a fire drill. Every capacity spike during a merge meant somebody was physically racking hardware in the Austin office. ForeFlight didn't want a new CI system. They wanted to stop being a data centre.