The news I've been waiting for.
The base Mac mini with an M4 chip is “currently unavailable” for delivery on the official online Apple Store. Apple Store Pickup is also currently unavailable. I don't remember this product ever being out of stock.
Meanwhile, the base Mac mini with an M4 Pro chip is available to purchase with an approximate seven-week wait.
Hopefully, this means a Mac mini with an M5 chip is on the horizon. I've been holding out on purchasing the M4 model because the M5 processes Large Language Models (LLMs) up to 3.6 times faster. This is a massive improvement.
I suspect Apple's struggling to keep up with demand for their base Mac mini because a lot of people recommended this product over the MacBook Neo for new users who doesn't need a built-in screen.
The MacBook Neo laptop with an A18 Pro chip is limited to 8 GB of unified memory; as a comparison, the base Mac mini desktop (no built-in display/keyboard) with an M4 chip has 16 GB of unified memory. They both cost $599.99.
The Mac mini with an M4 chip and 16 GB of unified memory is sufficient for models up to 14B parameters in low quantization. From what I've seen, models up to this limit are responsive (20-50+ tokens per second). An M5 chip would greatly improve these response times.