The New Mac mini Starts at $899, and That Price Is the Real Story

The Mac mini used to be the easy recommendation. Somebody asks what desktop to buy, you say Mac mini, they say how much, you say $599. Apple dropped a new one on Tuesday with no keynote and no fanfare, and the cheapest one now costs $899.

That's a $300 jump from where the M4 model launched in October 2024, in under two years. You get the same 16GB of memory and the same 256GB of storage you got at $599. What the extra money buys is speed.

The M6 is fast

The base Mac mini now runs an M6, Apple's first 2-nanometer Mac chip. It's a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU with a Neural Accelerator in every GPU core and a dual 16-core Neural Engine. Apple's numbers against the M4 mini: about 40% faster on CPU, roughly 2x on graphics and storage, up to 4x on AI work. You can configure it to 32GB of memory with 170GB/s of bandwidth.

In a normal day, that means local AI models run on this thing instead of crawling. If you've been running something like LM Studio on a Mac and watching it choke, that's the upgrade you'd feel. For browser tabs, Lightroom, a Final Cut timeline, and a dozen Slack windows, the M4 mini was already fine, and the M6 is faster in the way faster things usually are.

Step up to $1,699 for the M5 Pro version: 15-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 24GB of memory, 512GB of storage. Yes, the cheaper mini has the newer chip generation. That's confusing, and it's on Apple. Both models add Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thunderbolt 5, with a 10Gb Ethernet option. Pre-orders opened Tuesday and everything ships September 22.

The Mac Studio went up too

Apple refreshed the Mac Studio the same day. M5 Max starts at $2,499. The new M5 Ultra starts at $5,499, which is $1,500 more than the M3 Ultra cost when it launched last year. The Ultra is a quad-die design pushing 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, up from 819GB/s, with configurations reaching 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, and 512GB of unified memory. Apple claims up to 4.3x the peak AI compute of the M3 Ultra.

The 512GB memory config doesn't arrive until late October. The most expensive Mac you can currently order is an M5 Ultra with 256GB of memory and 16TB of storage, at $18,299.

Blame the RAM, but not entirely

Apple has pointed at component costs, and it isn't making that up. Memory prices have been climbing all year and every PC maker is absorbing it. Even so, the entry price of Apple's entry desktop rose 50% in 22 months while the base configuration stayed the same. The chip inside got better. The deal got worse.

Should you buy one?

If you're on an M1 or M2 mini and you do anything with video, code, or local AI, the jump is big enough to justify itself. If you're on an M4, sit this one out. And if you were about to recommend a Mac mini as the cheap way into macOS, check whether a refurbished M4 is still around first.

This was also almost certainly the last product launch of Tim Cook's tenure as CEO: no keynote, no stage, a press release and a price increase.