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Apple price hikes continue as Mac mini with 16GB RAM and 256GB is now $899 — 1TB storage option adds $500 to entry-level headless system
What's worse than a major price hike? Another one exactly two months later
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The AI-apocalypse is upon us, and regular consumers are paying that price in a big way. Apple went on a price-hiking spree in late June, leaving only iPhones and AirPods untouched. The bulk of Apple’s computing devices saw price increases ranging from a few hundred bucks to $1,300. Apple is now ushering in a new wave of price increases with the refreshed Mac mini and Mac Studio.
The new M6 Mac mini is now priced at $899, a $100 increase over the already inflated $799 price for the M5 version on June 25th. To put those increases in perspective, the M4 Mac mini had a base price of $599 when it originally launched in October 2024.
The new $799 base price is an even more bitter pill to swallow, given that the headless computer still comes with only 256GB of base SSD storage. One would think that the $300 price increase over the course of two months would at least lead to a doubling of the base storage, but the ongoing memory/storage shortage makes that wish unthinkable; at least in Apple’s eyes.
If you want to see more eye-watering pricing, take a look at the hardware upgrade costs for the base Mac mini. The system comes standard with 16GB of unified memory, but an extra 8GB (taking the total to 24GB) costs a whopping $200. If you want 32GB (the maximum allotment for the M6 chip), that’ll cost you an extra $400.
Things don’t look much better on the storage side, with an upgrade from 256GB to 512GB costing $200. The 1TB and 2TB storage options cost $500 and $1,000, respectively. Apple’s value-leader Mac mini is now in uncharted territory. A maxed-out Mac mini (M6, 32GB, 2TB) costs $2,229.
Even the M5 Pro version of the Mac mini couldn’t escape the AI tax, as the base configuration now costs $1,699, up from $1,599 for the M4 Pro version (June 25 pricing) and a far cry from the $1,399 price of the previous generation earlier in the year. That price gets you a 15-core GPU and a 16-core GPU, while stepping up to the uprated 18-core CPU/20-core GPU version adds $200. Memory upgrades are deflating to the psyche, as upgrading from 24GB to 48GB adds $600, while the 64GB option is $1,000.
Storage options are absolutely mind-boggling: a 1TB SSD requires an additional $300 outlay, while the max 8TB SSD configuration is listed at $3,800. The range-topping configuration (M5 Pro, 18-core CPU/20-core GPU, 64GB, 8TB) costs $6,699.
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