Apple’s cheapest Mac Mini just got 50% more expensive, now $899 starting

Apple has announced a new Mac mini. Pre-orders have opened in 30 countries, and the first units will reach buyers on 22 September.

There are two versions. The entry model uses the new M6 chip and costs $899 in the United States, with 16GB of memory and a 256GB drive. The step-up model uses the M5 Pro chip and costs $1,699, with 24GB of memory and a 512GB drive. Students and teachers pay $100 less on each, per Apple’s announcement.

The Mac mini is Apple’s small desktop, an aluminium box roughly 5 inches square that ships without a screen, keyboard or mouse. You get those yourself. Which is why it has been the cheapest way into a Mac for two decades. The design remains unchanged this generation. However, price has gone up.

$899

The previous Mac mini launched in October 2024 at $599 with the same 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage. We covered that launch at the time. In May 2026 Apple dropped the $599 version, brought it back in late June at $799.

So the same specification has gone from $599 to $799 to $899 in under two years, a 50 percent rise on a machine whose whole pitch is being the affordable Mac. This is the highest starting price it has ever had. The original 2005 model was $499.

Why the price went up

On its earnings call on 30 July 2026, chief executive Tim Cook told analysts: “we reluctantly raised prices, I would say. We did it because we’re in what I would characterize as a 100-year flood on the memory pricing.”

Three companies make almost all the world’s memory chips: Samsung, SK hynix and Micron. Since late 2025 they have moved factory capacity towards the specialist memory AI data centres buy, where margins are higher, leaving ordinary memory scarce.

Apple’s finance chief Kevan Parekh told the same earnings call that memory costs explained more than 100 percent of the company’s sequential fall in profit margin. The same pressure is expected to hit the iPhone 18.

What you get

The M6 has a 12-core processor and 12-core graphics, with a dedicated AI accelerator in every graphics core. Apple claims up to 4 times faster AI work and 2 times faster graphics than the M4 Mac mini. It is also the only M6 tier Apple plans to make, since it is said Apple will be skipping the M6 Pro and Max to bring the M7 forward.

Base memory stays at 16GB and base storage at 256GB, so the extra $300 buys speed rather than capacity. The M5 Pro model gets Thunderbolt 5, the fast port standard used for external drives and displays, and can be linked to other Mac minis to run large AI models locally. The M6 keeps the slower Thunderbolt 4. Both gain Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5Gb ethernet, and both run macOS 27, which brings the rebuilt Siri that Apple showed at WWDC in June.

What this means in Kenya

At about KES 129.45 to the dollar on 24 August 2026, $899 converts to roughly KES 116,000. After all the crazy taxes, the landed cost will be near KES 150,000 before any shop takes a margin. Early Kenyan pricing on new Apple hardware often runs high and then falls. The MacBook Neo landed at KES 130,000 against a $599 list price in March, and iPhone 17 prices dropped sharply three months after launch.

So if you must have the new Mac Mini, wait for stock to settle rather than paying the first asking price. If your current Mac still does your work, nothing in the memory forecasts suggests a cheaper Mac Mini next year.