# Apple's new Mac mini starts at $899, up from $599 in under two years *The M6 model is the fastest Mac mini yet and the most expensive one Apple has ever sold at entry level. Tim Cook has already explained why.* Apple announced a new Mac mini on Tuesday 25 August 2026. Pre-orders opened the same day in 30 countries, and the first units reach buyers on 22 September. Kenya is not on that list. 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](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-unveils-a-more-powerful-mac-mini-featuring-the-all-new-m6-and-m5-pro/). The Mac mini is Apple's small desktop, an aluminium box roughly 5 inches square that ships without a screen, keyboard or mouse. You supply those, which is why it has been the cheapest way into a Mac for two decades. The design is unchanged this generation. ## Where the $899 comes from The previous Mac mini launched in October 2024 at $599 with the same 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage. We [covered that launch](https://tech-ish.com/2024/11/04/m4-mac-line-up-apple-refresh/) at the time, when the M4 Pro cost $1,399. In May 2026 Apple dropped the $599 version, brought it back in late June at $799, and pushed the M4 Pro to $1,599, [changes tracked by MacRumors](https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/mac-mini/). 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. [AppleInsider calls $899](https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/25/m6-mac-mini-arrives-in-ram-and-ssd-constrained-environment) 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." The [full transcript is public](https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/08/07/apple-aapl-q3-2026-earnings-call-transcript/). 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. [TrendForce reported in July](https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20260703-13134.html) that contract prices would rise another 13 to 18 percent in the third quarter of 2026, after jumps of roughly 60 percent in the quarter before. Apple's finance chief Kevan Parekh told the same 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, covered in our [piece on iPhone pricing in Kenya](https://tech-ish.com/2026/08/02/iphone-18-split-launch-kenya-prices/). ## 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, on its own July 2026 tests. It is also the only M6 tier Apple plans to make, since it is skipping the M6 Pro and Max to bring the M7 forward, as our [piece on both chips explains](https://tech-ish.com/2026/08/25/apple-m6-m5-ultra-chips-explained/). 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](https://tech-ish.com/2026/06/02/wwdc-2026-siri-ios-27-cook-last-keynote/) as an English-only beta later this year. Apple said in February that Mac mini production would come to the United States for the first time, at a Houston plant, and Cook confirmed in July that assembly starts there this year. Apple [opened a training centre at the site on 13 August](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-opens-advanced-manufacturing-center-in-houston/). ## What this means in Kenya Apple has no store here, so the machines arrive through authorised resellers and importers on their own timelines. At about KES 129.45 to the dollar on 24 August 2026, $899 converts to roughly KES 116,000. Nobody will pay that. Computers enter Kenya at zero import duty, but a 2.5 percent import declaration fee, a 2 percent railway development levy and 16 percent VAT all apply, and VAT is charged on top of the other two. With air freight, our working estimate puts the landed cost near KES 150,000 before any shop takes a margin. The outgoing M4 Mac mini sells locally from about KES 89,000 at [iTey Store](https://iteystore.co.ke/category/mac-mini-m4-m5-in-kenya-apple-desktop-computers) to KES 137,000 at [Price in Kenya](https://www.priceinkenya.com/product/113317-apple-mac-mini-m4). Early Kenyan pricing on new Apple hardware runs high and then falls. The MacBook Neo landed at KES 130,000 against a $599 list price [in March](https://tech-ish.com/2026/03/25/macbook-neo-price-in-kenya-alternatives/), and iPhone 17 prices [dropped sharply three months after launch](https://tech-ish.com/2025/12/30/iphone-17-iphone-air-prices-in-kenya-go-down-crashing-just-3-months-later/). So 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. The thing to watch is whether Kenyan resellers list the M6 before the 22 September shipping date.

Apple today introduced two new chips, the M6 and the M5 Ultra, along with a new Mac Mini and a new Mac Studio to put them in. Both machines ship on 22 September.

Normally, since Apple launched it’s own silicon line: Plain M chips go in the cheaper machines. Then more expensive devices get the Pro, Max and Ultra chips.

The M6

The M6 is Apple’s first chip made on a 2 nanometre process. The processor has 12 cores, two more than the M5, in three types:

2 super cores,
4 performance cores and
6 efficiency cores.

Super cores take single-threaded work, meaning tasks that cannot be split up and shared out, and Apple claims the M6 now offers the fastest single-threaded performance of any chip. Efficiency cores handle background jobs cheaply. Apple says multithreaded performance is 1.2 times better than on the M5 and 2.4 times than on the M1.

Graphics also goes to 12 cores, each with a Neural Accelerator built in for the matrix maths that AI models run on. Apple says peak graphics compute for AI are up nearly 30 percent above the M5. The chip carries a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, two AI engines rather than one, which Apple says software can use at the same time. Memory bandwidth reaches 170GB/s, and the M6 takes up to 32GB.

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The M5 Ultra

Apple always Ultra chips by fusing smaller ones together over a link it calls UltraFusion. It usually has fused two. The M5 Ultra fuses four, which Apple says is a first for the M series.

Underneath are two M5 Max chips, each already made of two dies. The connection between them runs at more than 4.4TB/s, quick enough that software sees a single processor rather than four parts.

That buys up to 36 processor cores and up to 80 graphics cores, which Apple calls its most powerful graphics ever. Neural Accelerators reach an Ultra chip for the first time, and Apple is claiming 4.3 times the AI compute of the M3 Ultra.

The M5 Ultra also takes up to 512GB of unified memory at 1.2TB/s. For localised AI work that number is more important than the cores. A model has to fit in memory before it will run at all, and the big freely available models need hundreds of gigabytes.

No M6 Pro, no M6 Max

This time, accoridng to explanation by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in July, we won’t be seeing the M6 Pro and M6 Max. Apple is said to be skipping even the M6 Ultra to get the M7 out sooner.

“Apple had been planning major neural-processing upgrades for the M7 family and ultimately decided those improvements were important enough to justify accelerating the next generation rather than completing the M6 lineup,” he wrote in his Power On newsletter. He expects the M7 in the first half of 2027, the M7 Pro and M7 Max late that year, and an M7 Ultra in 2028.

Apple has not confirmed any of it. If Gurman has it right, the M6 spends about six months as Apple’s newest chip, and the Mac mini is the only machine that will ever ship with one.