The AI industry’s demand for memory, storage and powerful chips has finally come for the Mac mini. Apple has stopped selling its cheapest $599 model of the Mac mini, based on changes to the company’s store page spotted by MacRumors. Only configurations that come with at least 512GB of storage and up are available, which means the Mac mini now effectively starts at $799. The tiny desktop’s popular use as a home for local AI agents likely played a part in the change.
Engadget has contacted Apple for confirmation that it’s discontinuing the entry-level Mac mini. We’ll update this article if we hear back.
When Apple started selling the redesigned Mac mini for $599 in 2024, it was one of the best deals the company had offered in years. With options for multiple tiers of Apple’s M4 chip, at least 16GB of RAM, at least 256GB of storage and enough ports to get things done, the Mac mini was remarkably capable. That also made it popular among the AI crowd, first for its ability to run local large language models, and later as a dedicated computer for AI agents like OpenClaw. A combination of demand from AI tinkerers and growing constraints around sourcing things like memory and storage may have motivated Apple to remove its cheapest model, at least for now.
CEO Tim Cook suggested as much during Apple’s most recent earnings call. “We think, looking forward, that the Mac mini and Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply demand balance,” Cook said. “Both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted, and so we saw higher than expected demand.”
Apple has been better than most at weathering “RAMaggedon,” or at least hiding its effects across its product lines. When the company updated the MacBook Air with its M5 chip, it also bumped the storage to 512GB and the starting price to $1099, possibly in light of the changing cost of RAM and storage. In that case, the blow was softened by the availability of the MacBook Neo, which offered a lot of the power of Apple’s Macs for a much more affordable $600. There’s currently no equivalent for the Mac mini, though, and it’s not clear when, if ever, Apple will start selling something similar for that same cheap starting price.
Leave a Reply