The AI industry’s demand for memory, storage, and powerful chips has finally arrived for the Mac mini. Apple has stopped selling its cheapest $599 Mac Mini model, based on changes to the company’s Store page. macrumors. The only configurations available are those that come with at least 512GB of storage and above, meaning the Mac mini now effectively starts at $799. The popular use of small desktops as homes for local AI agents likely played a role in the change.
Engadget has contacted Apple for confirmation that it is discontinuing the entry-level Mac mini. We will update this article if we get any response.
When Apple started selling the redesigned Mac Mini in 2024 for $599, it was one of the best deals the company has offered in years. With multiple tiers of Apple’s M4 chip options, at least 16GB of RAM, at least 256GB of storage, and enough ports to get the job done, the Mac Mini was remarkably capable. This 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 OpenGL. The combination of demand from AI tinkerers and increasing constraints around sourcing things like memory and storage has led Apple to remove its cheapest models, at least for now.
CEO Tim Cook suggested as much during Apple’s recent earnings call. “We think, in the future, that ‘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 their customer adoption is happening much faster than we predicted, and so we saw more demand than expected.”
Apple has been better than others at confronting “RAMaggedon” or at least hiding its effects across its product lines. When the company updated the MacBook Air with its M5 chip, it increased storage to 512GB and the starting price to $1099, presumably 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 much of the power of Apple’s Macs for a more affordable price at $600. However, there is currently no counterpart for the Mac mini, and it’s unclear when, if ever, Apple will start selling something similar at the same cheap starting price.
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