Apple Mac mini review: The new M6 impresses, but the price hike is rough
The new Mac mini is the kind of Mac upgrade Apple has done a million times. It’s the same design as before but with new guts. These play-it-safe updates aren’t very exciting, but they’re also usually all upside—you get a year or two's worth of technological improvements for the same price you would have paid for the older version yesterday. Unfortunately, 2026's unprecedented memory crunch has upended that standard operating procedure. The new Mac mini starts at $899 for a version with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, a $300 increase for the same memory and storage specs you could get in the $599 M4 Mac mini in 2024. Read full article Comments
The new Mac mini is the kind of Mac upgrade Apple has done a million times. It’s the same design as before but with new guts.
These play-it-safe updates aren’t very exciting, but they’re also usually all upside—you get a year or two's worth of technological improvements for the same price you would have paid for the older version yesterday. Unfortunately, 2026's unprecedented memory crunch has upended that standard operating procedure.
The M4 Mac mini was one of Apple’s best values. The $899 M6 mini, not so much.
The M4 Mac mini was a great general-purpose desktop computer and one of the best values Apple had ever offered in a desktop Mac. The M6 Mac mini is only one of those things. I’ll let you guess which.
Note that this review is specifically for the M6 version of the Mac mini. We didn’t get an M5 Pro Mac mini to review, but we’ll talk more about how its pricing and performance fits in for our Mac Studio review.
