This is our new normal. The Mac Mini is still a great deal; it just doesn’t feel like the steal it used to be. But with the recent price increases hitting MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, the new Mac Minis remain much cheaper than getting similar chips in a laptop (especially if you already have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard). The base M6 Mac Mini is $400 cheaper than the cheapest M5 MacBook Air, and the base M5 Pro model is $800 less than the MacBook Pro with the same chip and memory.
Despite the price increase, the Mac Mini M6 is still a good deal. It's the Mac desktop that most people should buy. Brand-new Windows- or Linux-based mini PCs start at hundreds of dollars more and lack some of the AI capabilities of the Mac Mini M6. Oftentimes, they're also larger.
Apple’s Mac mini with M6 is one of the company's most impressive desktops, packing desktop-class power into a tiny footprint thanks to the cutting-edge 2nm chip inside. While it retains the same design and port layout as its predecessor, this upgraded Mac mini is a true workhorse that can handle far more demanding tasks.
If you need a desktop computer right now for anything from basic browsing to less-intensive local AI models, this is still Apple’s most affordable computer (chatbots and image generation should run pretty well on it; more intensive coding-centric models will be a bit squeezed for RAM and memory bandwidth, even at 32GB).
Based on my initial testing, the M6 Mac Mini is looking like it’s going to be an even more popular pick than the M5 Pro Mini or previous M4 Mini for agentic AI workloads. The dual 16-core neural engine, combined with the neural accelerator on each GPU core, helped the M6 rocket ahead of the M4 Mini on our Geekbench AI test, which measures the on-device AI performance of a laptop’s NPU. The M6 also topped the M5 Pro Mini and every M5-based MacBook we’ve tested on this test. The M5 has the GPU neural accelerators of the M6 but not its dual 16-core neural engine.
If you absolutely need a decent Mac desktop today, the Mac mini M6 remains the system to beat for most people. It's fast, adorably compact and it'll tackle just about everything you need. It's just a shame that it's no longer the incredible deal like the previous generations, though. At $899 — oh so close to $1,000 — the Mac mini M6 feels more like a serious purchase. Before, it just seemed like a great little system for minor projects.
There’s a lot to love about the new Mac mini, including the faster performance and storage, all with the same great design. That combination of performance and design also makes it the most versatile Mac Apple sells, whether you’re using it as a desktop, an always-on server, a machine for running AI agents, or something else entirely.
Still, what a computer! Even the performance of the base M6 model is more than enough for most computing tasks that regular people will ever need. If you invested in an external display a few years ago, most likely that display is still going strong—and attaching a new Mac mini to it will just refresh everything. If you want a Mac to live in a closet and serve files and web pages and run AI agents or whatever, it’ll be great for that too.
However, the elephant in the room is pricing for the Mac mini. Earlier this year, you could grab a base Mac mini for $599 – although availability was spotty after Q1, thanks to OpenClaw and anticipated price hikes. More importantly, over the years, going from one Mac mini generation to the next typically yielded performance benefits with no (or minimal) price increase. The AI revolution has rewritten the hardware rulebook, so we’re now faced with a new generation that is $300 more expensive than the previous model ($200 June price increase + another $100 increase for this new generation).
Gast
