Last chance to get a cheaper Mac mini as entry-level model is scrapped

Apple has quietly killed off the cheapest version of the Mac mini.

This is the Mac mini with M4 processor and 256GB storage. It brought the entry price for Apple’s brilliant pint-sized personal computer down to £599, but now you’ll have to pay £799 to get on board.

The pricier version does have 512GB storage, which is an upgrade we can recommend to any remotely serious Mac user — SSD storage juggling gets old fast. However, a £200 real-world price bump in this economy? It’s no small affair for buyers on a budget.

The good news is that, at least at the time of writing, some retailers still have the old deal in stock. You can pick up a 256GB £599 Mac mini from Argos, subject to collection-ready stock in your area. Other key UK retailers appear to have pulled this lower-capacity model from sale already.

While Apple hasn’t released a statement on this decision, you don’t have to be a market analyst to have a decent guess at why this has happened.

In case you missed it, the tech industry is going through a major RAM and components cost crisis. And as both the old £599 and current £799 baseline Mac minis have the same 16GB of RAM, it’s likely Apple was feeling too much of a profit margin squeeze on the cheaper version.

One of the core reasons for this whole techy crisis is the rapid building of computer infrastructure for AI services. It’s also thanks to AI that the Mac series’s baseline amount of RAM was raised from 8GB to 16GB in 2024. Artificial intelligence is hungry for the stuff.

This could also be taken as a sign we can expect Apple’s hardware prices to increase in the future, despite the company already charging a small fortune for bumps in RAM and storage capacity. You'll currently pay £200 for an additional 8GB RAM in a Mac mini, another £200 to make the jump from 512GB to 1TB storage.

Tim Cook even warned that increased RAM costs will impact Mac pricing from June onwards, during a recent earnings call. And, well, we’re clearly already seeing that impact in a slightly sneakier form already.

In April, Cook announced he plans to step down from the role of Apple CEO on 1 September, to be replaced by leading Apple hardware geek John Ternus. You’ll have seen plenty of him if you have watched some of Apple’s product launch presentations in recent years.