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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. 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. Design The M4 Mac minis gave the computers their first full redesigns in nearly 15 years, so it’s not too surprising that the new Mac minis don’t change anything. Compared to the older Intel and M1/M2-era versions, they’re slightly taller (2 inches, up from 1.4), but they have a smaller 5×5-inch footprint (down from 7.7 inches squared). The system is actively cooled, with a fan vent on the bottom to make sure that whatever chip is inside can run at high sustained clock speeds (passively cooled Apple Silicon Macs like the MacBook Air have always been a bit slower than actively cooled Macs with the same chip).
document fetched 2026-09-22 02:53 · canonical https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/apple-m6-mac-mini-review-300-price-hike-spoils-a-nice-upgrade