New Mac mini: £899 Now Buys What £599 Did in 2024

Apple has just put the new Mac mini on sale at £899, and the number that matters most is not the one on the price tag. It is 256GB. That is the storage in the entry-level machine, and it is exactly what you got in the £599 Mac mini that launched in October 2024, right down to the same 16GB of memory.

The chip inside is far better. The price is £300 higher. Whether that trade is worth making depends entirely on what you actually do with a desktop Mac, so let me lay it out properly rather than just listing the specs at you.

What Apple Announced Today

There was no event. Apple published three newsroom posts this morning, opened pre-orders the same day and set shipping for 22 September. A surprise launch a fortnight before the September iPhone event is unusual enough to be worth noting on its own.

The new Mac mini comes in two configurations. The £899 model runs the M6, Apple's first 2-nanometre chip, with 16GB of unified memory and 256GB of storage. The £1,699 model runs the M5 Pro with 24GB and 512GB. Both keep the 5-by-5-inch chassis introduced in 2024, so nothing about your desk changes.

The Mac Studio was refreshed the same morning with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, at $2,499 and $5,499. I wrote about what to expect from the Mac Studio M5 before today's announcement, and that machine is a different conversation for a different budget. This post is about the mini.

The New Mac mini Has Less Storage Than the Model It Replaces

Here is the part most coverage will skate past. Apple's own announcement puts the M6 model at $899, and 9to5Mac notes that this is a $100 increase on the outgoing base model. TechRadar has the UK figure at £899. A hundred pounds more for a much faster chip is a defensible trade on its own terms.

But the outgoing entry-level Mac mini shipped with 512GB. The new one ships with 256GB. You are paying £100 more and getting half the storage, which is a price rise dressed up as a spec sheet.

Set against where this machine started, it looks worse. £599 in October 2024 to £899 today, for the same 16GB of memory and the same 256GB of storage, is a 50 per cent increase in under two years. That last figure is my own arithmetic rather than anything Apple has published, but the two prices and the two configurations are both matters of record.

I covered the first half of that increase back in May, when Apple quietly retired the £599 model and made £799 the new floor. The reason then was memory and SSD prices climbing on the back of AI infrastructure demand. That pressure has not eased. It has moved up a rung.

What the M6 Chip Actually Gets You

I do not want to be unfair to the M6, because on paper it is a serious jump. It is a 12-core CPU on a 2-nanometre process, split into two super cores, four performance cores and six efficiency cores. Apple claims 40 per cent faster CPU performance than the M4.

The AI figures are the ones Apple is pushing hardest. There is a dual 16-core Neural Engine, Neural Accelerators sitting in each of the 12 GPU cores, and a claim of up to 4x faster AI performance than the M4. Memory bandwidth runs up to 170GB/s, and you can configure the M6 to 32GB.

Whether any of that reaches you depends on your workload. If you run models locally, it genuinely matters. If you cut video, the GPU and ray tracing work matters. If you bought a Mac mini to run a browser, Mail and an occasional Lightroom export, the M4 was already past what you needed and the M6 will not change your Tuesday.

The ports deserve a look before you order. The £899 M6 model gets three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and you have to step up to the £1,699 M5 Pro to get Thunderbolt 5. Both get two front USB-C, HDMI and 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard, with 10Gb as a paid upgrade, plus Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. If you have been tracking where the M6 sits against what comes next, the mini is the first machine to ship it.

The M5 Pro Model at £1,699

The M5 Pro configuration is the more honest proposition, which is an odd thing to say about a £1,699 desktop. You get up to an 18-core CPU, up to a 20-core GPU with third-generation ray tracing, up to 64GB of unified memory and 307GB/s of bandwidth.

At that price you are no longer shopping against a laptop, you are shopping against a Mac Studio. The gap between a well-specced M5 Pro mini and a base Mac Studio closes quickly once you start adding memory to the mini, so price both configurations properly before you commit to either.

I Said Wait in May. Here Is What Waiting Cost.

When Apple killed the £599 mini in May, I said I would wait if I could. One of my three reasons was that if RAM pricing eased at all, Apple might quietly walk the entry price back down.

That was wrong, and it is worth saying so directly. The price went up again by another £100 and the base storage halved. Anyone who read that post and held off has ended up paying more and getting less, and I would rather correct it here than leave the old advice sitting there unchallenged.

The uncomfortable lesson is that when component costs are rising, waiting is not a neutral act. It carries a price, and on current evidence that price is going up roughly every other quarter. That changes how I would answer the buy-or-wait question for the rest of this year.

Should You Buy the New Mac mini?

Three situations, three different answers.

• You need a desktop Mac now and you live in iCloud or already own an external drive: buy the £899 M6. It is a good machine at a price you will probably look back on as reasonable.
• You need a desktop Mac now and you keep everything locally: work out what Apple wants for the 512GB upgrade before you order, then check whether a refurbished 512GB M4 does the same job for less money.
• Your current Mac is working fine: keep it. The M6 is a large generational jump on paper and almost none of it will be visible in general use.

The one group I would push towards ordering today is anyone doing local AI work. The dual Neural Engine and the up to 4x AI claim are the real upgrade here, and that is the specific workload where an M4 mini does start to hold you back.

For everyone else, the honest framing is that this is a routine chip bump with an above-inflation price rise attached, and the storage cut is what makes it sting rather than the £100.

FAQ

How much is the new Mac mini in the UK?

The M6 model is £899 with 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage. The M5 Pro model is £1,699 with 24GB and 512GB. Pre-orders opened on 25 August 2026 and both configurations ship on 22 September.

Is the new Mac mini worth upgrading to from an M4?

For most people, no. The M6 is around 40 per cent faster on CPU than the M4 by Apple's own figures, but an M4 mini remains a very capable desktop and you would be spending £899 to solve a problem you probably do not have. The exception is local AI work, where the up to 4x AI performance claim is worth taking seriously.

Why does the new Mac mini have less storage than the old one?

The £899 entry model ships with 256GB where the outgoing entry configuration had 512GB. Apple has not explained the change, but rising memory and SSD costs have shaped Mac pricing all year, and trimming base storage is a quieter way to absorb that than putting the headline price up again.

My Take

The M6 Mac mini is a good computer and the worst value the Mac mini has offered since 2024. Both things are true at the same time, and the reason most coverage will only tell you the first half is that the second half requires looking up what this machine used to cost.

If you need one, buy it, and put whatever Apple wants for the 512GB upgrade towards an external SSD instead. If you do not need one, understand that this is not a year where the Mac mini gets cheaper by waiting. That was the bet I made in May and it did not pay off.

Source: Apple unveils a more powerful Mac mini featuring the all-new M6 and M5 Pro, Apple Newsroom. UK pricing via TechRadar.