Apple killed the $599 Mac mini. The cheapest one is now $799 with 512GB.

Apple removed the $599 Mac mini from its online store on May 1. The 256GB tier is gone, the configurator now starts at $799 for the 512GB model, and Apple did not put out a press release. The change shows up in the shop, not in the newsroom.

This isn’t really a price hike. The 512GB tier with 16GB of unified memory cost $799 yesterday too. What changed is that the cheaper SKU is no longer an option, so the floor of the Mac mini lineup has moved up by $200 even though no individual configuration got more expensive. That distinction matters for buyers who would have picked the $599 model anyway, and it matters for the headline the channel is going to tell the rest of the year.

What Tim Cook said the day before

The pull came one day after Apple’s Q2 2026 earnings call, where CEO Tim Cook addressed the Mac mini and Mac Studio backlog directly. On the call, Cook said “the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted” and told analysts the supply-demand gap would take “several months” to close. He flagged the small desktops as “amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools,” which is the closest Apple has come to acknowledging the use case publicly.

That use case is the part the press release skipped. The Mac mini stopped being a teacher’s-desk machine the moment it became cheap enough to run a quantized 70B model under your TV. A $599 box with 16GB of unified memory and an M4 was the cheapest legal way to run inference on a Mac chip, and that’s how a lot of people were using it. The 512GB tier is a better fit for that workload because local model files chew through a 256GB drive in two downloads.

What the lineup looks like now

The current Mac mini configurator on apple.com starts at the 512GB / 16GB / M4 SKU at $799. The M4 Pro variant lives at $1,399 and up. Both popular memory upgrades show backorder dates pushing into the second or third week of June. The Mac Studio configurator carries similar shortage warnings on M4 Max and M3 Ultra builds, which lines up with Cook’s “several months” framing on the earnings call. If you order today, you’re likely waiting roughly six weeks.

The wider context is the DRAM crunch Cook also called out on the same call. When unified-memory chips are the constraint, dropping a low-margin entry SKU is the rational move. You free up wafers for higher-margin configurations and you let the channel sell the parts you can actually ship.

What this means for you

If you were eyeing the $599 model as a homelab box or a Plex host, the math changed by $200. That’s still cheap for an Apple Silicon desktop, and the 512GB SSD is the right floor for anyone running local LLMs, photo libraries, or virtual machines. If you wanted Mac mini purely as a low-end office computer, an M2 mini in the refurb store at $499 still solves that problem and is sitting on shelves right now.

For everyone else, brace for the wait. June arrival on a today-placed order is the realistic target, and Apple’s tone on the call suggests Q3 isn’t going to fix the squeeze. Don’t expect a fall refresh to come early either. Cook’s “several months” and Apple’s quiet SKU pull both point to the same thing: the company is rationing what it can build, not lining up an M5 surprise. The 256GB tier was overdue for retirement on a desktop where 16GB of unified memory routinely fills with browser tabs, but the way Apple did it, with no announcement and a multi-month backlog, lands as a constraint message, not a product update.