The Mac mini’s price has jumped 50% in 5 months — come on Apple, put an A18 Pro chip in an Apple TV-sized box and give us a $599 'Mac Neo' PC to bring the cost back down

Apple has just unveiled the new Mac mini with M6 processor , and for me the biggest news is the price hike to $899 for the cheapest model.

This is a jump from $799 for the previous Mac mini M4 model — but that had also received a de facto price rise only back in May , when Apple discontinued the $599 entry-level option (with 256GB of storage) and made the $799 version (with 512GB of storage) the new lowest-price option.

It means that between April 2026 and August 2026, the minimum price you can pay for a Mac mini has jumped by 50%.

That's not an ideal situation at a time when it feels like our income is being squeezed harder and harder every week.

Yes, you get more storage and the new $899 version has more powerful chip than in the older $599 version — but, frankly, there will be plenty of people for whom price is the key factor, not the ability to run LLM requests faster.

Apple knows this; these people are exactly who the MacBook Neo is aimed at.

So now that the Mac mini is no longer a budget buy, we need Apple to bring the Neo principle to the desktop.

No revolution necessary As I said in the headline, I don't think a 'Mac Neo' PC even needs to be a complicated proposition to develop: we already know the A18 Pro chip runs macOS really well, because we've seen it do it in the MacBook Neo.

And Apple already has a small body that can take the thermal requirements of iPhone-level chip, in the form of the latest Apple TV 4K .

The existing Apple TV 4K body already has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennae built in, and Ethernet and HDMI output ports — and while it no longer has USB-C, it used to, so it wouldn't be too hard to add back in.

Surely, in a plastic body, using an iPhone chip, we can get the price down below $600 again.

The MacBook Neo is $699, and that includes a screen, keyboard and battery, after all.

The MacBook Neo is a genuinely great laptop for a low price — so let's drop the bits we don't need… (Image credit: Future) If Apple is working on this, I expect we might have a bit of a wait — supposedly, the MacBook Neo will get a refresh in 2027 with an upgrade to the Apple A19 Pro processor (which brings a boost from 8GB of RAM to 12GB with it), which makes sense in terms of Apple saying that the new AI Siri's most powerful features require 12GB of RAM .

It would probably make sense to launch my new 'Mac Neo' or 'Mac Nano' or whatever you want to call it alongside the next MacBook Neo, if it were to happen.