Apple’s $599 Mac mini is gone. Blame the AI agents.

Apple has quietly raised the desktop’s starting price to $799 after demand from developers building local AI tools cleared its shelves. Tim Cook says it could take months to catch up.

For five years, the Mac mini has been the cheapest way into Apple’s desktop ecosystem. Since the M4 refresh in late 2024, that price has been $599, an unusually aggressive figure for Cupertino, and one that turned the small aluminium box into a sleeper hit.

It became the recommended starter Mac, the home-server-of-choice for tinkerers, and, increasingly, the go-to local machine for developers running AI models on their own hardware.

As of Friday, the $599 Mac mini no longer exists.

Apple has discontinued the 256GB configuration of the M4 Mac mini and made the 512GB model, which sells for $799, the new starting point. Bloomberg reported the change first, citing Apple’s own product pages, with confirmations ...