New Mac Mini and Mac Studio Launch Tomorrow

I want an M6 Mini for $499 like I bought the M4 Mini for.

great, looks awesome. shame i cant afford one lol

I’ve sent off both my kidneys to Apple, hoping for a good trade-in price!

Think such a long pre-order window/gap between announcement and availability was never there before. Think the new mini and Studio will always have long lead times. Happy with my M4 mini and not buying the new mini.

I want an M6 Mini for $499 like I bought the M4 Mini for.

Unfortunately, you'll see similar % price rises on all computer equipment, not just Mac, at the moment.

If it makes you feel any better, the Apple Silicon Mac Mini launched at $699 in 2020 and, according to an online inflation calculator, that's $904 in 2026 money.

Computer prices have spent 50 years in their own economic bubble where regular inflation just didn't happen while specifications increased exponentially (I guess due to the exponentially expanding market and consequent economies of scale). The Apple II was $1300 in 1977 and while it's an impossible argument to pick a modern equivalent that's still a plausible ballpark price for a half-decent personal computer - if anything, higher. Or a Sinclair Spectrum in 1983 vs. a Raspberry Pi 500 (or even a TheSpectrum 'replica') today - still pretty much the same ballpark number of dollars or pounds. Clearest example - since it is still vaguely recognisable as a product and aimed at the same market segment, even if the tech has changed, is the iMac - $1299 in 1998, $1299 until a few months ago.

So, although the "proximate cause" of the current price hikes is the AI bubble, I suspect that its also the case that the personal computer bubble is no longer growing fast enough to maintain the immunity from inflation/ever-increasing specs on a viable way and maybe we're going to have to get used to inflation going forward. (Or, from another perspective, the industry is pushing AI on a skeptical market because it sees that as the only way to continue the past growth of the tech sector). Unfortunately, I don't think prices are going to drop to past levels anytime soon... these prices may be driven by shortages, but everybody in the supply chain is raking off some extra revenue from the higher prices, and won't want to give that up.

M6 1TB Ordered 8/31. Shipped from China 9/14,Sitting at UPS in KY since 9/17. And now Apple shows delayed and UPS showing... waiting on a new delivery date?