Demand for the Mac Mini is surging — and Apple just raised the starting price from $599 to $799
· Business Insider
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- Apple's Mac Mini starting price rose this week as the company reported a surge in demand.
- The cheapest model is now $799, and the $599 model no longer appears on Apple's website.
- CEO Tim Cook says AI is driving the unexpected demand for the device.
Apple's "most affordable Mac" just got more expensive.
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The starting price for the Mac Mini jumped $200 this week as the company reported an AI-fueled increase in demand for the compact computer.
The $599 base model with 256GB of storage, touted on the website as the "mini-est, most affordable Mac with mighty performance," had disappeared from Apple's site as of Friday.
The website now says the starting price for a Mac Mini is $799, which comes with 512GB of storage. Earlier this week, the website listed the starting price as $599, the Internet Archive shows.
While it's not an increase in price for the model that comes with 512GB of storage, it means the entry point for a Mac Mini is now higher.
Apple, which did not respond to a request for comment, said on its quarterly earnings call this week that it hasn't been able to keep up with an AI-related clamor for the Mac Mini.
The line got a boost in popularity earlier this year when tech enthusiasts sought them out to use with OpenClaw, an open-source, autonomous AI agent previously known as Clawdbot.
CEO Tim Cook attributed the boost to the device's abilities as a "amazing" platform for "AI and agentic tools."
"The customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted," Cook said on the call. "And so we saw higher-than-expected demand."
Cook said it could take "several months" for supply to balance out with Mac Mini demand.
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