Apple Mac mini (2026, M6 / M5 Pro)

Apple has spent the last two years quietly turning the Mac mini into the most sensible desktop it sells: a 0.82L box roughly the size of a drinks coaster that you park behind a monitor and forget about. The 2026 refresh doesn't touch that formula at all — the chassis, the two front USB-C ports, the rear Thunderbolt/HDMI/Ethernet cluster and, yes, the famously awkward power button placement are all carried over from the 2024 redesign. What's new is inside: the M6, Apple's first 2nm chip for the Mac, or a step up to the M5 Pro for people who need more memory headroom.

Two very different buyers are being addressed here. The $899 M6 with 16GB and 256GB is the general-purpose machine — a home or office desktop, a compact developer box, a decent living-room media and light-editing machine. The $1,699 M5 Pro configuration with 24GB is squarely for creative professionals and anyone whose workloads need to scale past 32GB of RAM, which the M6 tier simply can't do. The quieter but genuinely useful improvements sit in the plumbing: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard and faster storage all address niggles that felt increasingly dated on the outgoing model.

On the merits of the hardware, this is an easy machine to admire. Reviewers who have run the M6 describe class-leading single-core performance and a multi-core showing that clears current Intel and AMD competition, and it does all of that in a chassis you can lift with two fingers. The performance-per-litre argument remains unanswered by anyone else in the desktop market, and the port selection — three Thunderbolt 4 connections, HDMI, 2.5Gb Ethernet and two front-facing USB-C — is more generous than the footprint suggests. Support for up to three external displays makes it a credible multi-monitor workstation rather than a compromise.

The problem is the price, and it's a real one. At $899 the entry model costs $300 more than the M4 it replaces, the result of a $200 hike in June 2026 attributed to component costs and a further $100 with this generation. That fundamentally changes the pitch. The old Mac mini was a bargain you recommended without qualification; this one you recommend after checking the buyer's budget. And Apple hasn't sweetened the deal elsewhere — you still get 256GB of base storage, no SD card slot, no user-serviceable or upgradeable anything, forgettable built-in speakers, and a Wi-Fi 7 implementation capped at 160MHz that doesn't deliver everything the badge implies. The $1,199 jump for a 512GB M6 is a steep tax on storage most people will need.

Judged purely as a computer it's excellent; judged as a value proposition it has slipped meaningfully. If you own an M4 mini there is no case for upgrading. If you're coming from something older, or you need the M5 Pro's memory ceiling, it remains the compact desktop to buy — just with less of the grin the previous one raised. Four stars: outstanding engineering, noticeably worse value. Note that our assessment of speaker quality and real-world performance draws on published reviewer findings rather than extended in-house testing of every configuration.