Apple drops the $599 Mac Mini as memory prices surge
Apple has discontinued the $599 Mac Mini with 256GB storage and raised the desktop’s starting price to $799 for a 512GB model. According to the article, the change reflects a global DRAM shortage driven by demand for AI data centres, which is pushing up memory costs across consumer electronics.
Apple has discontinued the cheapest version of its Mac Mini worldwide, removing the $599 model with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage from its configurator. The Mac Mini now starts at $799 with 512GB of storage, according to the source article. Apple did not move the 256GB version to a new price point; it is gone entirely.
The change affects Apple’s entry-level desktop at a time when the broader memory market is under pressure. The article says Mac Mini and Mac Studio models began going out of stock in April, with higher-RAM options disappearing from Apple’s online store before the company made the discontinuation official. During Apple’s most recent earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said the products “may take several months to reach supply demand balance.”
The Mac Studio has also been hit by pricing and configuration changes. Apple removed the 512GB RAM upgrade option completely, and the price of upgrading from 96GB to 256GB of RAM rose from $1,600 to $2,000, a 25 per cent increase, according to the article. These changes are presented not as product refreshes, but as supply chain reactions to a tightening memory market.
The underlying issue is DRAM, or dynamic random-access memory, the short-term memory used by computers and many other devices. According to TrendForce, DRAM contract prices surged about 90 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the fourth quarter of 2025, the largest quarterly increase on record. PC DRAM prices rose by more than 100 per cent in the same period, the article said.
The article attributes the shortage to AI data centres. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, which together make nearly all of the world’s DRAM, have shifted most of their production capacity toward high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, for AI servers. HBM now accounts for 23 per cent of total DRAM wafer output, up from 19 per cent in 2025, and producing a single bit of HBM takes roughly three times the wafer capacity of standard DDR5, according to the article.
That shift matters because every AI server built consumes memory capacity that would otherwise go into laptops, desktops, tablets and phones. The article says the biggest cloud companies - Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle - are on track to spend more than $650 billion in capital expenditure in 2026, with nearly all of it going to data centres, GPUs, custom chips and networking gear. Oracle’s need for PIMCO to anchor a $10 billion tranche of a $16.3 billion data centre financing deal is cited as one example of how large the spending has become.
The pressure is not expected to ease soon. The article says HBM demand is projected to grow 70 per cent year on year in 2026, while new fabrication capacity can take two to three years to come online. The CHIPS Act is not seen as a quick fix, since its funds are aimed mainly at logic chip fabrication rather than memory, and the major DRAM manufacturers are prioritising AI-related output over consumer parts.
Apple is better placed than most PC makers to cope because it controls its supply chain more tightly and has more negotiating power, according to the article. But the result is still a higher entry price for Apple desktops: the cheapest Mac Mini now costs $200 more than before, entirely because the memory market has changed around it.
