I need a new little Mac for my music studio, currently an M2 MacBook Pro. I thought I'd be fun to experiment with some local models as well. Well, let's price up an M5 Pro. $3,019 with 64GB RAM and a 1TB HD. Three thousand American dollars for a Mac Mini. Beefy spec for sure but not comically so.

Frankly even the entry price is a bit high - I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model.

Kinda sad that in 2026 1TB and 62GB of RAM is considered "beefy". We had 1TB iPhones for 5 years.

The only reason for this huge speedbump is that chip makers have been dragging their feet for the last 10 years with "just enough" memory.

I bought a 5090 a year an a half ago for $2000. The same card, now a year and a half older, is $4000. Then there is the RAM - I bought 96GB, wishing it was 128, and now the price on my old RAM has doubled.

Stuff is crazy expensive.

The first Mac, which had 128k of ram and an 8mhz CPU and cost more than $6500 in today's dollars. Humans are spoiled.

Isn't OP complaining that the price went up because people want them for AI use? I guess it also went up because of cloud AI use increasing component costs, but those local models you want to run probably were trained in the cloud..

> I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model.

The base price of a mini has only gone up $200 from $699 in 2020 to $899 today, and for $699 you only got 8GB of RAM instead of 16. Yeah the price has gone up but not nearly as much as you seem to be remembering...

[0] https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Mac_mini_(M1,_2020)