The Mac mini has been Apple's secret weapon since the M4 redesign turned it into a 127mm square aluminium puck that disappears behind a monitor. The M6 version changes nothing about that form factor and changes everything about the silicon inside it. Single-core performance jumps 25% over the M4, multicore climbs 50%, and graphics land roughly 75% faster. For a machine that starts under a thousand pounds, those are serious numbers. The M6 chip's single-core speed is now the fastest in Apple's entire lineup — about 8.5% ahead of anything else they make. Apps launch near-instantly; compilation, media encoding, and anything that leans on the CPU just evaporates. The machine runs silent under normal loads and barely whispers under full stress. If you're replacing a Mac that's three or four years old, the performance delta will feel like changing decades, not generations. Apple's software story has caught up too. macOS 27 Golden Gate refines the Liquid Glass design language and relaunches Siri as "Siri AI" — a meaningfully smarter assistant that reads your screen, tracks parcels from email codes, and integrates into Spotlight search. The file-naming suggestion tool sounds mundane and turns out to be genuinely useful, the kind of small AI win that actually saves time rather than performing intelligence. The port selection remains strong for something this size: three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, 2.5Gb Ethernet, two front USB-C ports, and a headphone jack. No USB-A, but that's increasingly a legacy concern. Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support round out connectivity. The only physical complaint is the power button buried on the base — an ergonomic misfire Apple has refused to fix for two generations. Now the catch. The M4 Mac mini launched at £599. The M6 starts at £899. That's a 50% price increase driven by what the industry is calling RAMageddon — a global memory cost spike hitting every device with RAM or storage. The base spec still starts at just 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, neither of which is upgradeable. For a machine at this price point, 256GB of non-expandable storage feels stingy. The competitive picture tells the story clearly. Below it sits the new MacBook Neo at £699 — a laptop with less power but portability included. Above it, the M4 iMac at £1,499 bundles a display. The mini occupies the sweet spot for anyone who already owns a good monitor and keyboard, but that sweet spot just got £300 more expensive, and the value calculus has shifted from "obvious" to "strong but conditional." This is still the best small desktop computer you can buy, full stop. The M6's performance is not incremental — it's a genuine leap that will serve most users for five or six years. But the M4 mini was a category-defining bargain, and the M6 mini is merely a very good deal. If you need a desktop Mac today, buy it. If your current machine still works, the M4-to-M6 jump alone doesn't justify the outlay at this price.
