This discussion reminded me that, just for comparison, in 1984/5 I bought a tricked out Apple IIe, 128K RAM, DuoDisk, Amber monitor and AppleWriter dot matrix printer, the package with educational discount for around $2,500, about $7,500 in 2026 dollars. Jeez, I don’t think I would spend that today!
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Depends on what it is doing. I have the current Studio for Lightroom and wildlife processing…and while the new ones are ‘faster’ when benchmarking it comes down to how much time gets saved. Importing 8,000 photos in to Lightroom and creating 100% previews in 8 minutes instead of of 10 isn’t significant as I start the process and come back later. Knocking 3 seconds off of a 15 second denoise is similarly not worth upgrading for. If one wants to run local AI models then the new ones can now do that but most of us aren’t doing that and even local models have to reach out to the cloud ones for some things according to what I read…but I don’t do AI.
What I can say is that if my house burned down or I otherwise had to start over…I would have a loaded 14 MBP with an external display, keyboard and mouse for processing images, that would simplify the road/home Lightroom process. The Studio also does scanner/printer hosting and home file server…but a slightly above base mini could easily handle all of that. Fewer computers to manage at home would always be nice and I would lose basically no processing images speed at all. Several of my photographer friends have likewise ditched the desktop/laptop combo for the laptop and display option as well and none of them have reported being unhappy with the switch.
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I think that was starting at 22 September. I pre-ordered an M6 on Wednesday (one day after they started accepting pre-orders) to replace an Intel Mac and my new machine is expected to ship late October. Demand>>Production. It’s good to own Apple stock 
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I was wondering if that was going to happen, which is why my next sentence was:
We’ll see if Apple has predicted demand accurately enough to meet that promise for everyone who pre-orders.
Yes, you did say that. I was saying all the stuff I saw was “available starting 9.22” (which is what’s still on the mini pre-order page) not that they promised all pre-orders on that date.
A moment of silence for the olden days of MacMinis that do not require upper middle class money. Sadly its clear that the time has passed and gone when Apple made MacMinis for poor people.
that’s all well and good, but I bet my IIci can kick the M6 Intergalactic UltraPro butt!
Yeah, but only if you have an L2 cache card installed! 
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I’d be curious to know how long it will take Apple to lower back down prices once this AI bubble has burst. I absolutely do expect a ~$600 mini to make a return eventually. Apple will not just lower the price of an existing config, they’ll introduce a new low-end config at the new lower price. Sound familiar…?
I cannot imagine the MacBook Neo was just a poorly thought out Apple one-off with some spare parts that happened to be lying around. And if they indeed see success materialize with a strategy tapping into for them new (or at least deteriorating) markets, I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar also prevail on the desktop side.
I don’t believe Apple will lower prices on the Mini and the Studio if the “AI Bubble”, assuming one even exists, goes away because Apple has discovered that both are now business computers. Essentially by accident, Apple has finally penetrated a “Pro” market that is not related to video, music, or graphics. The newest Mini in particular is no longer a budget or minimalist machine primarily targeted to consumers. It’s a LLM and AI workstation that has been designed and priced for people with angel investor and VC dollars to burn. As such, I wouldn’t be surprised if the iMac becomes Apple’s only consumer desktop.
An interesting indicator of how hot the Mini and Studio market has become is how quickly items move when they’re posted on the Apple Store refurb page. Minis are gone within minutes while any sub-$5,000 Studios are sold in a matter of hours.
Plus, has Apple ever lowered prices, outside of China (I think the iPhone Air did get discounted there)? It seems like when Apple wants to give buyers a price incentive, it upgrades a component when a product is refreshed (more storage, more memory, etc), offers a gift card with a purchase, or throws in some accessory (free Pencil, free watch band, etc). Price cuts, on the other hand, aren’t really part of Apple’s DNA to my mind.
ETA: the infamous Apple Polishing Cloth was just reissued at a lower price. So if I buy a couple thousand of them, I can “save” enough money to afford a M6 Mini!
;-)
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I’ve been wondering if prices will ever come down as well. I think they might, though perhaps with new models rather than just as price drops. But it might be a while, since we’ve never seen Apple lead the industry with low prices—other companies will have to move in that direction first.
My guess is that Apple will introduce a Mac Neo, a desktop version of the MacBook Neo, to capture the low end of the market with capable but older processors. The bad news is that the timing is bad - getting any processors made these days is getting harder and harder, and Apple must prioritize iPhone processors - but that may be part of the reason for the recent Intel deal, to make the processors using older technology for products like the Neo, monitors, HomePods, etc.
Apple tends to let inflation eat away at the price of the phone rather than explicitly lowering it. The iPhone 14 was introduced at $799 in 2022. The iPhone 16 (two years later) was the same price ($799) despite inflation making that an effective ~$50 discount off the iPhone 14 (799 in 2022 was worth 856 in 2024).
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