Bad news for OpenClaw stans: Apple’s Mac Mini starts at $799 • The Register

https://www.theregister.com/2026/05/04/mac_mini_ai_memory/

Publish Date: 2026-05-04 17:46:00

The Mac Mini is the latest victim of the AI-fueled RAM-pocalypse. Last week, Apple discontinued the 256 GB version of the system, which cost $599. To get in now, you’ll need to drop at least $799 on a 512 GB version.

The price hike makes the Mac Mini Apple’s most affordable Mac no longer. That distinction now goes to the $599 MacBook Neo, unveiled back in March.

The decision comes a day after soon-retiring CEO Tim Cook told investors that rising memory prices were negatively impacting the iGiant’s business.

Apple has seen strong demand for its entry-level Mac Mini and higher-end Mac Studio among AI enthusiasts. The machines can be had with relatively large quantities of fast memory, which makes them particularly attractive for running local AI agents like OpenClaw at home.

However, Apple’s decision to kill off its 256 GB Mac Mini likely has less to do with demand and more to do with the impact of a less local kind of AI on its supply chains.

Over the past six months, flash storage and DRAM memory prices have skyrocketed, with the unrelenting demand for AI infrastructure largely to blame. The typical GPU server now features more than 2 TB of high bandwidth memory (HBM) and another 4 TB or more of DDR5, and that’s not even counting local storage.

The proliferation of inference platforms like Claude Code have also driven additional demand for flash storage to store model states between sessions. As a result, consumers have seen the street price of memory and SSD storage jump by 3x or more since the start of the year.

And while Apple’s supply chains — perhaps Cook’s most enduring legacy — are usually more robust than its competitors’, the company isn’t immune to the memory shortage.

Apple’s starting prices have been trending upward since last fall, when it increased the memory capacity of its Pro iPhones from 128…

Source