Mac Mini Costs 3x More, This Windows 11 Pro Mini PC Is 3x Cheaper and Covers 99% of Daily Workloads

Mac Mini Costs 3x More, This Windows 11 Pro Mini PC Is 3x Cheaper and Covers 99% of Daily Workloads

Mac Mini Costs 3x More, This Windows 11 Pro Mini PC Is 3x Cheaper and Covers 99% of Daily Workloads

https://gizmodo.com/mac-mini-costs-3x-more-this-windows-11-pro-mini-pc-is-3x-cheaper-and-covers-99-of-daily-workloads-2000777148

Publish Date: 2026-06-24 19:25:00

Source Domain: gizmodo.com

A Mac Mini starts at $599. This Windows 11 Pro mini PC does everything most people use a desktop for and costs a fraction of that. Amazon has the Geekom Air12 mini PC at $284, down from its $399 standard price and close to its record low, despite RAM prices rising across the board due to AI infrastructure demand that has pushed component costs upward throughout 2025. For a mini PC with Intel 7505, 8GB DDR4, 256GB NVMe SSD, triple 4K display support, Windows 11 Pro, Wi-Fi 6, and a 3-year warranty, that’s a price the Mac Mini can’t touch. This deal requires Prime membership, and the 30-day trial runs without a card.

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Triple 4K displays and Windows 11 Pro in something 4.6 inches wide

The Geekom Air12 measures 4.6 x 4.4 x 1.35 inches, which is small enough to mount behind a monitor, sit on a desk without taking up meaningful space, or disappear into a home theater setup. Despite that footprint, it drives three simultaneous 4K displays via HDMI 2.0, Mini DisplayPort 1.4, and full-function USB-C, which covers a three-monitor productivity setup, a digital signage installation, or a home theater configuration from a single unit. The Intel UHD Graphics with 48 Execution Units delivers double the graphics cores of the N100 and N150 chips that most competing mini PCs at this price use, with AV1 hardware decoding for efficient 4K streaming without taxing the CPU.

The Intel Pentium 7505 delivers 25% faster single-core performance than N95, N100, and N150 chips, which translates to more responsive web browsing, faster spreadsheet calculations, and snappier everyday application performance than the entry-level chips that dominate the mini PC category at this price. The dual-slot DDR4 RAM configuration supports true dual-channel operation, which eliminates the memory bandwidth bottleneck that single-channel competing mini PCs produce under multitasking workloads. Upgradeability extends to 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD, which means the Air12 can grow…

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