Apple’s Mac Mini M1 is back on sale for $600 at Amazon

Apple’s colorful new iMac may be too flashy for some, and those people should look to the Mac Mini M1 for a similarly powerful desktop experience. Normally starting at $700, the Mac Mini M1 has been discounted to $659 at Amazon — but an automatically applied coupon knocks the price down even further to $600. That gets you Apple’s latest M1 chipset along with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

The Mac Mini is a great option if you want to customize your desktop experience to a certain extent. You don’t get a 4.5K Retina Display like you do with the latest iMacs, but that’s not a huge deal if you have a monitor that you already love — plus your preferred keyboard and mouse setup as well.

Aside from its compact size, this Mac Mini’s biggest draw is the new M1 chipset, which has proven to be blazing fast on every machine we’ve tested with it. Switching between apps is a breeze, systems wake almost instantaneously and playing Apple Arcade games won’t make the Mac Mini break a sweat. It’s also worth noting that the Mac Mini M1 comes with an 8-core GPU, which is slightly better than the 7-core GPU on the base iMac.

Apple focused on the internals here, so the exterior design of the Mac Mini hasn’t changed. It’s still a sleek square on which the back edge houses all of its ports: an Ethernet connector, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one HDMI 2.0 connector, two USB-A ports and a headphone jack. That’s another perk of the Mini when compared to the new iMac, which only has two or four Thunderbolt ports depending on the configuration. Overall, Amazon’s sale is a good opportunity for those with aging desktops to get an M1 machine as a replacement for less.