That seems to be drastically understating the change.

The M4 Mac mini was announced two years ago with 16GB RAM standard, starting at MSRP of $599, without anything like an education discount (which knocked another $100 off the machine), and stayed at that price until early this year when supply simply evaporated. Then the M6 model this fall went up by $300 for the same base memory and storage capacities. +50% in overall price of the entry-level machine, and probably not much of it was due to the M6 being a more advanced processor than M4.

Crazy that in this market especially, Apple wouldnt release a Mac Mini Neo with the Neo boards and make it minier. Its enough of a machine to do most work including app dev and I've only run into memory problems after really pushing it and having a program that had some insane memory leaks. Note: I dont do photoshop or video editing, I'm sure its not awesome at those, even though it can do it.

$800? They were below that on sale. I seem to recall the all time low was $400 for 16gb models of the mini at one point.

I picked up an M4 16GB Mac Mini with a 1TB drive for ~$900 USD last year. Last train out of Saigon… though I wish I’d got more memory