No, it's $599, with a load of extra customised options that allow people to add what they want, you cannot even buy this one in a store, you have to do a custom order, your regular user, walking into an electronic store will buy a base model.
You've specced it up with every customisation possible, that 999.999999% of buyers won't do and won't need and then complain at the cost in an effort to bash Apple,
I'm not trying to bash Apple in bad faith, but let's be real the $599 model is inadequate. 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD in 2023. There's plenty out there on the M1 Mac mini's 8GB being a bad idea even for casual users. I had an 8GB M1 mini when it first came out and returned it because it was swapping to the SSD with like 3 apps open (nothing like an IDE or Docker or Adobe X Y Z).
I just find it humorous that you can spend several thousand dollars on a Mac mini, Mac Pro, or Mac Studio. It seems like there's a lot of product overlap to me.
Because I've fielded all sorts of "my PC has a virus / isn't working right" calls, but near-zero numbers of them for their Macs, and they don't need a laptop that's 2x the cost.
My 2016 Macbook air had 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, and that was bad for 2016. You can buy 1TB NVME SSD for $100 to upgrade any off-the-shelf SFFPC. There's not much excuse why Apple can't do the same, other than to get you to subscribe to iCloud storage.
The $599 model is for a basic user who barely does anything more than browse the web and send emails (which is to say, a lot of people). It's not a pro machine.
I feel this website is a strange bubble. I use an underpowered laptop from 2013 for all my daily tasks including light photo, video and audio manipulation and I have no problems. Why does it always have to be about videogames, heavy creative work, multiple VMs or compiling gigantic codebases?
One thing to keep in mind is the demand of the specific OS/applications you are running. For example, 1GB of RAM is plenty for Windows XP, but 4GB for Windows 10/11 is abysmal. This is more or less why Linux is such a popular choice for repurposing old computers.
I feel like such a "basic user" would be better-served with an iPad or even a MacBook Air, unless they happen to have a monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers and webcam from, say, their old PC. Historically Apple has marketed the mini as a "gateway drug" to Macs. Cheap, and people can just reuse the peripherals they already have. Even now I wouldn't recommend an entry-level mini to that "email and web" crowd.
I know from personal experience that if you are using the mini for anything of substance, and only have 8GB of RAM, you are using your SSD as "RAM" more than you probably realize.
"many people" is as anecdotal as it gets. I don't know anybody who A) only needs 8GB/256GB and B) isn't better-served by an iPad or something similar. I think if anyone from Apple Marketing is reading this thread, they are laughing at how people are so instinctively buying into the entry-level Mac mini. The biggest value-add the $599 Mac mini has is that Apple can say Macs start at "just $599".
There will always be some non-zero number of people who either want or are genuinely best-served by something like the entry-level Mac mini, but that doesn't equate to it being a generally-good option.
It's just ironic that some people here are really pushing a $599 Mac mini as a valid option, while ignoring tablets. The argument that a Mac mini is a great alternative to a PC in that malware isn't an issue is totally valid, but iPads benefit from that too (and are often less than $599).
As I'm sure you know, there are many articles, threads, et. al. out there about whether 8GB is enough for a Mac. We can link articles back and forth all day, but here's what it comes down to: with only 8GB of RAM, even light use will see the Mac offload to swap much more often than if it had 16GB to work with, and one of the first "scandals" that arose from the M1 Macs was that bytes written to the internal SSD was much, much higher than it should have been, because of that swap usage.
You've specced it up with every customisation possible, that 999.999999% of buyers won't do and won't need and then complain at the cost in an effort to bash Apple,