The new Mac mini is the kind of Mac upgrade Apple has done a million times. It’s the same design as before but with new guts.

These play-it-safe updates aren’t very exciting, but they’re also usually all upside—you get a year or two's worth of technological improvements for the same price you would have paid for the older version yesterday. Unfortunately, 2026's unprecedented memory crunch has upended that standard operating procedure.

The new Mac mini starts at $899 for a version with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, a $300 increase for the same memory and storage specs you could get in the $599 M4 Mac mini in 2024.

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Google is ready to take a swing at laptops... again. The company has had a lot of success in phones, but it has struggled to parlay that into an effective strategy for larger screens. Chromebooks have been fine as a budget option, but it seems like Google has accepted they'll never compete with macOS or Windows. That's where Googlebooks come in. These new Android-powered laptops are intended to be "real" computers, featuring premium hardware, on-device apps, and powerful development tools.

After the Googlebook reveal at I/O this year, Google's partners are now ready to sell you one. The first Googlebooks are available from several OEMs that have been making Chromebooks over the years, but don't expect Chromebook pricing. There's only one model under a grand, and the rest are well above that.

Familiar hardware

The bulk of Chromebooks have been budget machines, and they looked the part. Googlebooks, however, feature bright OLED screens, metal builds, big haptic trackpads, and the Glowbar. All the machines have this illuminated bar on the lid, but it doesn't do much for now. It lights up when the device boots and can display battery level, but Google says it's going to release an API for developers to add more features.

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