same spec, same chip. I tought Apple would at least bump the RAM

You thought they'd bump the base RAM in the middle of the biggest RAM crisis in history?

Yea, that wasn’t going to happen.

yep why not ? "Unified Memory" was always their favourite selling argument

Because they would be throwing away margin for no real reason

And except at the beginning, the Mac Minis of the past weren’t famous for being cheap, but rather for being disappointingly, unattractively expensive and, over time, apparently increasingly forgotten by Apple.

Mac minis from 2005-2024 launched with entry-level models priced from $499-$699, with the outliers being the 2018 model at $799:

https://everymac.com/global-mac-prices/all-msrp-mac-mini-pri...

Though $599 for the M4 in 2024 seems like a local optimum.

Actually they were famous for being tiny.