Before the personal LLM craze you could easily get $400 Mac Minis from Apple's certified refurbished store. I bought two M2 Pros for that price and turned them into Asahi Linux CI machines.

In Europe, but I didn't realize the 499 one is also history. Even worse :/

At a store, some stores do have stock. Otherwise apple.com

Cheapest mac mini I could spec out on the apple store right now is about $750, which if you consider how much more capable its M4 processor is than the pi, is a pretty good deal tbh.