New Mac mini and Mac Studio bring major AI gains – at higher prices

Apple has unveiled new generations of the Mac mini and Mac Studio, delivering substantial AI performance gains alongside notable price increases across both product lines.

The new Mac mini comes with Apple's M6 chip, or the more powerful M5 Pro. The M6 features a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU, up from 10 cores each on the M5, with memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s. A significant share of the upgrade targets AI: the M6 includes a dual 16-core Neural Engine for the first time, said to be up to twice as fast as before, plus new Neural Accelerators on every GPU core across both chip options.

Apple claims the M6 delivers CPU performance up to 40 per cent faster, graphics up to twice as fast, and AI workloads up to four times faster than the M4 model – figures based on Apple's own testing, pending independent verification. The M5 Pro option offers up to an 18-core CPU, 20-core GPU and 307GB/s bandwidth. The push reflects Apple's ambition to run AI models and agents locally on the machine rather than relying solely on the cloud.

Design and ports are largely unchanged, though wired networking now defaults to 2.5-gigabit Ethernet (up from 1 gigabit), and wireless connectivity adds Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Pricing has risen: the M6 model starts at $899 in the US, and the M5 Pro at $1,699 – $300 more than the previous M4 model's equivalent starting price.

Alongside it, Apple introduced a new Mac Studio lineup with the M5 Max or the new M5 Ultra, which the company calls the most powerful Mac it has built. The M5 Ultra offers up to a 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU, a 32-core Neural Engine, and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth – 50 per cent higher than before – with configurations up to 512GB of unified memory, enabling it to run very large language models locally. Apple claims up to 4.3 times the AI performance of the M3 Ultra. The less powerful M5 Max offers an 18-core CPU, up to a 40-core GPU and up to 128GB of memory.

The Mac Studio gains Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thunderbolt 5, along with the ability to link multiple units via Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA for faster distributed AI workloads. Pricing starts at $2,499 for the M5 Max version and $5,499 for the M5 Ultra.