Overview
- The company quietly unveiled the refreshed desktops, which it put up for preorder on Tuesday, Aug. 25, with most models scheduled to arrive to customers and stores starting Sept. 22.
- The Mac mini now offers the new M6 chip — Apple’s first 2‑nanometer part with a 12‑core CPU, 12‑core GPU and a dual 16‑core Neural Engine — and an M5 Pro option to boost AI and multithreaded tasks.
- Mac Studio gains the M5 Max and a new M5 Ultra that fuses four dies into a single chip, scaling to a 36‑core CPU, up to an 80‑core GPU and up to 512GB of unified memory for running large local models.
- Apple published U.S. starting prices of $899 for the M6 Mac mini, $2,499 for the M5 Max Studio and $5,499 for the M5 Ultra Studio, and warned that select high‑memory Studio configurations (512GB) will not ship until late October.
- The update adds faster memory, PCIe Gen6 storage, Wi‑Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thunderbolt 5 on higher configs and promotes clustering over Thunderbolt 5 to let multiple Macs share memory for larger on‑device AI workloads, leaving Mac Studio as Apple’s top desktop after the Mac Pro exit.