Overview
- Apple announced the refreshed Mac mini and Mac Studio on Tuesday and opened preorders the same day with most shipments scheduled to begin September 22 and some high‑memory Studio options delayed until late October.
- The Mac mini now ships with the new M6 — Apple’s first 2‑nanometer chip featuring a 12‑core CPU, 12‑core GPU and a dual 16‑core Neural Engine — or an optional M5 Pro, and starts at $899 in the U.S.
- The Mac Studio is offered with M5 Max or the new quad‑die M5 Ultra, which links four dies with next‑gen UltraFusion for up to a 36‑core CPU, an 80‑core GPU and up to 512GB unified memory in supported configs.
- Apple highlights on‑device AI and clustering: Neural Accelerators in GPU cores, larger Neural Engines, Thunderbolt 5 clustering and higher memory targets are billed as ways to run larger models locally without cloud hosting.
- Both desktops keep their existing chassis but add faster I/O and connectivity (Wi‑Fi 7 via Apple’s N1, higher baseline Ethernet, Thunderbolt 4/5 differences), ship with macOS 27 and carry higher starting prices than prior generations.