Apple launches the M6 Mac mini at $899 and a 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio
Apple announced new Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops on August 25, built around two new chips and pitched squarely at people running AI models on their own hardware. The Mac mini with the all-new M6 starts at $899. The Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra starts at $5,499. Both opened for pre-order the same day and start arriving on September 22.
The M6 is doing most of the work in that pitch, so start there. Apple calls it the company’s first 2-nanometer chip, and it pairs a 12-core CPU with a 12-core GPU, two more cores each than the M4, with a Neural Accelerator built into every GPU core. Apple says that adds up to 4x faster AI performance and 40 percent faster CPU performance than the Mac mini with M4. CNBC and SiliconANGLE both name TSMC as the manufacturer.
| Model | Chip | CPU / GPU cores | Max unified memory | From |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac mini | M6 | 12 / 12 | 32GB | $899 |
| Mac mini | M5 Pro | up to 18 / up to 20 | 64GB | $1,699 |
| Mac Studio | M5 Max | 18 / up to 40 | 128GB | $2,499 |
| Mac Studio | M5 Ultra | up to 36 / up to 80 | 512GB | $5,499 |
The memory column is the one that decides what you can run, because a model has to fit in RAM before it does anything at all. Apple says the M5 Ultra reaches 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, 50 percent higher than the M3 Ultra it replaces. It also claims 4.3x the peak AI compute of that M3 Ultra, and 3.9x faster AI performance for the M5 Max over the prior generation.
Apple leaned on clustering as well, which is how it answers models too big for any single box. Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA let several Mac Studios share one memory pool, and Apple says a cluster of four delivers up to 3x faster AI inference than a single machine. That’s a workflow hobbyists and professional developers had already improvised by daisy-chaining Macs, as Ars Technica reported, now sold as a supported feature.
By integrating Neural Accelerators directly into the GPU and offering massive amounts of high-bandwidth unified memory, the new Mac Studio is our most powerful Mac ever.
Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, via Apple Newsroom
Every performance figure above comes from Apple, measured on Apple’s own configurations, and most are hedged with an “up to”. But no independent testing exists yet. Ars Technica made the same point on announcement day, noting there aren’t any verifiable benchmarks to work from yet for the M6 claims. The vendor-benchmark problem isn’t new, but it bites harder when the whole case for the machine rests on inference speed.
Price is the other catch, though. CNBC reports the $899 entry point is $100 above the outgoing Mac mini, and that Apple blamed memory costs for an earlier increase. TechCrunch notes the company discontinued its $599 base model earlier this year, which means the cheapest Mac mini has climbed twice inside a year. That erodes the arithmetic that made a Mac mini attractive as an always-on inference box in the first place.
The configuration worth watching is the 512GB Mac Studio, which Apple says isn’t shipping until late October. So until somebody outside Apple runs a four-machine cluster against a rented GPU instance, the hosted versus self-hosted question stays open at this tier. That comparison, not the core counts, is what decides whether a $5,499 desktop pays for itself.
Get the daily rundown
One email each weekday with the AI news that matters, every claim linked to its primary source.
Free, one email each weekday, unsubscribe in one click. We never sell or share your address.
