Apple Announces New Mac Mini With M6 and M5 Pro Chips Starting at $899

Apple is refreshing its Mac mini, its cheapest desktop Mac, with a brand-new M6 chip, as well as the M5 Pro chip previously seen in the latest MacBook Pros. The entry-level model with an M6 chip, 16GB of unified memory, and 256GB of storage is priced at $899, and it will start shipping on September 22 alongside the M5 Pro version.

In recent months, demand for the Mac mini surged as the low-cost Mac became popular among developers interested in running AI models locally. This led Apple to discontinue the $599 M4 version with 256 GB of storage in May, leaving the $799 512GB version as the new base model. The Mac mini was also exempted from the price increases that impacted all Mac models in July.

Well, this new base M6 Mac Mini with 256GB of storage is $100 more expensive than the M4 version with twice the storage. However, the $100 difference will give you a newer chip with 12 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores with neural accelerators (the M4 on the Mac Mini only had 10 CPU and GPU cores), a dual 16-core neural engine, and up to 170GB/s memory bandwidth (up from 120 GB/s on the M4). Apple said today that the M6, its “first state-of-the-art 2-nanometer chip, advances every compute block, delivering gains across every dimension of performance.”

Overall, the company promises up to 4x faster AI performance, 2x faster storage and graphics, and 40% faster CPU performance with its M6 chip, which also supports up to 32 GB of unified memory (up from 24GB on the M4). The new chip also adds support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and there’s a new 2.5Gb Ethernet port by default, with the option to upgrade to 10Gb.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman previously reported that Apple’s M6 chip wouldn’t be declined into more powerful Pro, Max, and Ultra variants, and that’s probably why Apple is making its new Mac mini available with an M5 Pro chip previously seen in the latest MacBook Pros. Compared to the newer M6, the M5 Pro on the Mac mini offers up to 18 CPU cores with 6 super cores and 12 performance cores, up to 20 GPU cores with neural accelerators, and up to 64GB of memory with 307 GB/s of memory bandwidth. However, there’s an older 16-core neural engine, while the M6 offers a new dual 16-core neural engine.

The Mac mini with M5 Pro starts at $1699 with a version of the chip with just 15 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores, 24GB of memory, and 512GB of storage. Unlike the M6 version, the Mac Mini with M5 Pro comes with three Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back, and it can be configured with up to 8TB of storage. “Thunderbolt 5 also allows users to cluster multiple Mac mini systems together to run large AI models entirely on device. And newly added genlock support through USB-C enables precise synchronization between a display and camera, including iPhone 17 Pro,” Apple explained today.

Both the M6 and M5 Pro Mac mini are available for pre-order today, and they will start shipping on September 22 with macOS 27 out of the box. Apple also announced today a refreshed Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, and I’ll have more details on it in a separate post.