Apple announced new Mac mini and Mac Studio models on August 25, an unusual time of year for Mac hardware. Pre-orders opened right away, with deliveries and in-store availability from September 22.
The Mac mini now comes with either the new M6 or an M5 Pro. TidBITS describes the M6 as Apple's first chip on a 2-nanometer process, with a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU that includes Neural Accelerators. Apple says multithreaded CPU performance is about 1.2 times that of the M5. Both Mac mini versions gain Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread support through the N1 chip, and 2.5Gb Ethernet is standard.
Pricing for the Mac mini starts at $899 for the M6 model and $1,699 for the M5 Pro model. Each is $100 more than the equivalent M4-based model was priced in June, according to TidBITS.
The Mac Studio offers M5 Max and M5 Ultra options. The M5 Ultra joins two M5 Max dies, which TidBITS describes as Apple's first quad-die design, and supports up to 80 GPU cores and up to 512GB of memory. The M5 Max version starts at $2,499 and the M5 Ultra at $5,499. Configurations with 512GB of memory are due to arrive in October.
Apple also highlighted clustering several Mac Studios over Thunderbolt 5 for AI inference, claiming four machines run such work about three times faster than one.
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