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AI Chips & Compute

Apple unveils M6 Mac mini and M5 Ultra Mac Studio with faster AI performance and higher prices

Apple unveiled the M6 Mac mini and M5 Ultra Mac Studio, boosting AI performance with new chips and higher starting prices.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-26 01:15

The Mac mini now starts at $899 with the M6 chip, up from $799 for the previous M4 model, and can be configured with the M5 Pro for $1,699. The Mac Studio starts at $2,499 with the M5 Max, while the M5 Ultra configuration costs $5,499, $200 more than the previous M3 Ultra model. Preorders opened Tuesday, with shipments beginning September 22; the Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory will follow in late October.

The M6 is Apple's first chip built on a 2-nanometer process. It has a 12-core CPU with two super cores, four performance cores and six efficiency cores, a 12-core GPU, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine. The chip supports up to 32GB of unified memory with 170GB/s of bandwidth. Apple said the M6 Mac mini delivers up to 40 percent faster CPU performance, up to two times faster graphics and up to four times faster AI performance than the previous M4 model, with storage speeds doubled.

The M5 Pro version of the Mac mini is aimed at more demanding users. It comes with up to an 18-core CPU and 20-core GPU, supports up to 64GB of unified memory with 307GB/s of bandwidth, and includes three Thunderbolt 5 ports. Apple said it can process large language model prompts 8.5 times faster than older Pro Mac mini models.

At the top of the lineup, the M5 Ultra is Apple's most powerful chip ever. It combines two M5 Max dies using UltraFusion into a quad-die architecture, with up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU and a 32-core Neural Engine. It supports up to 512GB of high-bandwidth unified memory. Apple said the M5 Ultra offers up to four times faster LLM prompt processing and 4.5 times faster AI compute than the M3 Ultra. Multiple Mac Studios with the Ultra chip can be linked together to pool memory and run trillion-parameter frontier models.

The new computers are part of Apple's effort to position Macs as devices for local AI work. Developers using software like OpenClaw often run agents on a dedicated Mac mini, and the Mac Studio has become popular among AI researchers. Apple said the unified memory architecture in its chips reduces bottlenecks when running large models.

Other upgrades include Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard, and neural accelerators in every GPU core for the first time on these models. The higher prices follow an earlier increase over the summer, which Apple attributed to rising memory costs.