Apple introduced the next Mac mini on 25 August, offered with two chip options: the M6, making its debut in this machine, and the M5 Pro released earlier in the year. Nothing changes on the outside. Quite a lot changes inside, and so does the starting price: the base model now costs 899 dollars in the United States.

M6: a dual neural engine, built on 2 nanometres

The M6 carries a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, up from 10 and 10 in the M5. The change that matters most for AI work is a different one: it is Apple’s first chip with a dual neural engine, two 16-core units where there used to be one. Memory bandwidth rises to 170 GB/s, from the 153 GB/s of the M5.

It is also Apple’s first chip built on 2 nanometres, and the company states it holds the fastest CPU core on the market. Against the previous Mac mini with a 10-core M4, 32 GB of unified memory and 2 TB of storage, Apple cites up to 40 % more CPU performance, up to four times more on AI tasks, up to twice the graphics performance and up to twice the storage speed.

The company describes the machine as the leading desktop for always-on, deskside agentic computing. It is the first time Apple has framed the Mac mini in those terms.

The M5 Pro option

Anyone needing more muscle gets two M5 Pro configurations: one with a 15-core CPU and 16-core GPU, another with an 18-core CPU and 20-core GPU. Both keep a single 16-core neural engine, so on the AI side specifically the M6 has the advantage despite being the entry model.

Across both families, the Mac mini includes neural accelerators inside every GPU core for the first time.

Memory and storage draw the other line between them. M6 configurations go up to 2 TB of SSD and 32 GB of RAM; M5 Pro goes up to 8 TB and 64 GB.

Connectivity: what did change on the outside

The chassis is unchanged and still comes in silver only, but connectivity has been brought up to date. The new models move to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, from the Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 of the 2024 generation.

  • Two front USB-C ports and a front headphone jack, unchanged.
  • Three rear Thunderbolt ports, HDMI and Ethernet. M6 models carry Thunderbolt 4; M5 Pro models, Thunderbolt 5.
  • Ethernet is now 2.5 gigabit by default, up from one gigabit. The 10-gigabit option remains available.
  • Native support for up to three external displays, as before.

The price is the awkward part

The previous Mac mini started at 599 dollars with 256 GB of storage and 16 GB of memory. That configuration went up to 799 in June, as part of a general price adjustment across Mac and iPad. The equivalent with an M6 now starts at 899 dollars, and the M5 Pro version starts at 1,699.

That is 300 dollars more than less than two years ago for the entry model, and the jump has taken up much of the reaction to the announcement, ahead of the technical improvements. Apple keeps 256 GB as the starting storage on the base configuration.

Dates

Pre-orders opened on the day of the announcement, with deliveries and retail availability set for Tuesday 22 September. Apple presented a refreshed Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips on the same day.