Apple Mac Mini M6 and Mac Studio M5 Ultra: Specs, Price, Release Date

Neither the Mac Mini nor the Mac Studio has seen any physical changes on the outside, but the eagerly awaited update has brought these Macs back into stock after being hard to come by for most of the year. Crucially, this marks our first glimpse of the M6 chip, which we can expect to see more of in upcoming MacBooks.

The Mac Mini now offers two options: the M6 and the M5 Pro. The M5 Pro shares the same chip found in the current MacBook Pro, while the M6 is entirely new. It is the first Apple Silicon part to utilize 2-nanometer process technology and features an additional 12 cores—another first for Apple—with a breakdown of two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores.

Notably, the M6 includes performance cores designed to accelerate multithreaded tasks while maintaining efficiency. Apple claims the M6 to be 20% faster in multithreaded performance and 40% faster than the M4.

In terms of graphics, the M6 boasts a more powerful GPU with an additional two cores, totaling 12 GPU cores. This Mac Mini is also the first to feature Neural Accelerators for accelerated on-device AI performance, a feature introduced with the M5 chip last year. Consequently, Apple asserts that the M6 Mac Mini is twice as fast as the M4 Mac Mini, offering improved gaming performance.

However, this enhanced performance comes at a $200 price increase, with the M6 Mac Mini starting at $899 for the configuration with 16 GB of unified memory. Upgrading to the maximum of 32 GB is still possible, and Apple claims the Mac Mini is 40% faster with bandwidth reaching up to 170 GB per second.

Switching gears to the Mac Studio, it also receives a significant upgrade. Like the Mac Mini, it remains available in two configurations: the M5 Max and the new M5 Ultra. This is the fourth generation of the Mac Studio, with the M3 Ultra (and M3 Max) model launching in early 2025. Apple confidently declares that the M5 Ultra is their most powerful chip to date, marking the first instance of a "quad-die" architecture.

The Ultra chips have always been distinguished by the connection of two Max dies together using UltraFusion, but the M5 Ultra takes it a step further. The inter-die bandwidth has been increased to over 4.4 TB per second, enabling the entire array to operate as a single CPU.

The M5 Ultra Mac Studio packs in four extra CPU cores for a total of 36 cores. The GPU remains consistent with 80 cores, similar to the M3 Ultra, but the M5-specific enhancements to the GPU contribute to overall performance improvements. Apple even discussed the potential to connect multiple Mac Studios via Thunderbolt 5 to run frontier-level LLMs with over a trillion parameters locally, allowing the four systems to share memory. Hypothetically, this setup could enable tasks previously deemed impossible on a single Mac.

Both the Mac Mini and Mac Studio are now available for preorder, starting today, and will come preloaded with macOS 27 Golden Gate. However, shipping will not commence until September 22. Apple explained this delay is unrelated to the shipping times for these new Mac Mini or Mac Studio systems.