The MacRumors Show: Apple's Surprisingly Big Week of Announcements

In an unexpectedly eventful week for Apple, The MacRumors Show delved into the company's latest announcements. On Wednesday, September 9, Apple will hold its annual iPhone event at Apple Park, with select media invited to attend. The event, titled "Surprise and Shine," is anticipated to unveil at least six new products, such as the Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4, iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the first foldable iPhone.

Pre-orders for the new Mac mini and Mac Studio began shortly after Apple's announcement. The Mac mini, available with M6 and M5 Ultra chip options, boasts an N1 networking chip, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and standard 2.5Gb Ethernet. Pricing starts at $899 for a 16GB/256GB configuration, with the M5 Pro model costing $1,699 for 24GB/512GB. Additionally, pre-orders are open for the Mac Studio, beginning at $2,499 for the M5 Max at 36GB/512GB, and reaching $5,499 for the M5 Ultra at 96GB/1TB.

The Mac mini and Mac Studio are powered by Apple's first 2nm chip, the M6, which features a 12-core CPU with four performance cores, six efficiency cores, and two super cores. The M5 Ultra, Apple's first quad-die chip, delivers up to 36 cores, 12 super cores, and 24 performance cores, offering 1.25x single-threaded and 1.3x multithreaded performance compared to the M3 Ultra.

Its 80-core GPU is the most powerful Apple silicon ever, and the first on an Ultra chip to include Neural Accelerators. The M5 Ultra also introduces a 32-core Neural Engine and memory reaching up to 512GB at 1.2TB/s.