Apple Refreshes Mac mini and Mac Studio with M6 and M5 Ultra

Without much fanfare, Apple updated both of its desktop Macs today. The Mac mini now comes with the all new M6 chip or the M5 Pro chip, and the Mac Studio moves up to M5 Max or the new M5 Ultra. If you are thinking about which of these actually makes sense for your setup, reach out and we can help you figure it out.

Mac mini gets Apple's first 2 nanometer chip

M6 is Apple's first chip built on a 2 nanometer process, and it is a real jump for the Mac mini. It has a 12 core CPU and 12 core GPU, both up two cores from the previous generation, plus a new dual 16 core Neural Engine. Apple says that adds up to 4 times faster AI performance, 2 times faster graphics and storage, and 40 percent faster CPU performance compared to the outgoing M4 Mac mini. For people who want more headroom, there is also an M5 Pro configuration with up to an 18 core CPU and 20 core GPU. Both versions pick up Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and faster 2.5Gb Ethernet, with a 10Gb option available. The M6 Mac mini starts at 899 dollars and the M5 Pro model starts at 1,699 dollars.

Mac Studio scales up to a genuinely enormous chip

The Mac Studio update is aimed squarely at people doing serious creative or AI work. The M5 Max configuration has an 18 core CPU and up to a 40 core GPU. The M5 Ultra configuration is the interesting one: it is Apple's first quad die chip, built by fusing four dies together, with up to a 36 core CPU, an 80 core GPU, and up to 512GB of unified memory. That much memory means the machine can run very large AI models entirely on the device rather than relying on the cloud. Both Mac Studio models add Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thunderbolt 5, and Thunderbolt 5 also lets you cluster multiple Mac Studio units together for distributed AI work. Pricing starts at 3,499 dollars for the M5 Max version.

Should you order one now

Both machines are available to pre-order today and will start arriving September 22. The Mac Studio configuration with 512GB of memory ships a bit later, in late October. If you are a video editor, developer, or anyone running local AI tools and feeling the limits of an M1 or M2 machine, the jump in memory bandwidth and Neural Engine performance on either of these is substantial. If you mostly browse, handle email, and do everyday office work, the current Mac mini with M4 is still a perfectly capable machine, and there is no urgency to upgrade.

Figuring out the right configuration, whether it is worth waiting for a specific memory tier, or how to move your files and apps over from an older Mac, is exactly what we help with. Stanton Mac Support is an Apple focused tech support company based in Somerville, providing tutoring, troubleshooting, and setup help for Mac and Apple users throughout Greater Boston. Our new Mac setup sessions make migrating to a new machine painless.

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