Mac mini Picks Up the M6 and M5 Pro

Apple has refreshed the Mac mini with two new chips. The M6 model starts at $899, and the M5 Pro at $1,699. Pre-orders opened August 25, with units shipping September 22.

The M6 brings a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU with neural accelerators, a dual 16-core Neural Engine, 16GB of unified memory as standard, and up to 170GB/s of memory bandwidth. The M5 Pro scales to an 18-core CPU, a 20-core GPU, 64GB of memory, and 307GB/s of bandwidth, and moves up to Thunderbolt 5. Both gain Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

Apple's headline claims are up to 4x faster AI performance on the M6 versus the M4, and up to 8.5x faster local LLM processing on the M5 Pro versus the M2 Pro. Vendor benchmarks always deserve a raised eyebrow, but the direction is clear enough: the neural hardware is where the generational effort is going.

For anyone doing iOS development, this is the interesting one. The mini remains the cheapest way into a Mac capable of running Xcode comfortably, and at $899 the M6 undercuts the practical alternatives while running local models far better than the machine it replaces.

Source: Apple Newsroom, August 2026.