Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Mac Studio with M5 Max features an 18-core CPU, an up-to-40-core GPU with Neural Accelerators built into each core, and up to 128GB of unified memory, accelerating complex pro and AI workloads. With the powerful M5 Ultra, Mac Studio scales up to a 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, and a staggering 512GB of unified memory, enabling users to run enormous LLMs entirely on device. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 come to Mac Studio for the first time, while Thunderbolt 5 rounds out its extensive connectivity, so users can take advantage of blazing-fast external storage, PCIe expansion chassis, and powerful hub solutions for the most intense workloads. Thunderbolt 5 also enables multiple Mac Studio systems to be clustered, bringing up to 3x faster performance for distributed AI inference when compared to a single system.
[…]
Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499 (U.S.) and $2,299 (U.S.) for education.
[…]
Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 (U.S.) and $5,099 (U.S.) for education.
It’s not shipping until September 22, with the 512 GB configuration in late October.
John Gruber:
Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into condensed tables, so you can see which storage and memory options are available for each chip, and how much they cost.
[…]
It kind of stinks that there are no RAM options for the Studio between the 96 GB base and the $4,000 256 GB upgrade.
Jason Snell:
The Mac Studio is effectively the replacement for the Mac Pro, and it’s alone in offering the Ultra-class chip. Apple has positioned the Mac Studio as ideal for local AI workflows, and the new models will still be able to cluster via Thunderbolt 5 to create even larger collections of memory and performance. Apple representatives pointed out that a four-Mac Studio AI cluster, like the one I saw on display at WWDC earlier this summer, is so efficient that it can be powered from a single standard wall outlet. (They even showed us a picture of four Mac Studios plugged into a power strip that was plugged into the wall.) In an era of data center excesses, Apple is clearly leaning into the possibility of small, efficient Macs being used to do local AI work rather than relying on huge, power-hungry cloud models.
Federico Viticci:
If these numbers hold up and scale linearly, a local Mixture-of-Experts model such as Qwen 3.5-35B-A3B, which would run at ~17 tokens/sec on average on a base M4 Mac mini with 16 GB of RAM, could realistically generate output at over 60 tokens/second with the base model M6 Mac mini.
Based on what we’ve seen so far, the one downside of the M6 Mac mini is that it does not have Thunderbolt 5 ports; those are exclusive to the M5 Pro model, also announced today.
[…]
Speaking from personal experience, I know that my M3 Ultra Mac Studio using oMLX can run DeepSeek-V4-Flash locally with generation averaging 35 tokens/second. Assuming a linear 4x increase, that would put the same model at over 120 tokens/second on an M5 Ultra Mac Studio. To put things in perspective, that kind of performance would be faster than any AI chatbot website, it’d be faster than many providers who offer a “fast” mode for their models, and it’d only be second to either dedicated NVIDIA PC clusters at home or specialized inference providers such as Cerebras or Groq…which are running in full-blown data centers. Sure, you would need a computer that is likely going to cost more than $20,000 to make it happen, but it’d still be possible on a single machine that is small, quiet, and that – in theory – any consumer can buy off the shelf.
Previously:
Update (2026-08-26): John Gruber:
That upgrade is labeled “+ $300”, which makes it look as though the starting price for the 18/40-core model is $2,800. That’s the price I put in the original version of my chart.
But if you select that option, you’ll notice that the actual starting price jumps from $2,500 to $3,100 — a $600 difference, not $300. The reason is that the $2500 18/32-core version only comes with one option for RAM: 32 GB. The 18/40-core chip has three tiers for RAM: 48, 64, and 128 GB.
Update (2026-09-02): Joe Rossignol:
Apple’s press release for the new Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips last week initially stated that the computer had “next-generation SSD architecture built on PCIe Gen 6.” However, as spotted by the French blog MacGeneration, Apple removed the PCIe 6.0 mention from the announcement shortly after it was published.
Update (2026-09-22): Federico Viticci (Hacker News):
In my day-to-day experience with agents running on the M5 Ultra, these improvements to token prefill (or how quickly a prompt can be processed) and token generation are the changes I noticed immediately. When comparing a model running on the M3 Ultra and M5 Ultra side by side with Open Minis on iOS, the M5 Ultra was ~70% faster on average than the M3 Ultra at generating a response.
[…]
In my tests, prompt processing is up 150% on average from the M3 Ultra – a ~2.5× improvement from my previous setup. This change alone makes local models solid choices in apps like Open Minis and Hermes Agent.
[…]
As you’ll see from the visualizations later in this article, NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 is still faster than Apple’s M5 Ultra despite its “meager” 32 GB of VRAM, for two different reasons.
Update (2026-10-08): Andrew Cunningham:
In many of our general-purpose CPU and GPU tests, the Ultra’s CPU outruns the M5 Max by 80 or 90 percent, and the GPU is between 50 and 80 percent faster. That’s essentially in keeping with what we’ve observed in past Ultra chips—the CPU comes closer to 2x scaling than the GPU does. Compared to the outgoing M3 Ultra, M5 Ultra usually posts around 30 percent faster single-core CPU speeds, 50 percent faster multi-core CPU speeds, and GPU performance that’s anywhere from 33 to 66 percent faster, depending on the test. As you’d expect for a two-generation upgrade, it’s a big one.
But we also observed some less-expected behavior. The Ultra’s Geekbench multicore performance is only around 26 percent faster than the Max, and in our CPU-based Handbrake video encoding test, the Max is actually faster to complete the H.264 encode (and barely slower at H.265).
Looking at the power consumption numbers offers a possible explanation.
[…]
It’s genuinely fun and freeing to be able to write hobby-project code at usable speeds without my data ever leaving my control. It’s just too bad I’ve made this discovery as Apple has instituted 25-percent-and-up price increases across the entire Mac Studio line.
Previously:
Apple Hardware Announcement Apple M5 Max Apple M5 Ultra Artificial Intelligence Mac Mac Studio macOS Tahoe 26
Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors, Slashdot):
With M6, Mac mini now delivers up to 4x faster AI performance, 2x faster storage and graphics, and 40 percent faster CPU performance. Everything on Mac mini with M6 feels incredibly fast, from everyday productivity tasks to agentic AI workflows. Mac mini with M5 Pro delivers even more pro-level performance to breeze through demanding projects, from video production to game development. And this new level of performance takes on business workflows with ease whether Mac mini is being used as a primary desktop or for always-on, deskside agentic computing. Both Mac mini models include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, as well as upgraded 2.5Gb Ethernet, with a 10Gb option available.
[…]
Mac mini with M6 starts at $899 (U.S.) and $799 (U.S.) for education.
[…]
Mac mini with M5 Pro starts at $1,699 (U.S.) and $1,599 (U.S.) for education.
Rui Carmo:
The M6 tops out at 170GB/s and 32GB of unified memory, whereas the M5 Pro offers 307GB/s and up to 64GB–nearly twice the bandwidth, as well as twice the memory ceiling. That is the number to watch for AI inference, not just CPU and GPU benchmark deltas.
John Gruber:
Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into condensed tables, so you can see which storage and memory options are available for each chip, and how much they cost.
[…]
If you configure an M6 Mac Mini with 2 TB of storage, the SSD upgrade ($1,000) costs more than the entire base model computer ($900). So too with the 4 TB SSD upgrade for the M5 Pro Mini ($1,800 upgrade for a $1,700 computer).
Nick:
Almost double (in Canadian dollars) what I paid for my M4 mini 18 months ago.
Previously:
Update (2026-08-26): Jason Anthony Guy:
Why announce (and take pre-orders) today, but not ship for a month? Perhaps Apple is using pre-orders to gauge interest and adjust its product mix. With huge prices for memory and storage, Apple does not want to build high-cost configurations that end up sitting around. Or, perhaps the “Fall iPhone” event will be a “new products” event, and Apple is clearing the decks of interesting-but-hardly-important hardware it doesn’t want distracting us from more exciting Macs (like the expected MacBook Pro “Ultra”).
Juli Clover:
The Mac mini now starts at $899, $300 over the original starting price of the M4 Mac mini when it launched in October 2024.
[…]
The Mac mini and Mac Studio support genlock over USB-C, so there’s no need for a separate sync box. Genlock is used in multi-camera shoots and virtual production to lock timing to a shared reference signal.
Tim Hardwick:
Apple’s newly announced M6 and M5 Pro Mac mini models still support up to three external displays, but there’s now support for higher refresh rates, according to Apple’s published technical specifications.
Chance Miller:
Another interesting tidbit is that even though Apple raised Mac mini prices today, it’s still excluded from Apple Upgrade leasing.
Previously:
Update (2026-08-31): Imthaz Ahamed:
Now after the price hikes, the Neo starts at £699 and the Mini at £899. So to answer the question, is the best feature of the M6 Mini the price?
I don’t think so, and that’s not because of the increased price to £899 but because of the Macbook Neo. The Mac Mini used to be the computer that everyone bought to get a taste of macOS. A lot of my friends have purchased Mac Minis just because it was the cheapest way to get into a Mac. But now I think the Neo fills that role.
The Mac Mini hasn’t become a bad deal. It’s become a different kind of deal. If you already have a monitor and a keyboard, if you want real desktop performance without paying for an Macbook Pro or a Mac Studio, the M6 Mac Mini is still probably the best price-per-performance computer Apple sells.
Update (2026-09-22): See also: reviews from Jason Snell and Andrew Cunningham (Hacker News).
Expand Mac mini:
Our Mac mini M6 and M5 Pro arrived today, and we opened them up. Apple has dropped the removable SSD module. On both machines the NAND is soldered onto the logic board, as it was on the M1, M2 and M3.
Previously:
Apple Hardware Announcement Apple M5 Pro Apple M6 Apple Upgrade Mac Mac mini macOS Tahoe 26
Apple (MacRumors M5 Ultra and M6, Hacker News):
M6 is built using cutting-edge 2 nm process technology, packing greater transistor density into a smaller die for a major leap in performance and power efficiency. M6 also introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, providing up to 2x the peak compute over previous generations to make on-device AI workflows run even faster. System frameworks can automatically utilize both engines simultaneously, enabling applications to see faster model execution.
M6 has a brand-new 12-core CPU complex — two more cores than M5 — that consists of 2 super cores, 4 performance cores, and 6 efficiency cores. It delivers the world’s fastest single-threaded performance and up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance as compared to M5, and up to 2.4x faster than M1.
[…]
M5 Ultra uses UltraFusion to connect two dual-die M5 Max chips to form the quad-die architecture — a first for Apple silicon. UltraFusion increases the inter-die bandwidth to over 4.4TB/s and the connection density by over 6x. Together, these ultra-low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects allow the four dies to behave as a single unified processor. M5 Ultra also features a large up-to-36-core CPU consisting of 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, delivering up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than M3 Ultra.
M5 Ultra features a next-generation GPU with up to 80 cores, incorporating a Neural Accelerator in each core to offer up to 4.5x the peak GPU compute for AI compared to M3 Ultra and over 6x more than M1 Ultra.
ghostly_s:
It was not long ago all the illustrations in an M chip press release were graphs showing it flouncing the competition. Now it’s just random screenshots of desktops. Skimming this I didn’t see a single claim of performance advantages over competitors. The massive thing Apple still needs to solve is making sure customers don’t miss being able to plug the latest greatest GPU into their tower, they should not be resting on their laurels.
Greg Pierce:
I’m so old I remember when Apple PR benchmarks were all like “Photoshop Gaussian Blur in only 48 seconds!”
Previously:
Update (2026-08-26): Hartley Charlton:
The most significant architectural change is in the CPU. The M5 splits its ten cores into performance and efficiency groups, which is an arrangement Apple silicon has used since the M1. The M6 adds a third tier called “super cores,” which handle single-threaded workloads and which Apple says give the chip the world’s fastest single-threaded performance.
[…]
Apple did not publish real-world benchmarks comparing the M6 to the M5 directly, instead framing its Mac mini figures against the M4 and M1 models[…]
[…]
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in July that Apple has no plans to release “M6 Pro,” “M6 Max,” or “M6 Ultra” chips, having decided to accelerate development of the AI-optimized M7 generation.
Adam Engst:
As with previous Ultra generations, the M5 Ultra combines two M5 Max chips, but since they’re dual-die chips, the result is Apple silicon’s first quad-die architecture. (The M3 Ultra connected two single-die M3 Max chips.) There’s no practical benefit to users in a quad-die architecture, but it’s a huge win for Apple. The larger the die, the more difficult and expensive it is to manufacture because a defect can ruin the entire die. Dividing the design into smaller dies can substantially improve manufacturing yield and reduce costs.
[…]
The M5 Ultra dispenses with efficiency cores entirely, devoting all CPU resources to super and performance cores.
Update (2026-09-16): Joe Rossignol:
If this single Geekbench 7 result is accurate, the M6 chip has up to around 12% faster single-core CPU performance and up to around 27% faster multi-core CPU performance compared to the M5 chip.
Joe Rossignol:
Unsurprisingly, the M5 Ultra is Apple’s fastest chip ever. If this Geekbench result is accurate, it has up to around 30% faster single-core CPU performance and up to around 35% faster multi-core performance compared to the M3 Ultra.
Apple Hardware Announcement Apple M5 Ultra Apple M6 Artificial Intelligence Mac Processors
