Only Apple can drop an update like this out of the blue. Overnight, the tech giant announced new Mac minis, new Mac Studios, and new chips, M6 and M5 Ultra. Any other company would be holding a red carpet event, but not Apple. All this comes just weeks out from the new iPhone launch.
Let’s break it down from the Mac Mini to the Mac Studio and new chips.
Mac mini M6 and M5 Pro
The Mac mini is the best pound-for-pound computer ever made in my opinion. I’ve owned many over the years, and it looks like I’ll be getting more after this latest release.
M6 Mac mini now delivers up to 4x faster AI performance, 2x faster storage and graphics, and 40 percent faster CPU performance. Both new Mac mini models include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, as well as upgraded 2.5Gb Ethernet, with a 10Gb option available.
“Mac mini has always been our most versatile Mac. Whether it’s being used as a home computer, powering a professional studio, or as an always-on agentic device, it’s the little Mac that can do it all,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer.
“Today, we’re taking this versatility even further. With a more powerful CPU and graphics, Neural Accelerators in the GPU, and higher memory bandwidth, Mac mini with M6 delivers a whole new level of AI performance. And with up to an 18-core CPU and 20-core GPU, Mac mini with M5 Pro is an ultracompact powerhouse for complex pro workflows. We can’t wait to see all the incredible ways people will use it next.”
Mac mini with M6
- Up to 13.5x faster LLM prompt processing in LM Studio when compared to a Mac mini with M1, and up to 4.8x faster than M4.
- Up to 2.3x faster spreadsheet calculations in Microsoft Excel when compared to a Mac mini with M1, and up to 1.5x faster than M4.
- Up to 2x faster gaming performance with ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition when compared to a Mac mini with M4.
A Mac mini with M6 features a 12-core CPU — two more cores than before — with the world’s fastest single-threaded performance. A 12-core GPU, also with two more cores than before, now includes Neural Accelerators in each core for the first time on a Mac mini, resulting in up to 4x faster AI performance and 2x faster graphics than a Mac mini with M4. In addition, the all-new Dual 16-core Neural Engine delivers up to 2x faster performance than the previous generation, and combined with the advanced GPU, a Mac mini is a powerhouse for all things AI.
It starts with 16GB of standard unified memory configurable up to 32GB, as well as higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s.
A Mac mini with M5 Pro
- Up to 8.5x faster LLM prompt processing performance in LM Studio when compared to a Mac mini with M2 Pro, and up to 4x faster than M4 Pro.
- Up to 4.5x faster rendering performance with ray tracing in Blender when compared to a Mac mini with M2 Pro, and up to 1.4x faster than M4 Pro.
- Up to 2.1x faster image processing in Affinity when compared to a Mac mini with M2 Pro, and up to 1.5x faster than M4 Pro.
A Mac mini M5 Pro features up to an 18-core CPU with remarkable multithreaded performance and up to a 20-core GPU with an enhanced shader core and third-generation ray tracing for complex work in 3D design, VFX, and game development.
Neural Accelerators in each GPU core deliver significant gains in AI compute compared to the previous Mac mini, allowing users to tackle more advanced AI workflows like photo and video upscaling, and running large diffusion models faster than ever.
Mac mini with M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, enabling users to run even larger local AI models, work with complex 3D scenes, edit ProRes RAW files, and load large custom datasets for research.
Both variants support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, as well as 2.5Gb Ethernet for faster wired connectivity, with 10Gb available.
On the front, you get two USB-C ports that support USB 3 and a headphone jack with high-impedance headphone support. On the back, there are three Thunderbolt 4 ports on Mac mini with M6, and three Thunderbolt 5 ports on Mac mini with M5 Pro, along with HDMI and Ethernet. Thunderbolt 5 also allows users to cluster multiple Mac mini systems together to run large AI models entirely on the device. And newly added genlock support through USB-C enables precise synchronisation between a display and camera, including iPhone 17 Pro.
Pricing and Availability
- Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro are available for pre-order now.
- Mac mini with M6 starts at A$1,449 and A$1,289 for education.
- Mac mini with M5 Pro starts at A$2,699 and $2,539 for education.
Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
If you want power, at a price, then the Mac Studio is the model for you. It’s up to 4.3x faster in AI performance, up to 2x faster storage, up to 1.8x faster graphics, and up to 1.3x faster CPU speed, along with higher memory bandwidth.
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 connectivity. 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 is the ultimate desktop for on-device AI and the world’s most demanding pro workflows, relied on by users for its tremendous performance and extensive pro connectivity, all in a quiet, compact design that sits right on your desk — and today, we’re pushing the boundaries even further,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer. “With the powerful M5 Max and the incredible capabilities of M5 Ultra, Mac Studio ushers in a new era of desktop computing, delivering huge performance gains for pro workloads and AI inference with frontier-class models. By integrating Neural Accelerators directly into the GPU and offering massive amounts of high-bandwidth unified memory, the new Mac Studio is our most powerful Mac ever.”
Mac Studio is a computer for creators and powerful local AI. Neural Accelerators in each GPU core deliver dramatically faster matrix multiplication. M5 Max features phenomenal on-device AI compute with up to 3.9x faster AI performance than the prior generation, speeding up prompt processing. With M5 Ultra, Mac Studio achieves up to 4.3x the peak AI compute performance of M3 Ultra and a staggering 9.8x more than M1 Ultra.
Combined with up to 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, 50 per cent higher than before, Mac Studio lets users run massive models entirely on device.
Users and teams looking to share AI compute can cluster multiple Mac Studio systems together using the built-in support for Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA (remote direct memory access). This creates a vast shared memory pool across systems, allowing users to load the largest and most demanding frontier-class open-weight models available today. A cluster of four Mac Studio systems delivers up to 3x faster AI inference than a single system.
Core AI is a brand-new framework for building, running, and deploying AI models on Apple silicon. It provides an architecture optimised for Apple silicon, including unified memory, CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, allowing developers to deploy full-scale LLMs locally and bring their own custom models into their apps. MLX, Apple’s open-source machine learning framework optimised for Apple silicon, enables developers to run, train, and fine-tune models with exceptional efficiency on Mac. In addition to these powerful frameworks, combined with Xcode and a robust ecosystem of AI tools and solutions, Mac Studio provides a complete, end-to-end platform for AI development — from experimentation and training to deployment.
Mac Studio with M5 Max
- Up to 10.7x faster LLM prompt processing in LM Studio when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Max, and 3.9x faster than M4 Max.
- Up to 7.4x faster text-to-image performance when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Max, and up to 3.5x faster than M4 Max.
- Up to 5.3x faster Magic Mask performance in Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Studio when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Max, and up to 3x faster than M4 Max.
- Up to 3.5x faster basecalling for DNA sequencing in Oxford Nanopore MinKNOW when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Max, and up to 1.9x faster than M4 Max.
Mac Studio with M5 Max is ideal for musicians, photographers, software engineers, and designers pushing real-time 3D and motion graphics. Mac Studio with M5 Max delivers a huge boost in performance, featuring an 18-core CPU with 6 super cores and 12 performance cores, so developers can compile code even faster. The up-to-40-core GPU with Neural Accelerators is now up to 50 per cent faster than the previous generation, boosting graphics-intensive tasks like game development with higher frame rates and more complex scene geometry. With up to 614GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, M5 Max delivers superfast on-device AI compute, enabling users to run LLMs, generate images and video, as well as accelerate complex workflows.
The new Mac Studio also includes third-generation hardware-accelerated ray tracing, delivering faster, more realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows across professional 3D, VFX, and design workflows. Enhanced shader cores boost parallel processing, enabling smoother real-time viewport navigation and faster offline renders in creative workloads.
The Media Engine supports hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and AV1 decode, allowing filmmakers to colour-grade uncompressed 8K footage and process multiple concurrent video streams with ease.
Mac Studio with M5 Ultra
- Up to 15.4x faster CopyCat ML training performance in Foundry Nuke when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, and up to 3.3x faster than M3 Ultra.
- Up to 9.8x faster LLM prompt processing in LM Studio when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, and up to 4x faster than M3 Ultra.
- Up to 8.2x faster text-to-image performance when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, and up to 4.3x faster than M3 Ultra.
- Up to 4.7x faster scene rendering performance in Maxon Redshift when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, and up to 1.7x faster than M3 Ultra.
This is a computer for serious pros. Filmmakers can colour-grade uncompressed 8K footage in real time, VFX artists can render complex simulations, and data scientists can train local AI models on expansive datasets. The new Mac Studio with M5 Ultra features an up-to-36-core CPU with 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, delivering up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than M3 Ultra. Its up-to-80-core GPU, the most powerful Apple silicon GPU ever, brings Neural Accelerators to the Ultra chip for the first time, enabling up to 4.3x the peak AI compute performance when compared to M3 Ultra.1 It also features up to 1.8x faster graphics than the prior generation, providing smoother real-time 3D rendering for VFX workflows.
With up to 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, the new Mac Studio unlocks AI tasks on a single computer that’s insane. AI coding agents process significantly faster, image generation tools can render creations in an instant, and enterprise teams can cluster multiple systems to scale performance to new heights. In addition, with twice the video encode and decode blocks as M5 Max, the Media Engine in M5 Ultra is more capable than ever, empowering pros to simultaneously play up to 33 streams of 8K ProRes 422 at 30 fps on M5 Ultra.
Storage performance is up to twice as fast, with a next-generation SSD architecture built on PCIe Gen 6, delivering industry-leading read and write speeds for rapid project loading, file transfers, and loading huge LLMs. Thunderbolt 5 ports deliver transfer speeds up to 120Gb/s of bandwidth, so pros can connect high-performance peripherals, displays, PCIe expansion chassis, and external storage.
The Apple-designed N1 chip brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 to Mac Studio for the first time, delivering improved performance and reliability to wireless connections. Mac Studio now enables genlock over USB-C for precise synchronisation between a display and professional camera capture like iPhone 17 Pro. It also supports up to eight displays, or up to four Studio Display XDR at full 5K resolution and 120Hz, providing an expansive screen for the most demanding projects.
Pricing and Availability
- Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra are available for pre-order now.
- Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory is coming in late October.
- Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at A$4,299 and A$3,949 GST for education.
- Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at A$9,499 and A$8,809 for education.
Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
Let’s take a closer look at the M6, Apple’s first 2 nm chip, and the M5 Ultra, the company’s first quad-die architecture and its most powerful chip ever.
“Today, we’re debuting the next giant leap in performance and AI compute for Apple silicon with the incredibly advanced M6 and the most powerful M-series chip yet, M5 Ultra,” said Sri Santhanam, Apple’s vice president of Silicon Engineering Group.
“Built using the cutting-edge 2 nm process, M6 combines a new CPU complex, two additional CPU and GPU cores, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and more unified memory bandwidth to power through workloads with amazing energy efficiency. And for the ultimate desktop performance and the ability to run massive AI models, M5 Ultra features a massive GPU, now with Neural Accelerators, and more unified memory bandwidth, pushing the boundaries of what a desktop can do.”
M6
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 utilise 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 M1.2 The super cores blaze through single-threaded workloads, the performance cores use less power and join the super cores to run demanding multithreaded workloads, and the efficiency cores handle everyday background tasks — all with industry-leading performance per watt. As a result, demanding CPU tasks such as editing images, compiling code, indexing new files, and running agentic AI workloads are faster than ever.
Accelerated GPU and Faster Memory Bandwidth
M6 features a 12-core GPU — two more cores than M5 — with a Neural Accelerator in each core. This design delivers a nearly 30 per cent increase in peak GPU compute for AI compared to M5, and more than 8x compared to M1, enabling significantly faster prompt processing when interacting with on-device LLMs.
In addition, M6 offers Apple’s latest advanced graphics capabilities, including updates to the shader core architecture, Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. These technologies combine to deliver stunning visual realism, faster rendering, and higher frame rates for gaming. M6 also has 50 per cent increased geometry rates for complex graphics.
M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory to multitask across demanding apps and run LLMs on the device for secure and private agentic tasks. It also provides up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth — a 10 per cent increase over M5 and a 2.5x increase over M1.
M5 Ultra
M5 Ultra, Apple’s most powerful chip ever, is built for pros who need to speed through workloads that demand maximum CPU and GPU performance and unified memory bandwidth, such as complex 3D rendering, visual effects, scientific analysis, and running compute-intensive frontier AI models on the device.
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.
Unprecedented AI and Graphics, Massive Memory Capacity
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. The GPU includes Apple’s latest shader core with second-generation Dynamic Caching, as well as hardware-accelerated mesh shading and third-generation ray tracing, delivering up to 40 per cent faster graphics performance than M3 Ultra.
M5 Ultra incorporates a more capable Media Engine. Dedicated hardware-enabled H.264, HEVC, four ProRes encode and decode engines, and hardware-accelerated AV1 decode make it the ultimate solution for high-resolution video editing. M5 Ultra also includes a 32-core Neural Engine, driving complex AI tasks and Apple Intelligence features securely on device with industry-leading energy efficiency.
Additionally, M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB, and delivers a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth that is 50 per cent higher than M3 Ultra. This lets users store huge datasets entirely in local memory, increase the tokens-per-second speed, and run huge LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on device.
Unleashing Power for Developers
Apple’s developer frameworks and tools — including Core AI, Core ML, Metal, and Xcode — tap directly into the advanced hardware of both chips. Developers can leverage the Dual 16-core Neural Engine in M6, and the Neural Accelerators in the GPU with the massive 512GB unified memory pool and faster 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth in M5 Ultra, to provide incredible AI compute capabilities.
With these frameworks and new chips, developers can run and fine-tune large AI models locally on their Mac. Apple’s developer tools and frameworks automatically optimise performance across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, and give developers the ability to use Apple Foundation Models, App Intents to tap into Apple Intelligence features, or their own proprietary AI models to build and run powerful AI workloads entirely on device.
Conclusion
Apple is in a league of its own. Since moving to Apple Silicon, even the entry-level Macs have been untouchable by PCs. I moved back to Apple 20 years ago and haven’t looked back. The performance isn’t just better, it’s far better and more reliable than any PC I’ve ever used. I say this as a user who was continually frustrated by Windows machines when I did professional video work.
As AI moves to more locally based systems, it will be hard to ignore Apple’s latest machines, unless you’re in the NVIDIA wheelhouse.
These new Macs and chips are outstanding, even from the cheapest model. The only problem is price. As memory demands increase, so will costs for desktop computers. But if you’re looking for power and simplicity, you cannot go past the Mac mini. Its size hides a beast within, and it’s itching to get out.
