New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

So happy with my base M4 purchase for $499 when it released. I even snagged a 1TB replacement drive for $199 a year ago. Feels like I got the last train out.

It's a bit of an emotional goodbye to the super cheap Mac Minis we got to enjoy for a while. I got some for family members, we had some serving as iOS/macOS build servers sitting in a closet at my last job, they were fantastic.

Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.

One of the things that Steve Jobs got very right was "and you can order right now". Announcements where you have to wait a month to order throw away all of the hype. Even allowing pre-orders and shipping later is a better idea and so silly that Apple has started walking away from that.

What I am missing in all of those benchmarks, how does the M6 compares to the M5 Pro.

I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.

I am to only one?

> for always-on agentic computing

Don’t know, but this as main ad headline feels almost like a threat to my personal home computing needs

The M-chips are insanely powerful. So powerful for my regular use that I'm still on M1-generated devices and don't really need to update. Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade.

As a disclaimer though, I haven't even tried to really run local models on the M1 as I also have a 'gaming PC' that can run them fine.

After watching a video about how the filesystems are > 2x faster (and testing this myself in my mac mini vs a linux machine), I feel like Apple is leaving a lot on the table, and I hope that they get APFS to be as fast as the linux filesystems.

Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.

My father was a plumber in the 80s and bought our family an Amiga 1000 for $1,200. Today thats about $3800 in inflation adjusted money. I just bought my son a top of the line pc for $2,000. I get that it used to be cheaper, but value is still relatively good for these machines.

> Up to 2x faster gaming performance with ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition when compared to Mac mini with M4.

Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?

And while i'm at it, I was wondering a few weeks ago if I should try this game on my M3 pro. Anyone has played it on Apple and has feedback ?

The "4x AI performance" smells suspicious to me, M5 Pro does have slightly higher memory bandwidth than the M4 Pro, but there are also the new Neural Accelerators in the GPU cores, I've always wondered what they actually do, since the SoC has AMX (Apple Matrix Coprocessor) since the original M1 chip era.

So is this performance gain probably due to the new Neural Accelerators?

Do we need a 3rd top level discussion on this?

2.5Gbe as standard is nice.

Double the price of the base m4 mac mini in February :(

(it was late in it's lifecycle and there were frequent sales)

I will buy a Mac mini, 64GB RAM + 2TB. That will replace my current MBP M1 Pro with 16GB (4 years old). For serious upgrade I will wait the M7 Line.

Which is more important for AI/LLM stuff, the number of GPU cores or the amount of unified memory? I can choose from a Mini with the M5 Pro 18CPU/30GPU and 64GB RAM or a Studio with a M5 Max 18CPU/40GPU and 48GB RAM for roughly the same price

Related? "Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line" june 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676795 380 comments

I'm not a big Mac guy, but I have a couple of laptops. How do people feel about these? Use cases?

Wow. Is OpenClaw still alive? Would their users spend so many for the new Mac mini?

I see that my old M1 Mac Mini with 16 GB memory and 1 TB drive has held value over time, selling for $600 to $700.

A new Mac Mini with that much ram and storage costs about double now.

I really want to buy one for coding/dev work, but it's just too expensive. Not sure if the M4 MacBook will get a price cut anytime soon.

Is the "Water Project" intended as a sly dig or some kind of nod to AI water use concerns?

So I guess M5 Pro is better, right?

Not a surprise with John Ternus taking the reigns as CEO in a week, who was previously SVP of hardware engineering.

I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.

price hike makes the deal not so sweet, but still a bang on device

I’m still not convinced by the value of local models. It feels like ray-tracing where we are driving up the compute cost for a high cost and fringe benefit.

I’m not really sure what the end goal is with Apple investing so heavily in local AI hardware.

Feels like they’re doing it for the sake of getting with the times, but why would the average Mac User care? I wonder if this an answer the OpenClaw craze.

glad that i purchased mac studio this January

Very well timed for John Ternus's first quarter.

I'm so sick of "up to 2x faster" ...THAN WHAT? ON WHAT WORKLOAD? How can I reproduce these claims?

I really miss when vendors would run the SPEC benchmark suite and performance was quantitative, and not qualitative.

Upgrading to 48GB memory is $600…. Gut punch. I have a M4 Pro (top cpu skew 14 cores). Any idea the performance gain to M5 Pro? I feel like they holding off releasing M6 Pro because a new studio is dropping soon as well.

hmm waited for this, but the price... puuh

The "up to" and "Yx" compared to three generations ago specs from Apple. Never change.

Sigh. I had the m4 in my cart yesterday and now it is gone.

~75% higher price for some extra GPU power and small CPU boost compared to M4? Eh. It's pretty far from M4's value, which was a no-brainer recommendation for people who wanted a tiny box sitting somewhere on their desk.

So the price just went up by another $100 am I reading that right?

No 8GB option? Oh the horror.

Now if only it would come with Linux instead of MacOS!

Apple's software holds the hardware back, and it's ugly (especially liquid glass!)

Dear mods, please could these announcements be merged, if not done away with? They aren't really following the guidelines, they aren't 'curiosity', these are little more than marketing announcements.