Apple has announced a new generation of Mac mini desktop computers equipped with M6 and M5 Pro processors. The updated devices have received a significant increase in performance in working with local neural networks and AI agents, new wireless communication modules, and support for clustering.
Apple has announced a new generation of Mac mini desktop computers equipped with M6 and M5 Pro processors. The updated devices have received a significant increase in performance in working with local neural networks and AI agents, new wireless communication modules, and support for clustering.
This is stated in the official announcement on the Apple website. Pre-orders for the new computers are already open, and the official start of sales is scheduled for September 22.
The base version of the Mac mini with the M6 chip has a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU. The main technical change is the integration of neural accelerators into each GPU core. According to the manufacturer, this allows you to process artificial intelligence tasks up to four times faster compared to the M4 generation. The base configuration comes with 16 GB of combined memory (expandable to 32 GB) and a bandwidth of 170 GB/s.
The M5 Pro version is aimed at professional workloads: it offers up to 18 CPU cores, 20 GPU cores, and support for up to 64 GB of memory with a bandwidth of 307 GB/s. These characteristics allow you to run complex diffusion models and large language models (LLM) directly on the device without resorting to cloud servers.
Both models feature Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and a 2.5Gb Ethernet port (upgradeable to 10Gb). There are two USB-C ports and an audio jack on the front, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back for the M6 and Thunderbolt 5 for the M5 Pro.
Thunderbolt 5 enables multiple Mac minis to be clustered together to compute large-scale AI models. The devices run macOS 27 with deeply integrated Apple Intelligence and an updated Siri AI assistant.
The previous radical update to the series took place in 2024, when Apple released the Mac mini with M4 and M4 Pro chips. At that time, the company significantly reduced the dimensions of the case, abandoned USB-A ports in favor of USB-C/Thunderbolt, and increased the minimum amount of RAM in the basic versions to 16 GB.
