Apple announces new M6 Mac mini and M5 Ultra Mac Studio

Well, that was fast. A day after rumors broke that Apple was preparing new Mac devices for release, the company announced it’s refreshing its desktop computer lineup. Today, the company surprise-announced a new Mac mini with the new M6 chip and a Mac Studio with the new M5 Ultra chip, its most powerful processor yet.

The new chips offer “the next giant leap in performance and AI compute,” said Sri Santhanam, Apple’s vice president of Silicon Engineering Group, in a press release. Both Macs come in a second configuration with the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, respectively.

The M6 Mac mini has a Dual 16-core Neural Engine that offers up to twice the performance of older Mac minis to power through everyday on-device AI tasks. It starts at $899 with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The M5 Pro version starts at $1,699. This year, Mac mini desktops have become a popular choice for people running AI agents, and the devices have sometimes been hard to find in stock.

The M5 Ultra Mac Studio has up to a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU with up to a whopping 512GB of unified memory. Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, billed it as “the ultimate desktop for on-device AI and the world’s most demanding pro workflows.” It starts at $5,499 with a 30-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 36GB of memory plus 512GB of storage. The new M5 Max Mac Studio starts at $2,499.

Both new desktops are available for preorder ahead of their Aug. 22 launch.

These announcements come ahead of Apple’s annual September hardware event, where the company is expected to unveil the iPhone 18 series, a new foldable iPhone, updated smart home devices, and new Apple Watches.

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