Apple spent Tuesday updating two of its least glamorous Macs. The entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro and the iMac both move to the M6 chip, Apple's first processor built on a 2nm manufacturing process, arriving a day before the company's "Pro and Tell" event in Los Angeles, where a MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen is expected to make its debut.
The M6 MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 with 16GB of unified memory and 1TB of storage, the same starting price as last year's M5 model. Bumping memory to 24GB costs $2,199, and 32GB brings it to $2,399. Storage upgrades got pricier this round: 2TB now adds $500 and 4TB adds $1,500, which The Verge attributes to the ongoing memory shortage rattling the industry. Education pricing starts at $1,899.
The chip itself packs a 12-core CPU, up from 10 cores on the M5, paired with a 12-core GPU that has a Neural Accelerator built into every core and a dual 16-core Neural Engine for on-device AI tasks. Apple says the M6 delivers up to 30% faster graphics and 25% faster AI workloads than the M5, with multithreaded performance up roughly 1.2 to 1.3 times over its predecessor, according to the company. Apple also claims the chip processes LLM prompts up to 13 times faster than the original M1 MacBook Pro, though none of that has been independently verified.
Memory bandwidth climbs to 170GB/s from 153GB/s on the M5. The laptop keeps its existing design, 12-megapixel Center Stage camera and Liquid Retina XDR display, but finally gets Apple's N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, a feature previously reserved for pricier MacBook Pro configurations with the M5 Pro or M5 Max. Ports are unchanged: three Thunderbolt 4, MagSafe 3, full-size HDMI, an SDXC card slot and a headphone jack. Apple says the laptop supports fast charging to 50% in 30 minutes with a compatible adapter and quotes 24 hours of battery life.
The iMac gets the same chip, more colors
The M6 iMac starts at $1,499 ($1,449 for education) with a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, or $1,699 ($1,599 for education) for the full 12-core chip. It keeps its 24-inch 4.5K Retina display and seven color options: blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange and silver. Port count still depends on which chip you pick, with two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the base configuration and four on the higher one, and both versions now add a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port alongside the new Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support. Apple says the M6 iMac handles on-device AI tasks up to five times faster than the M4 model it replaces.
Both machines run macOS 27 and ship with Apple Intelligence and the newer Siri features built in. Neither got a redesign, which tracks with how Apple has treated its base MacBook Pro and iMac lines for the past few years: new chip, same shell, repeat.
Preorders for the M6 MacBook Pro and iMac open October 28 at 10:10 a.m. Pacific, with units shipping starting November 6. Apple's event on Wednesday is expected to bring the bigger reveal, a MacBook Pro built around an OLED touchscreen, which would be the more significant hardware shift this week.
CDFiled by The Computing Desk
Laptops, desktops, processors, graphics cards and the operating systems that run on them.
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