Apple's 14-inch MacBook Pro has a new chip and a new price tag in India. The M6 model starts at Rs 2,39,900, a jump of Rs 70,000 over the Rs 1,69,900 that the M5 version launched at a year ago. Students and educators get a discount, paying Rs 2,27,900.
Part of that price increase comes with a spec bump Apple isn't shy about mentioning: the base configuration now ships with 1TB of storage, double what the M5 model offered at launch. Unified memory still starts at 16GB, configurable up to 32GB, with memory bandwidth of up to 170GB/s.
Pre-orders open October 28 at 10:40 PM IST through Apple's website and the Apple Store app. The laptop goes on sale November 6 at Apple Stores and authorised resellers in India, in Space Black and Silver.
What the M6 chip actually changes
The M6 is built on a 2nm process, with a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, two more cores apiece than the M5. Apple says the new GPU is up to 30 percent faster at graphics tasks and 25 percent faster at certain AI workloads than the outgoing chip. There's also a new Dual 16-core Neural Engine that Apple claims runs up to 1.9 times faster than the M5's.
Apple is pointing specifically at creative workloads to justify the jump: up to 30 percent faster ray-tracing in Blender and around 25 percent quicker project compiling in Xcode, according to the company's own figures. Independent benchmarks aren't out yet, so those numbers haven't been checked outside Apple's labs.
For anyone mostly browsing, emailing or writing documents, none of this will feel urgent. It matters more to people editing 4K or 8K footage, working with large Photoshop files, or running AI models locally on the machine rather than in the cloud.
Same screen, new radios
Apple hasn't touched the physical design. The 14-inch Liquid Retina XDR display still hits up to 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness, with the optional nano-texture finish carried over for people working under bright lights. The 12MP Center Stage camera, the six-speaker system with Spatial Audio, and the three-microphone array are all unchanged from the M5 generation.
What has changed is wireless connectivity. The M6 MacBook Pro supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, an upgrade over the M5 model's radios, though the benefit depends on having a router or peripherals that support the newer standards. Wired connectivity stays at three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, a headphone jack and MagSafe 3, with support for up to two external displays.
Battery life is rated at up to 24 hours, the same figure Apple quoted for the M5 model, with a 96W USB-C adapter able to charge the battery to 50 percent in roughly 30 minutes.
The laptop ships with macOS 27, which Apple calls Golden Gate, bringing a more capable Siri that can pull context from supported apps to help with writing and cross-app tasks, along with smarter tab handling and change alerts in Safari.
For anyone still on an Intel Mac or an M1, Apple's pitch is straightforward: this is a real leap. For M4 or newer owners, the case for paying an extra Rs 70,000 is thinner, and will likely stay that way until reviewers get hands-on time before the November 6 sale date.
CDFiled by The Computing Desk
Laptops, desktops, processors, graphics cards and the operating systems that run on them.
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