Apple introduces Mac Studio, Mac Mini, and M6 chips

Apple announced the  Mac Studio, featuring M5 Max and the all-new M5 Ultra, delivering a leap in AI performance and even faster graphics for the most demanding pro workflows. Now featuring up to 4.3x faster AI performance, up to 2x faster storage, up to 1.8x faster graphics, and up to 1.3x faster CPU speed, along with higher memory bandwidth, Mac Studio empowers creatives, developers, AI researchers, data scientists, and more to push the boundaries of what they can do. Mac Studio with M5 Max features an 18-core CPU, an up-to-40-core GPU with Neural Accelerators built into each core, and up to 128GB of unified memory, accelerating complex pro and AI workloads. With the M5 Ultra, Mac Studio scales up to a 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, and a staggering 512GB of unified memory, enabling users to run enormous LLMs entirely on device. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 come to Mac Studio for the first time, while Thunderbolt 5 rounds out its extensive connectivity, so users can take advantage of blazing-fast external storage, PCIe expansion chassis, and powerful hub solutions for the most intense workloads. Thunderbolt 5 also enables multiple Mac Studio systems to be clustered, bringing up to 3x faster performance for distributed AI inference when compared to a single system. The new Mac Studio is available for pre-order starting today, with availability beginning Sept. 22

“Mac Studio is the ultimate desktop for on-device AI and the world’s most demanding pro workflows, relied on by users for its tremendous performance and extensive pro connectivity, all in a quiet, compact design that sits right on your desk — and today, we’re pushing the boundaries even further,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer. “With the powerful M5 Max and the incredible capabilities of M5 Ultra, Mac Studio ushers in a new era of desktop computing, delivering huge performance gains for pro workloads and AI inference with frontier-class models. By integrating Neural Accelerators directly into the GPU and offering massive amounts of high-bandwidth unified memory, the new Mac Studio is our most powerful Mac ever.”

• Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499 (U.S.) and $2,299 (U.S.) for education. Additional configure-to-order options are available at apple.com/mac-studio.

• Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 (U.S.) and $5,099 (U.S.) for education. Additional configure-to-order options are available at apple.com/mac-studio

Apple also announced the new Mac mini with the all-new M6 and M5 Pro, delivering a dramatic boost in performance and even more versatility in its supersmall desktop design. With M6, Mac mini now delivers up to 4x faster AI performance, 2x faster storage and graphics, and 40 percent faster CPU performance. Everything on Mac mini with M6 feels incredibly fast, from everyday productivity tasks to agentic AI workflows. Mac mini with M5 Pro delivers even more pro-level performance to breeze through demanding projects, from video production to game development. Both Mac mini models include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, as well as upgraded 2.5Gb Ethernet, with a 10Gb option available.

• Mac mini with M6 starts at $899 (U.S.) and $799 (U.S.) for education. Additional technical specifications are available at apple.com/mac-mini.
• Mac mini with M5 Pro starts at $1,699 (U.S.) and $1,599 (U.S.) for education. Additional technical specifications are available at apple.com/mac-mini.

Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra for a big leap in performance and AI compute

Apple today debuted M6 in the new Mac mini and M5 Ultra in the new Mac Studio. M6, Apple’s first state-of-the-art 2-nanometer chip, advances every compute block, delivering gains across every dimension of performance. The chip features a larger 12-core CPU complex with the world’s fastest CPU core, a larger 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth. M5 Ultra, the ultimate powerhouse for pro and AI workloads, uses next-generation UltraFusion technology to form a quad-die architecture for the first time in an M-series system on a chip (SoC). The chip includes an up-to-36-core CPU and up-to-80-core GPU with a massive 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth, 50 percent more than M3 Ultra. With their advanced technologies, these SoCs deliver extraordinary compute with industry-leading power efficiency, empowering users to do even more on a desktop.

M6 has a brand-new 12-core CPU complex — two more cores than M5 — that consists of 2 super cores, 4 performance cores, and 6 efficiency cores. It delivers the world’s fastest single-threaded performance and up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance as compared to M5, and up to 2.4x faster than M1.² The super cores blaze through single-threaded workloads, the performance cores use less power and join the super cores to run demanding multithreaded workloads, and the efficiency cores handle everyday background tasks — all with industry-leading performance per watt. As a result, demanding CPU tasks such as editing images, compiling code, indexing new files, and running agentic AI workloads are faster than ever.

M5 Ultra, Apple’s most powerful chip ever, is built for pros who need to speed through workloads that demand maximum CPU and GPU performance and unified memory bandwidth, such as complex 3D rendering, visual effects, scientific analysis, and running compute-intensive frontier AI models on device. M5 Ultra uses UltraFusion to connect two dual-die M5 Max chips to form the quad-die architecture — a first for Apple silicon. UltraFusion increases the inter-die bandwidth to over 4.4TB/s and the connection density by over 6x. Together, these ultra-low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects allow the four dies to behave as a single unified processor. M5 Ultra also features a large up-to-36-core CPU consisting of 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, delivering up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than M3 Ultra.