Apple has announced two new processors, the M6 and the M5 Ultra, alongside refreshed Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops built around them. The Verge reports that the machines are already available for preorder directly from Apple.
The M6 is Apple's first 2nm chip, with a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU and up to 32GB of unified memory. Apple claims it delivers "the world's fastest single-threaded performance," according to The Verge.
The M5 Ultra is the headline part. Apple calls it the company's "most powerful chip ever," and told Engadget it uses a quad-die 3nm architecture — "a first for Apple silicon" — with inter-die bandwidth above 4.4TB/s, scaling to a 36-core CPU and an 80-core GPU. Engadget frames it as a chip for running AI models and 8K video work.
On the hardware side, Apple says the new Mac mini offers up to 4x faster AI performance and up to 2x faster graphics, starting at $899 with the M6 and $1,699 with the M5 Pro, which also adds Neural Accelerators, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and faster Ethernet, per Firstpost. The Mac Studio moves to the M5 Max and M5 Ultra, with up to 4.3x faster AI performance and up to 512GB of unified memory, starting at $2,499. Wired notes the M6 Mac mini carries a $200 price bump.
The pitch is local AI. "With these frameworks and new chips, developers can run and fine-tune large AI models locally on their Mac," Apple said, as reported by CNBC. The Motley Fool casts this as evidence of a "capital-light" AI strategy — Apple selling AI capability as hardware rather than pouring money into data centers.
Why it matters: if serious AI work can run on a desktop you own, the industry's assumption that AI must live in someone else's cloud starts to look less inevitable.