Apple's New Mac Mini Arrives With M6 and M5 Pro, and It's Leaning Hard Into On-Device AI

Apple has announced a new Mac mini, and this time there are two chips to pick from. The standard model runs the new M6, while a step-up version gets the more powerful M5 Pro for people who need the extra muscle. Pre-orders are open today, with the machines shipping later in September.

The theme running through the whole launch is AI. Apple is pushing the mini as an "always-on agentic" desktop, meaning it's built to sit on your desk and run AI models locally, all day. It's a notable change in how Apple talks about this machine, which for years was simply the small, affordable Mac. Now it's being positioned as a compact AI workstation, and most of the upgrades here are pointed squarely at that goal.

Specifications

The M6 mini runs a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU. The new bit is that every GPU core now packs Neural Accelerators, a first for the mini, and Apple is quoting up to 4x faster AI performance and 2x faster graphics over the M4. There's also a Dual 16-core Neural Engine. Memory starts at 16GB, stretches to 32GB, and bandwidth tops out at 170GB/s. You get three Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back, which is where I'd start grumbling, because the cheaper model missing out on Thunderbolt 5 feels like a line drawn purely to protect the Pro.

The M5 Pro is the one doing the heavy lifting, and it's genuinely interesting. Up to an 18-core CPU, a 20-core GPU with third-gen ray tracing, and up to 64GB of unified memory at 307GB/s. It also gets Thunderbolt 5, which lets you cluster several minis together to run large AI models locally across them. That last bit is the one feature here I'd actually call clever, since it turns a pile of small desktops into something a developer or a research lab could genuinely use, rather than just another spec on a comparison chart.

Both models finally move to Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and 2.5Gb Ethernet, with a 10Gb option if you want it. Two USB-C ports and a headphone jack sit up front. macOS 27 arrives this fall with Siri AI and the next round of Apple Intelligence features, and I'll believe those improve daily life when I see them, because Apple Intelligence has a habit of looking better in the keynote than it does two weeks after launch.

Price and availability

Pre-orders open today, August 25, with units landing September 22. The M6 mini starts at INR 99,900, or INR 88,900 for education. The M5 Pro model starts at INR 2,09,900, or INR 1,97,900 for education.

That INR 99,900 sticker still makes the M6 mini the most sensible door into a Mac, but only on paper, because the moment you add a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse, the cheap-Mac fantasy quietly falls apart. The leap to INR 2,09,900 for the M5 Pro is steep enough that nobody should buy it on a whim. That one's for people who can name the exact workflow that needs the extra cores and Thunderbolt 5, and if you can't, you're paying a lot for headroom you'll never touch. And I'd treat the 4x AI numbers with real suspicion until independent benchmarks show up, because Apple lined those up against the M1, not the M4 that most upgraders are actually leaving behind.