Apple Launches Its First-Ever 2nm Chip: the Mini M6

Apple has updated one of its fan favorites, the Mac Mini, with its first processor built on a 2nm process: the M6 chip.

The M6 has a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, with a Neural Accelerator in each GPU core. Apple says this design gives the Mac Mini up to 300% faster AI performance and 2x faster graphics than the previous M4 model.

The company announced the new model on Tuesday, with preorders opening immediately and shipments beginning September 22. The Mac Mini now starts at $899 for the M6 version or $1,699 for the version containing the M5 Pro, which was introduced earlier this year.

Apple also refreshed its Mac Studio with its M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips. The new M5 Ultra has up to 36 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores. It also includes a 32-core Neural Engine and supports up to 512GB of memory with 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth.

The refreshed Mac Studio also features Thunderbolt 5 ports with up to 120Gb/s bandwidth, Wi‑Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and a next-gen PCIe Gen 6 SSD that is up to 2× faster. Multiple Mac Studio systems can connect using Thunderbolt 5 to work together, which Apple says could help meet growing demand for local AI workloads.

The Mac Studio starts at $2,499 for the M5 Max version and $5,499 for the M5 Ultra version.