Apple announced a new Mac mini on Tuesday with M6 chip and one with M5 Pro (skipping M5). Pre-orders are open now, with the desktop arriving September 22. The news comes on the heels of a rumoured Mac mini refresh reported by Mark Gurman last night, and yup the reporting was right again.
The Canadian starting price is $1,249 for the M6 model with 256GB storage and $2,399 for the M5 Pro, with education pricing at $1,109 and $2,259 respectively. That’s a notable jump over the outgoing M4 model (which started at $799 CAD with 256GB), while the last time the M4 Pro started at $1,899 CAD. Gone are the days of a cheap, affordable Mac mini.
“Mac mini has always been our most versatile Mac,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, who framed the update around the machine’s growing role as an always-on box for agentic AI work rather than just a desk computer.
The M6 version gets a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, two more cores each than the M4 it replaces. The bigger deal is that every GPU core now has a Neural Accelerator, which is a first for the Mac mini, and Apple claims that pushes AI performance up to four times faster than the M4 model. Graphics and storage are both up to twice as fast, and CPU performance is up 40 percent. Memory starts at 16GB and tops out at 32GB, with bandwidth up to 170GB/s.
Step up to M5 Pro and you get up to an 18-core CPU, up to a 20-core GPU with third-generation ray tracing, and up to 64GB of unified memory running at 307GB/s. Apple is pitching this one at video rendering, app development, and scientific work, plus running larger local models than the M6 can handle.
One detail that will interest anyone running models at home: the M5 Pro model has three Thunderbolt 5 ports, and Apple says you can cluster multiple Mac minis together to run large AI models entirely on device. The M6 model sticks with three Thunderbolt 4 ports instead.
Both configurations move to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and Ethernet is now 2.5Gb as standard with a 10Gb option available. The front still has two USB-C ports and a headphone jack, and the back adds HDMI alongside the Thunderbolt and Ethernet ports. Apple also added genlock support over USB-C for syncing a display with a camera, iPhone 17 Pro included.
The desktop ships with macOS 27 Golden Gate, which brings Siri AI and the next round of Apple Intelligence features. That update arrives as a free download this fall, says Apple.
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