Apple Mac mini (M6 or M5 Pro)

• Apple announced the new Mac mini by press release on 25 August 2026, with no keynote; pre-orders opened the same day and the machine is "Available starting 9.22"^{[1][3][5][6][7]}
• U.S. pricing starts at $899 for the M6 ($799 education) and $1,699 for the M5 Pro ($1,599 education); the base M6 is 16GB/256GB, a $100 increase over the previous base configuration, which had started at $599 before June price rises took it to $799^[1][5][6]
• Apple's launch video calls it "five by five inches of pure power and performance" and closes "Pre-order now. Available starting 9/22", and Johny Srouji is quoted saying "Mac mini has always been our most versatile Mac", with Apple positioning it for "always-on, deskside agentic computing"^[1][7]
• Apple's buy page lists six pre-order configurations - four M6 (16GB/256GB, 16GB/512GB, 24GB/512GB, 32GB/1TB) and two M5 Pro (15-core/24GB/512GB and 18-core/64GB/1TB) - without showing prices^[3]; 9to5Mac's Overtime episode 079 of 28 August 2026 compares the outgoing M4 $899 mini with the new M6 model^[4]

Notable features

• Compact silver desktop 5.0 inches (12.7 cm) square and 2.0 inches (5.0 cm) tall, weighing 1.5 pounds (0.67 kg) with M6 or 1.6 pounds (0.73 kg) with M5 Pro; two USB-C ports (up to 10Gb/s) and a headphone jack on the front, and on the back HDMI, Ethernet and three Thunderbolt 4 (M6) or Thunderbolt 5 (M5 Pro, up to 120Gb/s) ports^[2]
• The M6 has a 12-core CPU (two more cores than before), a 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators in every core (a first on Mac mini) and a dual 16-core Neural Engine, for up to 4x faster AI, 2x faster graphics and storage and a 40 percent faster CPU than the M4 model; 16GB unified memory configurable to 32GB at up to 170GB/s^[1][5][6][7]
• 9to5Mac adds that the M6 is Apple's first 2nm chip - 2 super cores, 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores - with 170GB/s bandwidth against 153GB/s on M5 and 120GB/s on M4, and that Apple's own benchmarks claim up to 13.5x faster LM Studio prompt processing than M1 (4.8x vs M4)^[6]
• The M5 Pro option offers up to an 18-core CPU and 20-core GPU with up to 64GB of unified memory^[1][5][6]; MacRumors lists two configurations (15-core CPU/16-core GPU and 18-core CPU/20-core GPU) and up to 8TB of storage, while 9to5Mac puts M5 Pro memory bandwidth at 307GB/s and its AI gain at up to 8.5x an M2 Pro (4x an M4 Pro)^[5][6]
• Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and 2.5Gb Ethernet are standard with a 10Gb option, and it ships with macOS 27 and Siri AI; MacRumors adds that the design is unchanged from the 2024 models, silver only, with Thunderbolt 4 on the M6, Thunderbolt 5 on the M5 Pro and support for up to three external displays^[1][5][6]