Apple updates Mac mini with M6, claims up to 4x faster AI performance
- Mac mini with M6 has a 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators in every core and a Dual 16-core Neural Engine; Apple claims up to 4x faster AI performance than the M4 Mac mini.
- Apple says M6 processes LLM prompts in LM Studio up to 13.5x faster than M1 and up to 4.8x faster than M4, with 16GB unified memory standard and configurations up to 32GB.
- The M6 model has a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU, up to 170GB/s memory bandwidth, and Apple claims 40 percent faster CPU performance plus up to 2x faster graphics and storage than M4.
- The M5 Pro Mac mini reaches up to an 18-core CPU and 20-core GPU for video production, game development, and other demanding workloads.
- Both models add Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, standard 2.5Gb Ethernet, and an optional 10Gb Ethernet port; pre-orders begin August 25 and availability starts September 22.
Hacker News opinions
I feel like this is an emotional goodbye to the cheap Mac mini. They were great family machines and closet build servers, but more than €1,000 for an M6 with 16GB and 256GB breaks a real psychological barrier.
Once you adjust for inflation, the difference from the old cheap Minis is smaller than the sticker price suggests. It is probably still more expensive, though.
Amazon cancelled my M4 order just after Apple discontinued it. It would have cost me about £600 after exchange rates, and I cannot justify more than double that for what looks like marginal improvement.
Over €1,000 for 16GB and 256GB is simply a bad deal.
Seeing Apple cite Cyberpunk 2077 ray tracing performance makes me wonder if it finally cares more about gaming. I have been considering trying it on my M3 Pro.
Apple includes game metrics because customers care about games, but that has never translated into Apple actually caring about Mac gaming. I do not understand why, but that has been true for a long time.
I play quite a few games on my Mac mini through CrossOver, though rarely demanding ones. Improvements in Game Porting Toolkit sometimes make their way into CrossOver and help performance.
Cyberpunk 2077 stays at 60 fps and looks great on my M1 Max with 64GB. I stopped using my RTX 4090 for it after getting REDmod working on macOS, partly to save power, but Apple dropping eGPU support was a major disappointment.
Apple seems to care about gaming up to the point where it would need to do something substantial. I would not expect a Proton-style compatibility layer anytime soon.
What I miss from these benchmarks is an M6 versus M5 Pro comparison. Apple comparing Excel to an M1 does not tell me much when the real delay in my work is not Excel calculation.
Manufacturer benchmarks are marketing. I will wait for independent reviews.
The M5 Pro has nearly twice the M6 memory bandwidth, 307GB/s versus 170GB/s, and supports up to 64GB unified memory instead of 32GB. That matters for AI inference.
I paid $499 for a base M4 with the education discount in April because I expected the next base model to cost more. Going from $599 to $899 is steep, even if DIMMs, GPUs, and SSDs are all more expensive now.
I am glad I bought the base M4 for $499 and a 1TB replacement drive for $199. It feels like I caught the last train before pricing changed.
Standard 2.5GbE is nice, but desktop Macs had gigabit Ethernet more than 20 years ago. I also want to know which 2.5GbE chipset Apple used, and there is still no SFP option.