Apple on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026, introduced M6 — its first 2-nanometer Apple silicon — in a new Mac mini, and M5 Ultra — the first quad-die M-series chip — in a new Mac Studio. Both machines are available for preorder and begin arriving to customers on Sept. 22, Apple said in Newsroom releases.

"Today, we're debuting the next giant leap in performance and AI compute for Apple silicon with the incredibly advanced M6 and the most powerful M-series chip yet, M5 Ultra," said Sri Santhanam, Apple's vice president of Silicon Engineering Group, in the chip announcement. "Built using the cutting-edge 2 nm process, M6 combines a new CPU complex, two additional CPU and GPU cores, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and more unified memory bandwidth to power through workloads with amazing energy efficiency."

Apple's M6 specs, as published: a 12-core CPU (2 super, 4 performance, 6 efficiency), a 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators in each core, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth. M5 Ultra uses next-generation UltraFusion to join two dual-die M5 Max chips into a four-die SoC, with up to a 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, up to 512GB of unified memory, and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth — 50 percent more than M3 Ultra, Apple said.

The Mac mini pitch is the small box as an AI appliance. "Mac mini has always been our most versatile Mac," said Johny Srouji, Apple's chief hardware officer. "With a more powerful CPU and graphics, Neural Accelerators in the GPU, and higher memory bandwidth, Mac mini with M6 delivers a whole new level of AI performance." Apple claims up to 4x faster AI performance versus Mac mini with M4, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and 2.5Gb Ethernet (10Gb optional). Mac mini with M6 starts at $899 in the U.S.; Mac mini with M5 Pro starts at $1,699.

Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra is the desk-side claim for "enormous LLMs entirely on device," Apple wrote. The Studio release says M5 Max brings an 18-core CPU and up to a 40-core GPU with up to 128GB of unified memory; M5 Ultra scales to the 36-core / 80-core / 512GB configuration. Thunderbolt 5 can cluster multiple Studios for distributed AI inference. Availability also begins Sept. 22. Pricing in Apple's Studio release starts at $2,499 for M5 Max configurations; third-party coverage put the M5 Ultra starting price at $5,499.

Those performance multiples are Apple's own lab numbers from July and August 2026 testing, not independent benchmarks. What Apple is selling ahead of the Sept. 9 iPhone event is silicon and SKUs: a 2nm chip in the cheapest desktop form factor, and a four-die Ultra aimed at people who want to keep large models off someone else's cloud. Shipping day is Sept. 22. The marketing claim is on-device AI. The receipt is a preorder.

Sources