New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

So happy with my base M4 purchase for $499 when it released. I even snagged a 1TB replacement drive for $199 a year ago. Feels like I got the last train out.

It's a bit of an emotional goodbye to the super cheap Mac Minis we got to enjoy for a while. I got some for family members, we had some serving as iOS/macOS build servers sitting in a closet at my last job, they were fantastic.

Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.

> for always-on agentic computing

Don’t know, but this as main ad headline feels almost like a threat to my personal home computing needs

What I am missing in all of those benchmarks, how does the M6 compares to the M5 Pro.

I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.

I am to only one?

After watching a video about how the filesystems are > 2x faster (and testing this myself in my mac mini vs a linux machine), I feel like Apple is leaving a lot on the table, and I hope that they get APFS to be as fast as the linux filesystems.

Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.

I see that my old M1 Mac Mini with 16 GB memory and 1 TB drive has held value over time, selling for $600 to $700.

A new Mac Mini with that much ram and storage costs about double now.

Do we need a 3rd top level discussion on this?

The M-chips are insanely powerful. So powerful for my regular use that I'm still on M1-generated devices and don't really need to update. Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade.

As a disclaimer though, I haven't even tried to really run local models on the M1 as I also have a 'gaming PC' that can run them fine.

> Up to 2x faster gaming performance with ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition when compared to Mac mini with M4.

Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?

And while i'm at it, I was wondering a few weeks ago if I should try this game on my M3 pro. Anyone has played it on Apple and has feedback ?

Double the price of the base m4 mac mini in February :(

(it was late in it's lifecycle and there were frequent sales)

2.5Gbe as standard is nice.

Is the "Water Project" intended as a sly dig or some kind of nod to AI water use concerns?

Which is more important for AI/LLM stuff, the number of GPU cores or the amount of unified memory? I can choose from a Mini with the M5 Pro 18CPU/30GPU and 64GB RAM or a Studio with a M5 Max 18CPU/40GPU and 48GB RAM for roughly the same price

Related? "Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line" june 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676795 380 comments

I will buy a Mac mini, 64GB RAM + 2TB. That will replace my current MBP M1 Pro with 16GB (4 years old). For serious upgrade I will wait the M7 Line.

Very well timed for John Ternus's first quarter.

glad that i purchased mac studio this January

Wow. Is OpenClaw still alive? Would their users spend so many for the new Mac mini?

I really want to buy one for coding/dev work, but it's just too expensive. Not sure if the M4 MacBook will get a price cut anytime soon.

~75% higher price for some extra GPU power and small CPU boost compared to M4? Eh. It's pretty far from M4's value, which was a no-brainer recommendation for people who wanted a tiny box sitting somewhere on their desk.

I'm so sick of "up to 2x faster" ...THAN WHAT? ON WHAT WORKLOAD? How can I reproduce these claims?

I really miss when vendors would run the SPEC benchmark suite and performance was quantitative, and not qualitative.

So I guess M5 Pro is better, right?

Now if only it would come with Linux instead of MacOS!

Apple's software holds the hardware back, and it's ugly (especially liquid glass!)

Upgrading to 48GB memory is $600…. Gut punch. I have a M4 Pro (top cpu skew 14 cores). Any idea the performance gain to M5 Pro? I feel like they holding off releasing M6 Pro because a new studio is dropping soon as well.

Not a surprise with John Ternus taking the reigns as CEO in a week, who was previously SVP of hardware engineering.

I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.

The "up to" and "Yx" compared to three generations ago specs from Apple. Never change.

No 8GB option? Oh the horror.

So the price just went up by another $100 am I reading that right?