Apple has announced updated versions of its Mac mini and Mac Studio desktop computers, featuring new M6 and M5 Ultra chips. The company stated that these refreshed models are specifically designed to support local AI inference and software development, building on their existing popularity for such tasks.
The Mac mini and Mac Studio have gained traction among hobbyists and professional developers for local AI inference and machine learning workflows. This is attributed to their unified memory architecture and the performance of their system-on-a-chip (SoC) CPUs and GPUs. This trend became particularly pronounced after the release of macOS 26.2 in December, which introduced "low-latency communication between Thunderbolt 5 hosts for use cases including distributed AI inference using MLX." Thunderbolt 5 is a high-speed wired data connection, while MLX is an open-source array framework designed to leverage the M-series chips' unified memory for machine learning. Developers have been daisy-chaining these devices to run larger local large language models (LLMs), offering an alternative to specialised hardware typically featuring Nvidia GPUs.
The new M6 chip, central to the updated Mac mini, marks Apple's first 2nm chip in the M-series. It features a 12-core CPU, comprising two "super cores," four performance cores, and six efficiency cores—making it the first Apple SoC to integrate all three core types. While verifiable benchmarks are not yet available, Apple claims the M6 can deliver up to 40 per cent faster multi-threaded CPU performance compared to the M4 chip. The M6 also includes a 12-core GPU, an increase of two cores from its immediate predecessors, and supports faster unified memory with up to 160GB per second of bandwidth. Memory capacity for the M6 is capped at 32GB.
For the updated Mac Studio, Apple is introducing the M5 Ultra, which the company describes as its most powerful chip for demanding workloads, particularly AI. This chip supports a maximum memory capacity of 512GB and boasts up to 1.2TB per second in unified memory bandwidth. Functionally, the M5 Ultra integrates the equivalent of two M5 Max chips onto a single SoC, resulting in 36 CPU cores (12 super, 24 performance) and 80 GPU cores. This configuration is positioned by Apple as optimal for local AI inference, although it also benefits other high-demand applications such as gaming and 3D graphics.
The optimisation for local AI inference addresses a growing need within the developer community. While powerful frontier LLMs and tools like Claude Code or Codex have led to increased adoption of AI coding agents, the operational costs of cloud-based models can be substantial. The ability to run open-weight models, such as recent Qwen and DeepSeek iterations, locally provides a cost-effective alternative, leveraging the user's own compute resources. Current standard consumer hardware, however, often lacks the capacity to run sufficiently large models for a fully local development workflow, making the enhanced capabilities of the new Mac mini and Mac Studio significant for developers aiming to shift away from cloud reliance.
Beyond AI-specific enhancements, the new desktops include standard upgrades. Both models feature Apple's N1 chip, providing support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Storage performance is claimed to be up to twice as fast, reaching 15GB/s. The Mac mini now ships with 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard, with an option to upgrade to 10Gb Ethernet.
Pricing for the Mac mini with an M6 chip starts at $899 (approximately £700) with 16GB of memory. Configurations with an M5 Pro chip begin at $1,699 (approximately £1,320). The Mac Studio with an M5 Max chip starts at $2,499 (approximately £1,940), while M5 Ultra configurations are available from $5,499 (approximately £4,270). Prices can increase significantly with custom configurations.
Pre-orders are open from today, with shipping commencing on 22nd September. However, the 512GB memory configuration for the Mac Studio is expected to ship in late October. Apple also indicated that the devices will ship with macOS 27 Golden Gate, suggesting its broader release for other Mac users may coincide.
