Mac Mini M6 Hits Store Shelves This Week With New 2nm Speed in the Same Tiny Box and a Higher Asking Price

Apple’s smallest desktop computer reaches store shelves this week after early reviews that call the M6 model a fast, quiet machine that still fits in the palm of a hand. Reviewers who spent days with Mac Mini review units describe a familiar five-inch-square aluminum case that measures two inches tall and weighs about a pound and a half. That same compact shape from the last redesign lets the computer sit behind a monitor, tuck under a desk, or serve as an always-on box for light work and local AI tasks.

The front ports feature two USB-C connectors and a headphone jack, while the back contains three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, 2.5-gigabit Ethernet, and a power plug. An M5 Pro variant replaces the fast Thunderbolt connectors with even faster Thunderbolt 5 connections and can include 10-gigabit Ethernet. Standard features include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Reviewers noted that the power button remains on the bottom, which might be inconvenient if the computer is crammed into a tight position, and they still want for an SD card port. The built-in speakers receive decent grades for being good enough to notify you of something going on, but not much more.

Apple’s first 2-nanometer Mac chipset introduces new silicon. The M6 has a 12-core CPU, divided into two super-strong cores, four high-performing cores, and six super-economical cores, as well as a 12-core GPU. Basic configurations start with 16 GB of unified memory and 256 GB of storage, with choices ranging up to 32 GB of memory. The memory bandwidth in the higher-end variants reaches an astonishing 170 GB per second. Storage reads and writes now complete nearly twice as quickly as the previous generation. One reviewer got a single-core score of roughly 4,700 on the Geekbench test and a multi-core result of around 21,400, indicating a significant improvement over the M4 Mini. Another person completed a 4K video export in under 2 minutes and 34 seconds. Local language model development resulted in significant increases, with Apple claiming more than thirteen times the speed of an M1 system for any given activity.

An M5 Pro option starts at $1,699 and includes a significant upgrade to an 18-core CPU, a 20-core GPU, 64 GB of RAM, and increased bandwidth. Reviewers who evaluated both computers stated the M6 could perform everyday tasks like photo editing, video chats, and light creative work with ease, while the Pro version provides some extra headroom for more intensive tasks like batch editing, heavy rendering, and larger models. Gaming remained viable at 1080p on default settings in games such as Cyberpunk 2077, with frame rates around 55. The supporters were quiet for the most part.

The pricing was the main topic of discussion among all reviewers. The M6 starts at $899, a $300 increase over the M4’s original MSRP for comparable memory and storage. Adding more memory and storage will just increase that bill. Several reviewers stated that the higher price reflects this year’s larger memory shortages, and that the Mini remains the most cheap way to get your hands on a recent Mac desktop. They also mentioned that upgrading from a 256 GB base disk to 512 GB or more makes a lot of sense for most individuals. One reviewer put it bluntly: the computer is still quite powerful; it’s simply not as inexpensive as before.