Apple has unveiled its latest Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops, placing a stronger emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), agentic workflows and high-performance computing while retaining the compact form factors of the company’s desktop lineup.
The new Mac mini is powered by Apple’s new M6 chip, with a higher-performance M5 Pro option available for users handling more demanding workloads.
Apple said the Mac mini with M6 delivers up to four times faster AI performance, twice the storage and graphics performance, and 40% faster CPU performance compared with the previous generation.
The company said the performance improvements are designed to accelerate everything from everyday productivity to agentic AI workflows, where AI systems can perform tasks with greater autonomy.
Apple is also positioning the Mac mini for business applications, including use as a primary desktop or as an always-on, deskside computing system for agentic workloads.
The M5 Pro version is aimed at more demanding professional applications, including video production and game development.
Both Mac mini models feature Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, alongside upgraded 2.5Gb Ethernet, with a 10Gb Ethernet option available.
Apple said the new Mac mini will also benefit from the capabilities of macOS 27, representing a major upgrade for both existing Mac users and those moving to the platform.
Alongside the Mac mini, Apple introduced a new Mac Studio powered by the M5 Max and new M5 Ultra chips, targeting creatives, developers, AI researchers, data scientists and other professional users with intensive computing requirements.
Apple said the new Mac Studio delivers up to 4.3 times faster AI performance, twice the storage performance, up to 1.8 times faster graphics and up to 1.3 times faster CPU performance, alongside higher memory bandwidth.
The M5 Max configuration features an 18-core CPU, up to a 40-core GPU with Neural Accelerators built into each core and up to 128GB of unified memory.
The M5 Ultra takes performance further with up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU and 512GB of unified memory.
The large memory capacity is particularly significant for AI developers and researchers, with Apple saying it enables users to run enormous large language models (LLMs) entirely on the device.
This reflects Apple’s broader push to position its desktop hardware as capable of handling increasingly sophisticated AI workloads locally rather than relying entirely on cloud computing resources.
The new Mac Studio also brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 to the platform for the first time, while Thunderbolt 5 provides connectivity for high-speed external storage, PCIe expansion chassis and other professional peripherals.
Apple said Thunderbolt 5 also allows multiple Mac Studio systems to be clustered, delivering up to three times faster performance for distributed AI inference compared with a single system.
The company is pitching the Mac Studio alongside the Studio Display and Studio Display XDR as a high-end professional desktop setup.
The launch highlights the growing importance of AI acceleration in Apple’s desktop strategy, with the company increasingly marketing its processors not only around conventional CPU and graphics performance but also their ability to handle AI workloads.
For developers and professional users, the combination of dedicated AI acceleration, high unified-memory capacities and local processing could make the latest Mac Studio particularly suited to workloads involving AI model development, inference and other data-intensive applications.
The new Mac mini and Mac Studio will be available for pre-order from Aug 27, with both models scheduled to begin reaching customers from Sept 22.
