John Voorhees, reporting for MacStories:

Today, Apple announced a new M6 chip that will debut in the Mac mini and an M5 Ultra that is coming to the Mac Studio. The company also announced an M5 Pro Mac mini and an M5 Max Mac Studio. Let’s take a look at the headline specs.

The headline feature of the M6 chip is that it’s Apple’s first 2-nanometer chip. The chip also includes “a larger 12-core CPU complex with the world’s fastest CPU core, a larger 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth.”

As for the M5 Ultra, which debuts in the Mac Studio, it sounds like a beast. According to Apple, the chip uses a next-generation version of its UltraFusion technology, resulting in a quad-die architecture for the first time in an Apple silicon chip. In addition, the M5 Ultra features an “up-to-36-core CPU and up-to-80-core GPU with a massive 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth, 50 percent more than M3 Ultra.”

Macs featuring the new chips won’t be available immediately. You can preorder both online today for delivery on September 22 with the caveat that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of memory won’t be available until later in October.

Prices have risen too. The Mac mini models are both $100 more than the models they replace, while the M5 Ultra Mac Studio’s base configuration has risen $200. However, the M5 Max Mac Studio’s starting price hasn’t changed.

This is not the first time Apple has announced a new chip architecture ahead of the new iPhone: the M4 was oddly announced in the organic-LED iPad Pro in May 2024 before the A18 and A18 Pro came later that year. I do still find the timing of this announcement to be peculiar, however, because the headline iPhone event is in two weeks. These computers will, in fact, ship four days after the iPhones are expected to. The only reasonable explanation is that Apple didn’t want to clutter the iPhone event with Mac news and also for some reason couldn’t wait until October to announce these new machines, so they came now. But that’s not a satisfying reason. Apple already raised the prices of these machines on June 25, and it has done so again. This is effectively the third price increase the base-model Mac mini has received this year:

  • Late April: The Mac mini with M4, 16 gigabytes of storage, and 256 GB of memory, priced at $600, was discontinued.

  • June 25: That Mac mini returns at $800.

  • Tuesday: That Mac mini is refreshed with an M5 at $900.

This is also the second price increase in two months that the high-end Mac Studio has received — its base price has gone from $4,000 to $5,500 over the summer, a remarkable 37.5 percent increase. So why didn’t Apple do just one price increase and announce the refreshes alongside it? It’s not like I didn’t expect this oddness. From my piece in June:

Apple was, and maybe still is, heavily rumored to announce new high-end MacBooks Pro with organic-LED touchscreens in the fall. But it appears Apple has either gotten into a fight with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company over pricing and/or determined it won’t be able to ship enough units at these updated prices for manufacturing them to be worth it. Either Apple fully delays the new MacBooks Pro to late 2027, which would be truly remarkable as it would be over an 18-month gap between revisions, or it will ship them with M5 Pro and M5 Max processors this fall anyway. It’s undeniable that the price increases — both on the supplier and consumer sides — will have some effect on product timelines in the short term.

My best guess is that even Apple doesn’t know what’s going on, and it just now has enough liberty in its supply chain amidst high demand to release new models. This entire situation is completely un-Apple-like: raising prices three times over a summer, launching new models two weeks before an event, and disturbing the October Mac release cadence. (These computers were due for October.) I would not bet a cent on there being an October press release for new MacBooks Pro — Apple itself probably doesn’t know if it’ll be able to release new computers later this year. Neither would I bet on the prices, configurations, and processor options those Mac laptops will have, if they even come at all. It’s safe to assume, however, that prices will increase further, much like Tuesday’s launch. This situation is a mess.

The M6 and M5 Ultra are the two new processors. The M6 is Apple’s first on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s 2-nanometer process, and it’ll almost certainly be joined by the A20 Pro system-on-a-chip in September. (The A20 is due alongside the base-model iPhones in the spring.) I’m eager to hear about thermal performance and reliability, since TSMC’s initial 3-nm process was a disaster: the M3 and A17 Pro processors notoriously ran warm, and those devices had poor battery life. (I speak from experience; I still have an M3 Max MacBook Pro.) Coupled with the rumors that there may not even be an M6 Pro and M6 Max, I’d really like to know what’s different about the M6. The M6 is Apple’s first to have three core types: efficiency, performance, and super, adopting the revised naming scheme from last year.

The M5 Ultra also has an interesting story: It is Apple’s first “quad” processor, i.e., four Max-level processors fused together. The M1 Ultra fused two M1 Max processors using UltraFusion, a high-speed interconnect Apple is again using in the M5 Ultra. After the M1 Ultra’s launch — but before the disappointing Apple silicon Mac Pro refresh — it was widely rumored that Apple was working on combining two M1 Ultra processors to form an “M1 Extreme” to power the Mac Pro or iMac Pro. That project was eventually cancelled, and the Mac Pro shipped only with an M2 Ultra before being discontinued in favor of the Mac Studio. The M5 Ultra is the spiritual successor to that project and is, without a doubt, the most capable Mac Apple has ever released. Top-end versions cost upward of $18,000 — and those models don’t even have 512 GB of memory.

Some takeaways as we head into iPhone season:

  1. As I predicted earlier in the summer, Apple’s supply chain and product release cycles are fully disrupted. I would say the fate of the high-end MacBooks Pro is unknown. I would not bet on the 512 GB Mac Studio becoming available in October, either.

  2. Desktop Macs are price-prohibitive for normal consumers, and I expect that trend to continue as the Mac laptops — all three — are refreshed over the next year. $900 for a 256 GB Mac mini is patently absurd. It has been a long time since I called a Mac overpriced, but most Macs on sale this fall are indeed overpriced. It is not a good time to want a new computer.

  3. I wouldn’t rule out further price increases, supply shortages, and product timeline uncertainty. This feels to me like it’s only the beginning — and that it will serve as one of John Ternus’ most pressing challenges as incoming chief executive.