Chips & Hardware
Apple unveils 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 chip
Apple unveiled a new 14-inch MacBook Pro and a new iMac, both powered by its M6 chip, with the MacBook Pro starting at $1,999 and the iMac at $1,499.
The announcement came Tuesday, a day before Apple’s “Pro and Tell” event and two days after the company revealed a new iPad mini. Apple describes the M6 as built around a 12-core CPU with what it calls the world’s fastest CPU core, paired with a 12-core GPU; against the M5 chip, the company claims graphics performance gains of as much as 30% and AI-workload gains of as much as 25%. On raw language-model performance, Apple says the M6 processes prompts up to 13 times faster than the original M1 MacBook Pro and 1.3 times faster than the M5 model.
The new MacBook Pro ships with 24 hours of battery life, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and a 12-megapixel camera carried over from earlier models. It starts with 16GB of unified memory, configurable up to 32GB, with memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s — up from 153GB/s on the M5 version — and supports fast charging to 50% in 30 minutes with a compatible high-wattage USB-C adapter. Ports include HDMI, MagSafe 3, three Thunderbolt 4 connections, an SDXC card slot and a headphone jack; the laptop comes in space black and silver.
The M6 iMac carries its own CPU and GPU upgrade, now with a Neural Accelerator embedded in each core — a change Apple credits for smoother multitasking and better performance in everyday apps, photo editing and video work, plus on-device AI that the company says runs up to five times faster than on the M4 iMac. Its display, camera and audio setup carries over from before (a 24-inch 4.5K Retina screen, Thunderbolt 4 connections numbering up to four), now paired with macOS 27 and accessories that match the computer’s color; buyers can choose from blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange or silver. Both machines open for preorder on October 28 and reach customers starting November 6.
Why it matters
Apple is leaning on AI-workload gains — not just raw CPU speed — to justify the M6 upgrade, signaling that on-device AI performance is becoming as central to its hardware pitch as the processor benchmarks that used to carry these launches alone.