Apple on Tuesday refreshed two of its most popular Macs with the M6 chip, announcing a new 14-inch MacBook Pro and a 24-inch iMac - and, notably, keeping prices where they were. The MacBook Pro starts at 1,999 dollars and the iMac at 1,499 dollars, unchanged from the versions they replace, even as memory costs surge across the industry. Preorders open October 28 and the machines ship on November 6.
The M6 is Apple's first 2-nanometer chip, first announced in August and shipped last month in the Mac mini. In this configuration it pairs a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, each with two more cores than the M5, with Apple's most aggressive AI hardware yet: a neural accelerator inside every GPU core and a dual 16-core Neural Engine that the company says runs up to 1.9 times faster than the M5. Unified memory bandwidth reaches up to 170GB/s, there is a third-generation hardware ray-tracing engine, and the machines add Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro's numbers center on AI and endurance. Apple says local large language model prompts generate their first token up to 30 percent faster than on the M5 model, and up to 13 times faster than on the M1-era machine; GPU performance is up to 30 percent faster. Battery life reaches up to 24 hours of video playback, the longest Apple has ever put in a Mac, with consistent performance on or off the charger, and fast charging reaches 50 percent in 30 minutes with a 96W adapter. The Liquid Retina XDR display peaks at 1,600 nits of HDR brightness, with an optional nano-texture finish.
The iMac makes a bigger jump: it goes straight from the M4 to the M6, skipping the M5 generation entirely, since Apple last updated the all-in-one in 2024. The machine keeps its seven-color design and 4.5K display, and gains SSD speeds up to twice as fast and 2.5Gb Ethernet up to 2.5 times faster. Apple is pitching the dual Neural Engine as the enabling hardware for running large language models locally, from Apple Intelligence features to on-device coding assistants. (Reports differ on Apple's claimed multiple for the iMac's on-device AI gain over the M4 model; Apple's own materials put the GPU and Neural Engine figures above, so we leave the headline multiplier out.)
Holding prices is the quiet story. Apple raised Mac prices in July, acknowledging that soaring chip costs had forced its hand, and the AI buildout has pushed memory prices sharply higher across the industry. Keeping the MacBook Pro at 1,999 dollars and the iMac at 1,499 dollars suggests Apple is absorbing component inflation to keep the entry tier of its AI PC pitch attractive.
The release is the third wave of an unusually busy Apple week: the iPad mini was updated Monday, AI tools for the Creator Studio apps arrived alongside the iWork suite, and on Wednesday the company holds its "Pro and Tell" event, where it is expected to unveil the first touchscreen MacBook Pro with an OLED XDR display and the Dynamic Island. Bloomberg reports Apple has discussed pricing that higher-end 14-inch model at 2,899 dollars, which would be a record starting price for a MacBook Pro.
The message underneath the week's hardware cadence is that Apple now sells on-device AI as the reason to upgrade. The M6's per-core neural accelerators, doubled Neural Engine and 170GB/s memory bandwidth are spec-sheet language for one promise: local models, local agents, local privacy. With an M7 generation planned for 2027 and an M7 Ultra for 2028, the company's silicon roadmap has clearly been redrawn around the assumption that the next decade of personal computing runs inference on the desk, not in the cloud.
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