Apple just dropped the AI-oriented M6 chip into the iMac and the 14-inch MacBook Pro
Popular Science ·
The chip that debuted back in August has made its way to two more of Apple's computers. Plus, the company's subscription-based suite of creative software got an upgrade. The post Apple just dropped the AI-oriented M6 chip into the iMac and the 14-inch MacBook Pro appeared first on Popular Science .
The $899 Mac mini was the first machine to get Apple’s M6 chip back in August, and now it moves into two Macs with built-in displays: the 14-inch MacBook Pro at $1,999 and the iMac at $1,499. Preorders open October 28, and deliveries start November 6. It’s the same 2nm chip in all three, and most of its gains land in on-device AI, where M6 runs two Neural Engines instead of one.
Apple also announced a round of generative tools for Apple Creator Studio, the $12.99-per-month app bundle it launched in January, including Generate Fill in Pixelmator Pro and a beta assistant inside Logic Pro for sound editing. Those updates arrive in November, and a qualifying new Mac comes with three months of the subscription free.
M6 has a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, two more cores apiece than the base M5. Apple claims the chip has the world’s fastest CPU core, but that’s for real-world benchmarks to decide. The bigger architectural change is the Neural Engine. M6 runs two 16-core Neural Engines, and Apple rates the pair at up to 1.9x faster than the single engine in M5.
Every GPU core still carries a Neural Accelerator, the M5 addition that lets the graphics hardware take on AI work. Memory bandwidth reaches 170GB/s on configurations with 24GB or more, while 16GB models stay at 153GB/s, the same as M5. That gap matters for local language models, whose weights move through memory for every token they generate, so anyone planning to run them should budget for the memory upgrade.
The footnotes in Apple’s MacBook Pro announcement show who the company is selling to. Against an M5 MacBook Pro, Apple’s Blender, Xcode, and Affinity tests come in between 1.2x and 1.3x faster, and so does time to first token in a local language model. Against a 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1, the same Blender render runs up to 11.7x faster. Consider this a nudge to anyone clinging to a computer bought at the dawn of COVID.
The new MacBook Pro costs the same $1,999 as the M5 model it replaces. That’s still $300 more than the M5 version cost when the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros arrived in March, because Apple raised the 1TB MacBook Pro from $1,699 to $1,999 in June and attributed the jump to a memory chip shortage. Storage starts at 1TB, and memory starts at 16GB with a 32GB ceiling.
Wireless gets the upgrade the M5 Pro and M5 Max received earlier this year, moving to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. The ports stay put, with three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, MagSafe 3, an SDXC slot, and a headphone jack. Thunderbolt 5 still requires stepping up to an M5 Pro model, which Apple continues to sell alongside the new one.
Apple rates the M6 model at up to 24 hours of battery life and says it runs at the same speed unplugged as it does on the charger. It can reach 50 percent in 30 minutes with a higher-wattage USB-C adapter, such as Apple’s 96W model. The Liquid Retina XDR display peaks at 1,600 nits for HDR, and a nano-texture option cuts glare for anyone who works next to a window. It comes in space black and silver.
If you’re familiar with the MBP already, there are no huge surprises here, just the inevitable march ahead in terms of hardware. That’s not a bad thing.
On the outside, the iMac’s spec sheet reads like the M4 model’s. It has a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display rated at 500 nits, a 12MP Center Stage camera, and seven colors running from blue to orange. Apple says M6 brings up to 5x faster on-device AI than the M4 iMac, up to 2x the ray-tracing performance in games, and SSD reads and writes up to twice as fast. You should feel the upgrade, but it’s not a revolution.
The $1,499 iMac has a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU. Spending $1,699 gets the 12-core chip plus all four Thunderbolt 4 ports, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet, a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID in the box, and access to the nano-texture display option. On the M4 iMac, the 10-core model already came with four Thunderbolt ports and a Touch ID keyboard.
The 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port is the sleeper upgrade for anyone who keeps a photo or video library on a network drive, and Apple rates it at up to 2.5x the wired speed of the previous iMac. Both models move to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 and can drive up to two 6K external displays. Every iMac still ships with a color-matched keyboard and a mouse or trackpad, all of which charge over USB-C.
Apple Creator Studio bundles Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage into one subscription, with exclusive extras for Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform. The November update leans hard on generative tools. Pixelmator Pro gets Generate Fill, which lets you circle part of an image, describe the change, and have the app match the lighting, perspective, and texture around it.
Final Cut Pro and Motion add text-to-image generation inside projects, and both can send an image to Pixelmator Pro and pull the edits back into the project. Final Cut Pro also picks up built-in MotionVFX effects and titles, rotoscoping and tracking tools, and 23 new transcription languages. Compressor learns to encode Cinematic mode video from the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo . If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry. Apple does a good job making the software accessible while still letting pros have their complex features.
Logic Pro’s new assistant runs in beta on the Mac only, and Apple says it’s built on Apple’s own models and OpenAI’s. It requires macOS 27 on an Apple Intelligence-capable Mac and works in U.S. English for now. The Stem Splitter may be the more immediately useful change, since it can now isolate, replace, or rebalance individual drum parts.
Keynote, Pages, and Numbers get a beta assistant of their own, along with Model Context Protocol support on macOS 27, which opens the apps to outside AI agents and tools. Existing subscribers get all of it as a free update in November, and Freeform’s Pixelmator Pro editing and text-to-shape generation follow in December. Final Cut Pro ($299.99) and Logic Pro ($199.99) remain available as one-time Mac App Store purchases.
Preorders for the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 and the iMac with M6 open October 28 at apple.com, and both arrive November 6 in 35 countries and regions, including the U.S. Education pricing drops the MacBook Pro to $1,899 and the two iMacs to $1,449 and $1,599. Apple Creator Studio costs $12.99 per month or $129 per year after a one-month free trial for new subscribers.
Apple
If you’re still carrying an M1 laptop, Apple built its benchmark footnotes for you. The base configuration pairs the 12-core M6 with 16GB of memory and a 1TB SSD, and Apple rates the battery at up to 24 hours. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 are new to this tier, while the three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, and SDXC slot carry over unchanged.
Apple
Spend the extra $200 if you can. The $1,699 iMac adds the 12-core M6, all four Thunderbolt 4 ports, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet, and a Touch ID keyboard, which covers most of what separates this generation from the last. The 24-inch 4.5K display and seven colors carry over, and the 10-core model at $1,499 is the cheapest M6 Mac that comes with a screen.
Apple
Buying Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro outright costs $499.98, which covers nearly four years of this subscription at the $129 annual rate. The bundle adds Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on top, and Family Sharing extends it to up to six people. Students and educators pay $2.99 per month after verification, though their plans can’t be shared.
The post Apple just dropped the AI-oriented M6 chip into the iMac and the 14-inch MacBook Pro appeared first on Popular Science .