The new Mac mini and Mac Studio

The Mac mini remains Apple's entry-level model, but the M6 chip gives it a solid leap in performance. Apple itself quotes a 40 per cent faster CPU, a GPU that's twice as fast, and AI processing up to 4 times faster than the M4. For specific tasks such as running local AI models, the gap even grows to 4.8 times.

You get 16 GB of unified memory as standard, expandable to 32 GB with the M6 and 64 GB with the M5 Pro. It drives two 6K displays plus an additional 5K display, more than enough for office tasks, browsing and everyday desk work.

Mac Studio: for heavy professional workloads

The Mac mini is aimed at a broad audience; the Mac Studio is clearly aimed at professionals. You can see that in the memory alone: 64 GB as standard, compared with 16 to 32 GB in a typical Mac mini. Video professionals working with uncompressed 8K footage, 3D artists, architects with large BIM models and photorealistic renders, or developers running large AI models locally: this is their machine.

There are two versions. The M5 Max, the same chip that debuted in the MacBook Pro earlier this year, offers up to 18 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores and a 16-core Neural Engine. If you need more, there's the brand-new M5 Ultra, Apple's first quad-die chip, with up to 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, a 32-core Neural Engine and up to 256 GB of memory. From October, there will even be a 512 GB version, with unprecedented bandwidth of 1.2 TB/s.

Compared with the previous M3 Ultra, Apple claims 25 per cent faster single-threaded performance and 30 per cent faster multithreaded performance, plus up to 40 per cent faster graphics and 4.5 times more AI computing power.