Apple is positioning the updated Mac Mini around developers and other users who run AI software directly on their machines. The company highlighted its neural engines and unified memory architecture as key parts of that workload, saying they allow developers to work with large models without relying entirely on cloud infrastructure. “With these frameworks and new chips, developers can run and fine-tune large AI models locally on their Mac,” Apple said in its announcement.
Apple says the M5 Pro version of the Mac Mini can process large language model prompts 8.5 times faster than earlier Pro models. The M6 version also includes a 32-core Neural Engine and neural accelerators across its GPU cores, with Apple claiming up to four times faster AI processing than an M4 Mac Mini.
The Mac Mini’s starting price is also increasing. The new model begins at $899, $100 above the previous price and higher than the $599 starting point before an earlier increase that Apple attributed to memory costs. An M5 Pro configuration starts at $1,699.
The Mac Studio is receiving its own processor upgrade, with configurations based on the M5 Max and M5 Ultra. Apple says the M5 Max can run large language models nearly four times faster than the chip it replaces.
At the top of the lineup, the M5 Ultra becomes Apple’s most powerful current processor. The chip combines two M5 Max processors and can be configured with as many as 36 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores. Apple says its AI compute performance is up to 4.5 times faster than the M3 Ultra.
Apple is also allowing multiple M5 Ultra Mac Studio systems to work together. The company says connected machines can combine their memory resources to run frontier AI models with one trillion parameters.
Pricing for the M5 Max Mac Studio remains at $2,499. The M5 Ultra version starts at $5,499, compared with a minimum of $5,299 for the previous Ultra configuration.
The refresh comes as Apple says developers are increasingly using Macs for local AI development and agent workloads. Mac Mini systems have become a common choice for running dedicated AI agents, while Mac Studio machines are used by researchers testing and deploying models locally.
This analysis is based on reporting from CNBC.
Image courtesy of Apple.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
