Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav The new Mac mini is the kind of Mac upgrade Apple has done a million times. It’s the same design as before but with new guts. These play-it-safe updates aren’t very exciting, but they’re also usually all upside—you get a year or two’s worth of technological improvements for the same price you would have paid for the older version yesterday. Unfortunately, 2026’s unprecedented memory crunch has upended that standard operating procedure.
The new Mac mini starts at $899 for a version with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, a $300 increase for the same memory and storage specs you could get in the $599 M4 Mac mini in 2024. The M4 Mac mini was a great general-purpose desktop computer and one of the best values Apple had ever offered in a desktop Mac. The M6 Mac mini is only one of those things. I’ll let you guess which.
Note that this review is specifically for the M6 version of the Mac mini. We didn’t get an M5 Pro Mac mini to review, but we’ll talk more about how its pricing and performance fits in for our Mac Studio review. Design The M4 Mac minis gave the computers their first full redesigns in nearly 15 years, so it’s not too surprising that the new Mac minis don’t change anything. Compared to the older Intel and M1/M2-era versions, they’re slightly taller (2 inches, up from 1.4), but they have a smaller 5×5-inch footprint (down from 7.7 inches squared).
The system is actively cooled, with a fan vent on the bottom to make sure that whatever chip is inside can run at high sustained clock speeds (passively cooled Apple Silicon Macs like the MacBook Air have always been a bit slower than actively cooled Macs with the same chip). All Mac minis have two 10 Gbps USB-C ports and a headphone jack on the front, and a 2.5 Gbps (default) or 10 Gbps (optional) Ethernet port and HDMI port on the back. Both also have three Thunderbolt ports on the back, but these are Thunderbolt 4 on the M6 Mac mini and Thunderbolt 5 on the M5 Pro version. That means the M6 mini’s ports top out at 40 Gbps, while the M5 Pro mini supports up to 120 Gbps speeds.
The Mac mini’s ports. No USB-A, but otherwise not bad for a system this small. Credit: Andrew Cunningham The Mac mini’s ports. No USB-A, but otherwise not bad for a system this small.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham Realistically, there aren’t a ton of things on a Mac that can use all that bandwidth, especially since Apple doesn’t support external GPUs. But you do need a Thunderbolt 5 Mac to daisy-chain multiple computers together to form a compute cluster, so if that’s something you’re interested in, keep it in mind when you buy—maybe you’re buying multiple desktops, or maybe you already have an M5 Pro or M5 Max MacBook Pro you’d like to test the feature with. The only real gripe with this design continues to be its bottom-rear-mounted power button; apparently, complaints about this are being sent to the same trash can Apple has always used for complaints about the Magic Mouse’s bottom-mounted charging port. It doesn’t come up often in everyday use if you just let your Mac go to sleep rather than shutting it down.
But the positioning problem does really call attention to itself when you pair a TouchID-equipped external keyboard with the mini, since it requires a quick double-tap of the Mac’s power button before the sensor will work. Meet the M6 Apple’s first M6-series chip is making its debut in the humble Mac mini, and the chip looks like the biggest upgrade Apple’s lower-end chip has gotten since the M4 generation added extra efficiency cores. The headliner is the presence of two of Apple’s so-called “Super” cores, Apple’s nomenclature for P-cores that are even faster than its typical P-cores. Those are added on top of four P-cores and six E-cores for a total of 12 CPU cores.
M4 and M5 both had 10 CPU cores. In the M4, these were split between four regular P-cores and six E-cores, whereas the M5 split them between four super cores and six E-cores (the M5’s cores were referred to as P-cores when it launched but were rebranded later when the M5 Pro and Max came out). The M1, M2, and M3 generations all used four P-cores and four E-cores. The M6 has fewer super cores than the M5 but the same number of E-cores and four additional P-cores.
While they’re apparently no longer “super,” the P-cores still perform well enough to ensure that the M6’s multi-core performance is better than M5’s overall. CPU S/P/E-cores GPU cores RAM options Display support (including internal) Memory bandwidth Apple M6 2S/4P/6E 12 16/24/32GB Up to three 153GB/s (16GB), 170GB/s (24GB/32GB) Apple M5 4S/6E 10 16/24/32GB Up to three 153GB/s Apple M4 4P/6E 10 16/24/32GB Up to three 120GB/s Apple M3 4P/4E 10 8/16/24GB Up to two 102.4GB/s Apple M2 4P/4E 10 8/16/24GB Up to two (one external) 102.4GB/s Apple M1 4P/4E 8 8/16GB Up to two (one external) 68.25GB/s (est.) Apple has mixed super cores with both other kinds of cores before, but this is its first chip to include all three kinds at once. To get around the awkwardness this might create at the CPU scheduler level, the built-in powermetrics tool suggests that Apple is still treating the M6 like a chip with just two types of cores. The six E-cores are all gathered together in one cluster, and the two Super cores and the four P-cores are all lumped together into a second six-core cluster called the “PS cluster.” Powermetrics also reports that both the P- and S-cores have the same peak and minimum clock speeds, unlike in the M5 Pro and M5 Max where they’re different clusters with different clock speeds (both P- and S-cores in M6 range from 1.44 GHz to 4.79 GHz).
The sysctl utility also suggests they share the same 20MB pool of L2 cache, up from 16MB for the 4-core Super cluster in the M5 (the E-core cluster has a bit more L2 cache, too, 8MB up from 6MB in the M5). The Super cores do have more L1 instruction and data cache, so they are definitely still different cores, and there are likely other differences that we can’t detect using software-level tools. But if you were wondering how macOS was going to treat a chip with three different kinds of CPU cores at a software level, the answer is “to act like it still has two different kinds of cores.” L1 instruction cache L1 data cache L2 cache Minimum clock Maximum clock M6 E-core 160KB 128KB 8MB shared between 6-core cluster 1,010 MHz 2,908 MHz M6 P-core 128KB 64KB 20MB split between P- and S-cores 1,440 MHz 4,788 MHz M6 Super core 192KB 96KB 20MB split between P- and S-cores 1,440 MHz 4,788 MHz The M6 gets additional GPU cores for the first time since the M2, increasing the count from 10 cores to 12. These cores include improved versions of the integrated neural accelerators Apple introduced in the M5-series GPU for speeding up AI and machine-learning workloads like ray-tracing and MetalFX upscaling.
A “Dual 16-core Neural Engine” also bumps the number of Neural Engine cores from 16 to 32. Saying you have 2×16 of something strikes me as a roundabout way of saying you have 32 of something, but I suppose the end result is the same either way. One small wrinkle in the M6 variants the Mac mini uses: The basic 16GB Mac mini offers 153 GB/s of memory bandwidth, the same amount as the M5. The 24GB and 32GB versions offer 170 GB/s, an 11 percent increase that should marginally improve graphics performance and the speed of any local AI models you run on this machine.
Our review unit is the 24GB version. What of the M6 Pro, M6 Max, or M6 Ultra? If the rumors are true, the M6 could end up being a lonely chip. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple isn’t planning a full M6 chip generation and that it could skip directly to M7 branding for the Pro, Max, and Ultra chips.
That would be a first for the company, which s
