THE CRUNCH
Apple has announced a new 14-inch MacBook Pro built around the M6 chip, with preorders opening tomorrow, October 28, and availability from Friday, November 6. The M6 brings a 12-core CPU, up from 10 cores in the M5, and a 12-core GPU that Apple says delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics and up to 25 percent faster AI workloads than the M5. The laptop starts at $1,999 with 16GB of unified memory and comes in space black and silver.
The M6 is, per The Verge, Apple's first 2nm chip, and pairs that CPU and GPU with a dual 16-core Neural Engine, which the company says is up to 1.9 times faster than the M5's. Neural Accelerators sit in every GPU core, and Apple positions the machine as a platform for on-device AI, from Apple Intelligence and Siri AI features to running large language models locally. Apple says memory bandwidth reaches up to 170GB/s, and TechCrunch notes that is up from 153GB/s on the M5 chip.
Connectivity gets a notable bump: Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 arrive via Apple's N1 wireless chip, previously reserved for MacBook Pro configurations with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Battery life is rated at up to 24 hours, which Apple calls the longest ever in a Mac, and the company says the laptop supports fast charging to 50 percent in 30 minutes with a compatible adapter. Ports carry over: three Thunderbolt 4 slots, HDMI, MagSafe 3, an SDXC card reader and a headphone jack, alongside the same 12MP Center Stage camera and Liquid Retina XDR display with an optional nano-texture finish.
Upgrades cost more this year, which The Verge attributes to the current memory shortage: 24GB of memory adds $200 and 32GB adds $400, while storage starts at 1TB with 2TB an extra $500 and 4TB an extra $1,500. The 16-inch MacBook Pro is left out of the refresh for now and still runs M5 Pro or M5 Max chips. Apple also announced an M6-powered iMac starting at $1,499, and both machines land a day before the company's "Pro and Tell" event in Los Angeles on October 28.