Not a surprise with John Ternus taking the reigns as CEO in a week, who was previously SVP of hardware engineering.
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
After watching a video about how the filesystems are > 2x faster (and testing this myself in my mac mini vs a linux machine), I feel like Apple is leaving a lot on the table, and I hope that they get APFS to be as fast as the linux filesystems.
Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.
What I am missing in all of those benchmarks, how does the M6 compares to the M5 Pro.
I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.
Says 1.2x for multithreaded and doesn't specify (I presume smaller) for single-threaded. That's compared to M5 not M5 Pro, so M5 Pro is likely significantly faster.
So happy with my base M4 purchase for $499 when it released. I even snagged a 1TB replacement drive for $199 a year ago. Feels like I got the last train out.
Same thing for me! Got it with the education discount when it came out in 2024 and, although I've been pretty disappointed with macOS, it's crazy to see that the price increased by $300 in less than 2 years, with no sign of the price increases slowing down.
What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
It's a bit of an emotional goodbye to the super cheap Mac Minis we got to enjoy for a while. I got some for family members, we had some serving as iOS/macOS build servers sitting in a closet at my last job, they were fantastic.
Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
When they discontinued the M4 with 16GB a few months ago I had literally just ordered one off Amazon which they promptly cancelled. It would have been 600 after exchange rate from GBP.
I can't justify a more than 2x price increase for what I'm guessing are marginal improvements. I want to replace my home lab but as it stands my underpowered NAS will have to continue as it has the past few years
If you adjust for inflation, is it a big change from the super cheap Mac Minis of the past? Probably still somewhat more expensive, but not as much as the nominal difference would imply.
Apple does this thing where they pick a very old game and then boast about how well it runs. It's so bizarre.
Not like Mac gaming is good anyway...they have "Game Porting Toolkit" but it's not free and open like Proton so nobody will use it unless Apple pushes them. Removing Rosetta doesn't help either.
From what I've seen they do care quite a bit about gaming, but not to the point where they're willing to actually do much about it, so I wouldn't expect a proton style compatibility layer anytime soon unfortunately
I play quite a few games on my Mac Mini via Crossover, but rarely anything particularly graphically intensive. Though I do see occasional buzz about improvements in the game porting toolkit leading to significant perf improvements when they make their way into Crossover.
> Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?
They include game metrics in their marketing often, because they know their customers care about gaming. But no—for whatever reason, it never translates into Apple caring about gaming. I don't get it, but that's the way it has been for a long time.
With the “game mode” and “game porting toolkit” in recent history, I think there’s one person at Apple who cares about gaming and every couple of years he escapes from the basement where they keep him locked up and manages to sneak something into the release branch
They’ve also said when they pull Rosetta for intel compatibility, it will still be available for old games to use, which is a huge improvement from their usual stance of “that game studio that hasn’t existed since 2008 should dust off their code and update it to our new architecture.”
they've done a bunch to make macs a better gaming platform, including the very nice game porting toolkit (https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/) which you can use yourself to run pc games on the mac. All macs since m1 have very nice gpus that can handle most games made today, and the newer ones can run the latest AAA ones with good detail. At this point it's more that game publishers/studios don't care about the mac
cp2077 sits permanently at 60fps and looks great on my m1 max 64gb. I used to play it on my 4090, but once I figured out how to do redmods on macos I quit using it and play it on my mac to save power (I'm 100% solar powered and barely generate 600w, 4090 consumes 500+). In apples infinite wisdom they don't support egpus, so my 4090 egpu will never work with my mac, which was a really disappointing thing to discover.
Have been considering a used M1 but I'm concerned that I'm going to get flash storage that's been thrashed to within an inch of it's life by someone running it as a poorly configured inference host.
There are sooo sooo many students and normal people using these devices or corporate laptops never seen inferencing or anything like this, its so hard to trash the storage of them, i wouldn't worry about it.
Upgrading to 48GB memory is $600…. Gut bunch. I have a M4 Pro (top cpu skew 14 cores). Any idea the performance gain to M5 Pro? I feel like they holding off releasing M6 Pro because a new studio is dropping soon as well.
I think there's a valid argument for this pattern when you know most people are on 3-ish year upgrade cycles. Also, if you compare against the most recent generation, you risk creating buyer's remorse for recent purchases.
Yup. Yesterday it was $799 for the base Mac Mini M4, a $200 increase from the original MSRP before June’s price hikes.
I paid $499 for my M4 back in April with the academic discount since I predicted the next generation base model would cost more. Sadly my prediction was correct: $599 to $899 is steep. I understand why; the prices of DIMMs, GPUs, and SSDs have also skyrocketed. But $899 for a base Mac Mini is painful, even if the alternatives on the current market are also painfully expensive.
I really want a mini for running local models, but there's no way I'm buying one for the next few years. I'm planning on waiting for models to get better and more powerful, as well as for hardware prices to come down.
Not a surprise with John Ternus taking the reigns as CEO in a week, who was previously SVP of hardware engineering.
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
After watching a video about how the filesystems are > 2x faster (and testing this myself in my mac mini vs a linux machine), I feel like Apple is leaving a lot on the table, and I hope that they get APFS to be as fast as the linux filesystems.
Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.
Related? "Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line" june 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676795 380 comments
What I am missing in all of those benchmarks, how does the M6 compares to the M5 Pro.
I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.
I am to only one?
The big difference you're not looking at is the memory bandwidth. The M5 Pro has nearly twice the one of the M6:
170GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 32GB unified memory
307GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 64GB unified memory
That is also the factor you want to take into account for AI inference, of course.
Last time the benchmark numbers from apple were stupid and they still are.
I just wait for practical real live numbers with real stacks i use.
And btw. they reduced the memory bandwdith on the M4 in comparision to its previous version by 40gb/sec or so, you need to wait to see.
It basically means that every meaningful comparison produced an embarrassing improvement multiplier
Benchmarks from the manufacturer are just marketing as well. Wait for independent 3rd party reviews.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-m6-a...
Says 1.2x for multithreaded and doesn't specify (I presume smaller) for single-threaded. That's compared to M5 not M5 Pro, so M5 Pro is likely significantly faster.
So happy with my base M4 purchase for $499 when it released. I even snagged a 1TB replacement drive for $199 a year ago. Feels like I got the last train out.
Same thing for me! Got it with the education discount when it came out in 2024 and, although I've been pretty disappointed with macOS, it's crazy to see that the price increased by $300 in less than 2 years, with no sign of the price increases slowing down.
What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
I feel that way about my GPU for normal gaming use. Now I’m afraid of it dying on me.
> Feels like I got the last train out.
Do you just mean in terms of getting something for the cheapest possible price or are you talking about quality going down in some way?
Appreciate the haters as always but can someone explain why they are downvoting this?
It's a bit of an emotional goodbye to the super cheap Mac Minis we got to enjoy for a while. I got some for family members, we had some serving as iOS/macOS build servers sitting in a closet at my last job, they were fantastic.
Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
When they discontinued the M4 with 16GB a few months ago I had literally just ordered one off Amazon which they promptly cancelled. It would have been 600 after exchange rate from GBP.
I can't justify a more than 2x price increase for what I'm guessing are marginal improvements. I want to replace my home lab but as it stands my underpowered NAS will have to continue as it has the past few years
> but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
We should be buying European solutions anyway. Different psychological barrier that was broken long before.
If you adjust for inflation, is it a big change from the super cheap Mac Minis of the past? Probably still somewhat more expensive, but not as much as the nominal difference would imply.
Mac Mini M4 launched less than 2 years ago at $600 (US, $500 with edu discount; as low as $400 on general discounts). Now same config with M6 is $900.
same spec, same chip. I tought Apple would at least bump the RAM
You thought they'd bump the base RAM in the middle of the biggest RAM crisis in history?
be more rational and get over psychological barriers?
> Up to 2x faster gaming performance with ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition when compared to Mac mini with M4.
Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?
And while i'm at it, I was wondering a few weeks ago if I should try this game on my M3 pro. Anyone has played it on Apple and has feedback ?
Apple does this thing where they pick a very old game and then boast about how well it runs. It's so bizarre.
Not like Mac gaming is good anyway...they have "Game Porting Toolkit" but it's not free and open like Proton so nobody will use it unless Apple pushes them. Removing Rosetta doesn't help either.
From what I've seen they do care quite a bit about gaming, but not to the point where they're willing to actually do much about it, so I wouldn't expect a proton style compatibility layer anytime soon unfortunately
I play quite a few games on my Mac Mini via Crossover, but rarely anything particularly graphically intensive. Though I do see occasional buzz about improvements in the game porting toolkit leading to significant perf improvements when they make their way into Crossover.
> Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?
They include game metrics in their marketing often, because they know their customers care about gaming. But no—for whatever reason, it never translates into Apple caring about gaming. I don't get it, but that's the way it has been for a long time.
With the “game mode” and “game porting toolkit” in recent history, I think there’s one person at Apple who cares about gaming and every couple of years he escapes from the basement where they keep him locked up and manages to sneak something into the release branch
They’ve also said when they pull Rosetta for intel compatibility, it will still be available for old games to use, which is a huge improvement from their usual stance of “that game studio that hasn’t existed since 2008 should dust off their code and update it to our new architecture.”
they've done a bunch to make macs a better gaming platform, including the very nice game porting toolkit (https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/) which you can use yourself to run pc games on the mac. All macs since m1 have very nice gpus that can handle most games made today, and the newer ones can run the latest AAA ones with good detail. At this point it's more that game publishers/studios don't care about the mac
cp2077 sits permanently at 60fps and looks great on my m1 max 64gb. I used to play it on my 4090, but once I figured out how to do redmods on macos I quit using it and play it on my mac to save power (I'm 100% solar powered and barely generate 600w, 4090 consumes 500+). In apples infinite wisdom they don't support egpus, so my 4090 egpu will never work with my mac, which was a really disappointing thing to discover.
It could work but that would require NVIDIA to release an arm64 macOS driver. Safe to say this will never happen.
Double the price of the base m4 mac mini in February :(
(it was late in it's lifecycle and there were frequent sales)
2.5Gbe as standard is nice.
Wow. Is OpenClaw still alive? Would their users spend so many for the new Mac mini?
How many tokens per second would you even get on them?
OpenClaw was originally designed to run on a Mac, but using remote LLMs accessed via API. Running the LLM locally on beefier hardware came later.
Afaik most openclaw users aren’t running their llm locally - just using a mac mini as an always-on sandbox for agents.
I really want to buy one for coding/dev work, but it's just too expensive. Not sure if the M4 MacBook will get a price cut anytime soon.
You will not feel a difference in coding/dev work between M1 to M6 in a relevant manner.
I have an M1 and M4 Max at office. I feel the sluggishness of M1 now, after years it finally started to show its age.
Yeah, I know. The problem is that used prices right now are almost the same as what they used to cost brand new. Prices have gone up way too much.
Have been considering a used M1 but I'm concerned that I'm going to get flash storage that's been thrashed to within an inch of it's life by someone running it as a poorly configured inference host.
There are sooo sooo many students and normal people using these devices or corporate laptops never seen inferencing or anything like this, its so hard to trash the storage of them, i wouldn't worry about it.
Where's a reliable place to buy a used Mac? I'm afraid of ending up with a broken unit.
Upgrading to 48GB memory is $600…. Gut bunch. I have a M4 Pro (top cpu skew 14 cores). Any idea the performance gain to M5 Pro? I feel like they holding off releasing M6 Pro because a new studio is dropping soon as well.
So I guess M5 Pro is better, right?
No 8GB option? Oh the horror.
The "up to" and "Yx" compared to three generations ago specs from Apple. Never change.
I think there's a valid argument for this pattern when you know most people are on 3-ish year upgrade cycles. Also, if you compare against the most recent generation, you risk creating buyer's remorse for recent purchases.
So the price just went up by another $100 am I reading that right?
Yup. Yesterday it was $799 for the base Mac Mini M4, a $200 increase from the original MSRP before June’s price hikes.
I paid $499 for my M4 back in April with the academic discount since I predicted the next generation base model would cost more. Sadly my prediction was correct: $599 to $899 is steep. I understand why; the prices of DIMMs, GPUs, and SSDs have also skyrocketed. But $899 for a base Mac Mini is painful, even if the alternatives on the current market are also painfully expensive.
Faster CPU and Ethernet is certainly worth $100. Sucks though, I agree.
Era of cheap compute is over I'm afraid
No, it's not. We do have to live through this long and harsh winter, though.
I really want a mini for running local models, but there's no way I'm buying one for the next few years. I'm planning on waiting for models to get better and more powerful, as well as for hardware prices to come down.
Over for now, or at least a little while until production ramps up to our new reality (~5 years minimum is likely).
Just got to wait for the wealth to trickle down to make it cheap again
/s