Apple is updating the 24-inch iMac and the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M6 chip. According to Apple, the laptop lasts up to 24 hours on a single battery charge.
Apple is releasing two new Macs with the M6. The iMac comes with ten or twelve CPU and GPU cores, the MacBook Pro with twelve.
The M6 chip
The core of the new line-up is the previously launched M6 chip, developed by Apple itself. The American PC maker unveiled the processor at the end of August in the Mac mini, which has been on sale since 22 September.
The chip has two more CPU cores and two more GPU cores than the M4 and the M5, and every GPU core contains a Neural Accelerator. Memory bandwidth rises to 170 GB/s, compared with 120 GB/s for the M4.
iMac with M6
The new iMac has a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display with a modest brightness of 500 nits and P3 colour gamut. The computer can drive up to two external 6K displays. Compared with the iMac with M4, Apple claims up to 1.5 times faster performance in Excel, up to twice as fast image editing and up to five times faster prompt processing in LM Studio. Take that with a pinch of salt: the small print reveals that Apple is comparing a new system with 32 GB of RAM to an old computer with 8 GB of RAM.
The 12-core version has four USB-C ports, all of which support Thunderbolt 4. Only that version can be ordered with a 2.5 Gbps ethernet port. The ten-core edition also has two fewer Thunderbolt ports. The Magic Keyboard with Touch ID comes standard with the 12-core version and is optional with the 10-core version.
MacBook Pro with M6
The 14-inch MacBook Pro has 16 GB of memory as standard, upgradeable to 32 GB. Compared with the MacBook Pro with M5, Apple promises up to 30 percent faster graphics performance and up to 25 percent faster AI tasks on the device itself. The display reaches a peak brightness of 1,600 nits for HDR content.
According to Apple, the battery lasts up to 24 hours. With a 96 W adapter, it can be charged to 50 percent in 30 minutes, according to the manufacturer’s own figures. The laptop has three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, a MagSafe 3 connector and a headphone jack.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro remains available too, but only with the M5 Pro or M5 Max processor.
Price and availability
The iMac with a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU is available from €1,819, the twelve-core version from €2,019. It comes in blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange and silver. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 costs from €2,329, in black or grey. Both devices can be ordered from 28 October and will be delivered from 6 November.