Apple on Tuesday unveiled a new 14-inch MacBook Pro and a refreshed iMac, both powered by its latest M6 chip, with the company pitching faster performance for running artificial intelligence tasks directly on the devices rather than in the cloud.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at 1,999 dollars, while the iMac starts at 1,499 dollars. Customers can pre-order both products from Wednesday, October 28, in 35 countries and regions, including the United States, with availability starting on Friday, November 6.
At the heart of both machines is the M6, built around a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators in each core and hardware-accelerated ray tracing, alongside a separate dual 16-core Neural Engine. Apple said the M6 MacBook Pro delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics and up to 25 percent faster AI performance than its M5 predecessor, along with up to 24 hours of battery life, which the company described as the longest ever in a Mac. For buyers upgrading from an M1 model, Apple put the gains far higher, at up to 11 times faster graphics and up to 13 times faster AI performance.
The MacBook Pro comes with 16GB of unified memory as standard, configurable to 24GB or 32GB, and 1TB of storage as standard, with 2TB and 4TB options. Higher memory configurations reach up to 170GB/s of memory bandwidth. It also gains Apple's new N1 wireless chip, bringing Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and it is offered in Space Black and Silver. Beyond the chip and connectivity, the design and display are otherwise unchanged from the model it replaces.
The iMac tells a bigger generational story, because it skips from the M4 of 2024 straight to the M6. Apple said the new iMac delivers up to five times faster on-device AI performance than the previous M4 model. It comes in two versions: a base model with a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU starting at 1,499 dollars, and a fuller version with the same 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU as the MacBook Pro starting at 1,699 dollars. Both include 16GB of memory as standard, the dual Neural Engine, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 via the N1 chip, and 2.5Gb Ethernet for wired connections up to two and a half times faster than before. The familiar 24-inch 4.5K Retina design returns in seven colors: blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange, and silver.
The emphasis on on-device AI is the thread running through the launch. Faster Neural Engines and higher memory bandwidth are aimed at running large language models and other AI workloads locally, keeping work on the machine instead of sending it to a server. That pitch matters for speed, for privacy, and for using AI features without a constant connection.
Tuesday's launch may not be the week's last word from Apple. The company hosts a "Pro and tell" event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 28, which Bloomberg News has reported is expected to feature Apple's first touch-screen MacBook Pro. For now, the M6 refresh gives the entry-level Pro laptop and the all-in-one iMac a clear, chip-led upgrade, with prices unchanged in spirit and orders opening within a day.