Apple has dropped some nice new updates to the Mac lineup with an all new M6 and M5 Ultra Silicon coming to power the refreshed desktops.
An all-new M6 will power a refreshed Mac Mini while the Mac Studio gets an all-new M5 Ultra which joins the Pro and Max in the M5 linuep.
Both devices and all the chips are designed with the usual bumps in performance for both the CPU and GPU, but also a real focus on capability with Neural accelerators allowing for strong on-device AI performance.
So much so that the term AI appears almost 20 times in the Mac mini announcement, and almost 30 times in that of the Mac Studio.
This on-device focus comes at a good time for corporate AI users, with concerns about where your data is going, where it’s stored and who we’re dealing with in the world of tech when it comes to all our data, on-device LLM processing means you are keeping your data local and secure. This will likely be a strong use-case for these two new devices, the Mac Studio in particular.
But, with an AI focus comes the fallback from the AI revolution. After price rises were flagged by outgoing CEO Tim Cook, prices went up almost across the Apple portfolio. With this launch the Mac mini gets another $200 more expensive than the outgoing model, while the Mac Studio remains at it’s current price.
However both are a big leap up in price from their predecessors launch prices. Mac Mini launched at $999 almost two years ago and is now $1,449, while Mac Studio is $800 more than when it launched not much more than a year ago.
For the Mac mini – here’s how Apple describes and quantifies it’s improvements.
Mac mini with M6 can power through everything from productivity tasks to creative projects, the latest AI workflows, and more. M6 features a 12-core CPU — two more cores than before — with the world’s fastest single-threaded performance, so everything feels extra snappy and responsive. A 12-core GPU, also with two more cores than before, now includes Neural Accelerators in each core for the first time on Mac mini, resulting in up to 4x faster AI performance and 2x faster graphics than Mac mini with M4.
In addition, the all-new Dual 16-core Neural Engine delivers up to 2x faster performance than the previous generation, and combined with the advanced GPU, Mac mini is a powerhouse for all things AI.1 And with 16GB of standard unified memory configurable up to 32GB, as well as higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s, multitasking is faster than ever.
Mac mini with M6 delivers:
The language is even stronger when it comes to the Mac Studio, Apple saying “Mac Studio is at the forefront of high-performance AI computing. Now, with M5 Max and M5 Ultra — Apple’s most powerful silicon ever — it’s turbocharged, putting frontier-class AI models right on a user’s desk. Neural Accelerators in each GPU core deliver dramatically faster matrix multiplication.
M5 Max features phenomenal on-device AI compute with up to 3.9x faster AI performance than the prior generation, speeding up prompt processing.1 With M5 Ultra, Mac Studio achieves up to 4.3x the peak AI compute performance of M3 Ultra and a staggering 9.8x more than M1 Ultra.
Combined with up to 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, 50 percent higher than before, Mac Studio lets users run massive models entirely on device with complete privacy — without counting tokens or worrying about rising cloud costs.
AI inference scales to entirely new levels with multiple Mac Studio systems. Users and teams looking to share AI compute can cluster multiple Mac Studio systems together using the built-in support for Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA (remote direct memory access). This creates a vast shared memory pool across systems, allowing users to load the largest and most demanding frontier-class open-weight models available today. A cluster of four Mac Studio systems delivers up to a remarkable 3x faster AI inference than a single system.cluster of four Mac Studio systems delivers up to a remarkable 3x faster AI inference than a single system.
Mac Studio is also a powerful platform for the rich ecosystem of tools AI researchers and developers rely on every day, utilizing the advanced frameworks in macOS. Core AI is a brand-new framework for building, running, and deploying AI models on Apple silicon. It provides an architecture optimized for Apple silicon, including unified memory, CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, allowing developers to deploy full-scale LLMs locally and bring their own custom models into their apps. MLX, Apple’s open-source machine learning framework optimized for Apple silicon, enables developers to run, train, and fine-tune models with exceptional efficiency on Mac.
In addition to these powerful frameworks, combined with Xcode and a robust ecosystem of AI tools and solutions, Mac Studio provides a complete, end-to-end platform for AI development — from experimentation and training to deployment.
Stats wise, here’s how they compare the Mac Studio
Mac Studio with M5 Ultra enables:
Both devices go on pre-order today, with availability September 22.
Announced today, available in a month – in between will be another Apple announcement – iPhone anyone?
Seems like Apple has cleared the deck so all eyes are on the iPhone team in September.
Trev is a Technology Commentator, Dad, Speaker and Rev Head.
He produces and hosts several popular podcasts, EFTM, Two Blokes Talking Tech, Two Blokes Talking Electric Cars, The Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, and the Private Feed. He is the resident tech expert for Triple M on radio across Australia, and is the resident Tech Expert on Channel 9’s Today Show and appears regularly on 9 News, A Current Affair and Sky News Early Edition.
Father of three, he is often found in his Man Cave.
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