Apple adds the M6 processor to it’s 14 inch MacBook Pro

Apple’s busy week continues with the announcement of an updated 14 inch MacBook pro today. It’s an under the hood performance upgrade that comes with another lofty price tag as has been the trend in the last twelve months thanks to the memory demands of the world.

In short, this is all about the Chips. Apple’s M6 Silicon is the star, while their N1 is also a feature.

“The 14-inch MacBook Pro is the pro laptop of choice for a wide range of users — from university students, to business professionals across every industry, to multidisciplinary creators doing it all on one device,” said Shelly Goldberg, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering. “With the powerful M6 chip, we’re taking performance to the next level, with a boost in CPU speed and graphics and even more powerful capabilities for on-device AI. With its amazing battery life, remarkable Liquid Retina XDR display, and even faster connectivity, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 delivers a fantastic combination of performance, capability, and value.”

One of the key things I’ve noticed about this announcement isn’t just the emphasis on AI capabilities – outlining the things this M6 enabled MacBook Pro can do – but also measuring it.

I think we’re all familiar with Apple’s claims of x number of times faster this and that. Normally this relates to GPU or CPU performance.

Today, Apple is now quoting “LLM” performance, with this line standing out to me in the release:

• Up to 13x faster time to first token performance for LLM prompt processing compared to the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1, and up to 1.3x faster than the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5.

This just demonstrates the importance of AI not just to the tech industry, not just to Apple, but to users – we’re now looking for performance from our AI models. Fascinating!

In terms of what’s new, the M6 chip takes the CPU from 10 to 12 cores, including two super cores, four performance cores and six efficiency cores.

MacBook Pro with M6 also lifts to 12 GPU cores and the Neural engine jumps from a single 16 core engine to dual 16-core engines.

That Apple N1 chip also enables Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 as well as thread networking.

Starting at $3,199 the 14 inch MacBook Pro with M6 is about a $500 jump on the previous M5 version – thanks AI Data Centres!

Pre-orders for the new laptop start at 4.10am on Thursday morning, it’s available from November 6.

Trevor Long is in Los Angeles as a guest of Apple