Apple announced two new Macs on October 27: a 14-inch MacBook Pro built around the new M6 chip, and a 24-inch iMac that moves from the M4 to the same M6 family. Both open for pre-order on October 28 and reach stores and customers on Friday, November 6. The MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 in the US and the iMac at $1,499, which in both cases is unchanged from the models they replace. Neither machine changes its design; what changes is the silicon inside, the wireless hardware and, for the iMac, the wired networking.
Apple's announcements are the primary record for the claims below, and most of its figures are comparisons against its own earlier chips rather than independent measurements. They are worth reading as Apple's claims, with the baseline attached.
What the M6 adds
The M6 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro has a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, two more of each than the M5 it replaces, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine where the M5 had a single one. Unified memory starts at 16GB, is configurable to 32GB, and runs at up to 170GB/s, up from 153GB/s according to 9to5Mac's comparison of the two generations. Each GPU core carries a Neural Accelerator, and Apple describes the ray-tracing hardware as third generation. The company's headline numbers against the M5 are up to 30% faster graphics, up to 25% faster on-device AI work such as prompt processing for local language models, and a Neural Engine up to 1.9 times faster. For specific tasks it quotes roughly 1.2 to 1.3 times gains: Blender ray-traced renders, Xcode builds and time-to-first-token for a local model at 1.3x, Affinity image processing at 1.2x.
The rest of the laptop is familiar. The Liquid Retina XDR display still peaks at 1,600 nits for HDR, with an optional nano-texture finish, and the port set is unchanged: HDMI, MagSafe 3, three Thunderbolt 4, an SDXC slot and a headphone jack, with support for two external displays. Apple rates battery life at up to 24 hours, which it calls the longest in any Mac, and says fast charging reaches 50% in 30 minutes with a 96W adapter. The new N1 wireless chip brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 in place of Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. 9to5Mac's summary is that the update is "solely a spec bump", and on the evidence of Apple's own specification sheet that is a fair description. It ships with macOS 27, including Siri AI features that Apple notes are in beta and subject to usage limits.
The iMac gets more than a chip
The iMac's update is slightly broader. It comes in two configurations: a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU model from $1,499, and a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU model from $1,699, both with the dual 16-core Neural Engine. Apple's comparisons here are against the M4 iMac, so the percentages are larger: up to 5 times faster on-device AI, up to 2 times faster graphics for photo editing and for ray-traced games, up to 2 times faster SSD reads and writes, and up to 1.5 times faster in everyday work such as Excel. 9to5Mac puts the CPU gain at up to 40%. Memory bandwidth rises from 120GB/s to 170GB/s.
The 12-core models also gain features the desktop has lacked. They can be configured with 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet, which Apple describes as up to 2.5 times faster wired connectivity than the previous generation, they carry four Thunderbolt 4 ports and drive two 6K external displays, and they offer the nano-texture display option. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 arrive across the range. The 24-inch 4.5K panel, the 12MP Center Stage camera and the seven colours are carried over, and there is still no larger screen size; a reader comment on 9to5Mac's report about the missing 27-inch model reflects a common reaction, though it is a reader's view rather than the outlet's reporting.
What it means for games and for buyers
For anyone who games on a Mac, the relevant parts are the extra GPU cores, the third-generation ray tracing and the Neural Accelerators in each core, which together underpin Apple's 30% graphics claim on the laptop and its 2x ray-tracing claim on the desktop. Those are generation-over-generation figures, not comparisons with a Windows machine at the same price, and Apple has not published frame rates for named games. The practical consequence is narrower: an M5 MacBook Pro owner gains little beyond faster wireless, while someone on an M1 or an Intel Mac is looking at a much larger step, which Apple quantifies at up to 11 times the graphics performance of M1 for the laptop and up to 18 times the overall performance of the most popular Intel iMac for the desktop.
The confirmed next steps are the dates. Pre-orders open on October 28 in 35 countries and regions, with 9to5Mac reporting a 10:10 a.m. Pacific start for the iMac, and both machines ship on November 6. Apple has not announced larger MacBook Pro models or other M6 Macs, and nothing in these releases confirms what else, if anything, is coming this week.
Reporting notes