Apple Unveils New Mac Mini With M6 and M5 Pro Chips

My take: The M6 is Apple's first chip built on a 2nm process and comes with a dual Neural Engine, a 40% CPU performance increase, and up to 4x faster AI task performance compared to the M4. In practice, this means tools like LM Studio or Ollama will run noticeably faster on the same compact form factor.

For those still on M1 or M2 Macs, the gains are more pronounced: up to 13.5x faster for local LLM processing. If you have been evaluating whether to upgrade to improve your AI workflows, the numbers are hard to ignore.

The price rose from $599 to $899 compared to the M4 model, which is a notable increase. But if you actively use AI and work with local models to avoid API costs, the additional performance could pay for that difference in a matter of months.

How much of your daily work already depends on local AI inference, and would that performance jump justify the upgrade?