TodayToday's edition
Apple's 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 gets a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU, with up to 30 percent faster graphics than M5 by Apple's own claim. Pre-orders open Oct. 28.
3 min readAI-assisted
Apple's 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, which Apple announced on Oct. 27 and opens for pre-order on Oct. 28.
Image: Apple
Source · Press image from the Apple Newsroom, used for news reporting.
Apple announced the 14-inch MacBook Pro with its M6 chip on Oct. 27, with a 12-core CPU, a 12-core GPU and a starting price of $1,999 in the U.S.
Apple says the M6 GPU delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics and up to 25 percent faster AI workloads than M5. Its Dual 16-core Neural Engine is claimed to run up to 1.9x faster than M5's. All of these are Apple's own comparisons, not independent measurements. Pre-orders open Oct. 28 in 35 countries and regions, and the laptop arrives Friday, Nov. 6.
Apple's own comparisons put graphics at up to 30 percent and AI workloads at up to 25 percent above M5, per Apple Newsroom.
Illustration (AI-generated)
The price is $1,899 with education savings, Apple said. Apple Upgrade leases start at $38.99 a month for 36 months in the U.S., excluding taxes and any trade-in credit.
The M6 adds two CPU cores and two GPU cores over the M5 in the 14-inch model, which Apple launched in October 2025 with up to 10 CPU cores and a 10-core GPU. Each GPU core carries a Neural Accelerator, and the chip keeps third-generation hardware ray tracing and Dynamic Caching.
For local AI work, Apple claims up to 13x faster time to first token for LLM prompt processing than the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1, and up to 1.3x faster than the 14-inch model with M5. Unified memory starts at 16GB and is configurable up to 32GB, and bandwidth reaches up to 170GB/s, which Apple's August M6 release puts at 10 percent above M5.
Apple rates battery life at up to 24 hours, which it calls the longest ever in a Mac, as its own claim, and says the machine performs the same on battery as plugged in. It supports fast charging to 50 percent in 30 minutes with a compatible adapter such as the 96W model. Apple gives no chip power draw in watts, so the efficiency claim of "industry-leading performance per watt" cannot be checked against rivals yet.
The laptop also gains Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. It ships with macOS 27, whose Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features Apple ties to the Neural Engine, so more AI work can run on the device itself.
The launch follows the A20 Pro iPad mini on Apple's 2nm process, which Apple said on Oct. 26 would reach stores on the same Nov. 6 date.
Unified memory means the CPU, GPU and Neural Engine share one pool of memory, so a language model does not have to be copied between separate chips. How fast that pool can be read sets how quickly the chip can feed a model. Apple puts M6 at up to 170GB/s, a 10 percent increase over M5, according to its August M6 release.
The two ends of an AI request stress different things. Reading a prompt is compute-heavy, which is where Apple's 25 percent AI gain and its time-to-first-token claim apply. Generating the answer re-reads the model for each token and is bandwidth-heavy, and memory of 16GB to 32GB caps the model size that fits. These are Apple's own figures until independent tests arrive.
Apple's 14-inch MacBook Pro release does not repeat the process node, but Apple said in its Aug. 25 M6 release that M6 is its first 2 nm chip. Apple has not named the foundry; Notebookcheck reports TSMC. The release also does not state the chip's power rating. The performance figures are Apple's own claims, so independent benchmarks after Nov. 6 will show how far the 30 percent graphics claim holds in sustained use.
