Apple announced the new Mac mini on 25 August 2026 with two chip options, the all-new M6 and the M5 Pro. Pre-orders opened the same day and machines start arriving on 22 September. Australian pricing is confirmed on Apple's own Australian newsroom: A$1,449 including GST for the M6, and A$2,699 including GST for the M5 Pro. Education pricing is A$1,289 and A$2,539.

The price, first, because that is the story

When Apple launched the Mac mini with M4 on 30 October 2024, its Australian press release put the starting price at A$999 including GST, with the M4 Pro at A$2,199. Today the entry Mac mini is A$1,449 and the Pro model is A$2,699. That is 450 dollars more on the base machine in under two years, and 500 dollars more on the Pro. Both figures are Apple's own, from Apple's own Australian pages, so there is no argument about exchange rates or retailer margin here.

Worth knowing what you actually get for that. Apple's release confirms 16GB of unified memory as standard, configurable to 32GB. It does not state the base storage anywhere in the release, so I am not going to put a number on it. Check the configuration page before you order, because storage is where Apple has historically made the entry price look better than it is.

What M6 actually changes

M6 is Apple's first chip built on a 2 nanometre process. Smaller process, more transistors in the same space, better performance per watt. The practical version: a 12-core CPU made up of 2 super cores, 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores, which is two more cores than M5, and a 12-core GPU that now has a Neural Accelerator inside every core. There is also a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, which Apple says roughly doubles peak AI compute over the previous generation because the system can drive both engines at once.

Against the M4 Mac mini most people are actually replacing, Apple claims up to 4 times faster AI performance, twice the graphics and storage speed, and 40 percent faster CPU. Its more specific numbers: up to 4.8 times faster prompt processing in LM Studio than M4, up to 1.5 times faster spreadsheet work in Excel, and up to twice the gaming performance with ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077. Those are Apple's own tests on preproduction hardware, so treat them as the best case rather than what you will see on a Tuesday afternoon.

Memory bandwidth is up to 170GB/s, a 10 percent lift on M5.

The M5 Pro version

Step up to M5 Pro and you get up to an 18-core CPU and up to a 20-core GPU, with support for up to 64GB of unified memory and 307GB/s of bandwidth. Apple's comparisons here run against the M2 Pro machine, up to 8.5 times faster LLM prompt processing and up to 4.5 times faster ray-traced rendering in Blender, with the M4 Pro comparisons sitting at up to 4 times and up to 1.4 times respectively.

Ports and connectivity

Both models get Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard, with a 10Gb option. Two USB-C ports on the front alongside a headphone jack with high-impedance support. On the back, three Thunderbolt 4 ports on the M6 model and three Thunderbolt 5 ports on the M5 Pro, plus HDMI and Ethernet. Thunderbolt 5 also lets you cluster multiple Mac minis to run bigger AI models locally. There is new genlock support over USB-C for syncing a display with a camera, including iPhone 17 Pro.

macOS 27 arrives as a free update later this year and brings Siri AI, which is currently in beta and English only to start.