Apple has unveiled new versions of the Mac mini and Mac Studio, powered by two new chips – the M6 and the M5 Ultra – that are explicitly aimed at running AI workloads locally rather than in the cloud. While the hardware itself is largely an incremental "specs bump" rather than a fresh design, Apple's marketing and technical choices make clear it is chasing the growing trend of developers and hobbyists using Mac hardware, often chained together, to run large AI models on their own machines instead of relying on expensive cloud-based services.

The M6 is Apple's first 2nm chip and the first to combine three different core types, offering a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU with claimed multi-threaded performance gains of up to 40 percent over the M4, though memory remains capped at 32GB. The more powerful M5 Ultra, destined for the Mac Studio, is essentially two M6 Max chips fused together, delivering 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, up to 512GB of memory and bandwidth of up to 1.2TB per second. This surge in local AI capability follows macOS 26.2, which enabled fast Thunderbolt 5 connections between Macs for distributed AI inference using the MLX framework, allowing users to run open-weight models such as Qwen and DeepSeek locally as a cheaper alternative to cloud-hosted frontier models.