Apple's new Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops went on sale today at Apple Store locations, on apple.com, and in the Apple Store app. The Mac mini with the M6 chip starts at $899, while the M5 Pro version is priced at $1,699. The Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499, and the M5 Ultra model starts at $5,499.
Students and educators get lower year-round education pricing, starting at $799 for the M6 Mac mini and $5,099 for the Mac Studio. U.S. shoppers can also lease a Mac Studio with M5 Max for as little as $48.99 per month on a 36-month Apple Upgrade plan, or an M5 Ultra model from $110.10 per month, before taxes and trade-in credit.
The Mac mini keeps its small footprint but moves to Apple's M6 and M5 Pro silicon. Apple says the M6 version delivers up to 4x faster AI performance and 40 percent faster CPU performance than before, with 16GB of unified memory as standard and configurations up to 32GB. The M5 Pro model steps up to an up-to-18-core CPU, an up-to-20-core GPU, and up to 64GB of memory. Both include Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and 2.5Gb Ethernet, with a 10Gb option.
The Mac Studio is positioned as Apple's most powerful Mac, built for professional workloads. The M5 Max version pairs an 18-core CPU with an up-to-40-core GPU and up to 128GB of unified memory, while the M5 Ultra model goes to an up-to-36-core CPU, an up-to-80-core GPU, and up to 512GB of memory with 1.2TB/s of bandwidth. Apple says the new Mac Studio delivers AI performance up to 4.3x faster and graphics up to 1.8x faster. Both Studio models include Thunderbolt 5, and Apple says RDMA support lets multiple units be clustered for distributed AI inference with up to 3x the performance of a single system.
Both desktops ship with macOS 27, which Apple released recently and which adds Siri AI, Apple Intelligence features across apps, and a new Settings slider for personalizing the Liquid Glass interface. The announcement does not say whether the previous generation Mac mini and Mac Studio remain on sale alongside the new models.
The launch follows Apple's mid-September beta releases of iOS 27.2, iPadOS 27.2, macOS 27.2, and other platform updates for developers. Apple also used that week to brief developers on subscription tools in iOS 27 and on changes to its App Tracking Transparency prompt in the European Union.
Apple is pitching the new machines at buyers ranging from students and small businesses to video editors and AI researchers, and points to trade-in credit and monthly installment options as ways to offset the cost.
