What I keep circling back to on the M6 Mac mini isn’t the 2 nm process or the 40 percent multi-thread bump. It’s that only the M5 Pro gets Thunderbolt 5, and with it the cluster capability for local AI models. The M6 gets three Thunderbolt 4 ports and up to 32 GB unified memory. Fine for running one model. Not a box you grow into.
So if you’re buying a mini to self-host inference, the 1049-euro entry price is a trap and 1999 euros is the actual floor. Apple’s pitch to companies is explicit: weigh the hardware against the tokens you stop paying a cloud provider, plus data sovereignty. That math works. It just doesn’t work on the cheap end.
The story — Apple announced an unexpected August update to the Mac mini and Mac Studio with four chips: M6 and M5 Pro in the mini, M5 Max and M5 Ultra in the Studio. The M6 is Apple’s first 2 nm chip. The M5 Ultra lifts UltraFusion interconnect bandwidth to 4.4 TB/s and scales to 512 GB unified memory. Prices rose sharply on memory shortages; preorders open today, sales start 22 September. (Source)