Apple unveiled a 14-inch MacBook Pro and an iMac powered by its new M6 chip, starting at $1,999 and $1,499, with pre-orders opening October 28 and availability from November 6.
Apple on Tuesday unveiled a new 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac powered by its latest M6 chip, pitching faster performance for artificial intelligence tasks run directly on the devices rather than in the cloud.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 and the iMac at $1,499, with pre-orders opening Wednesday in 35 countries and regions including the United States and availability starting November 6. Apple said the MacBook Pro's M6 chip delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics and up to 25 percent faster AI performance than its M5 predecessor, along with up to 24 hours of battery life, which Apple calls the longest ever in a Mac. The new iMac delivers up to five times faster on-device AI performance than the previous M4 model, according to Apple.
The MacBook Pro's M6 chip has a 12-core central processor and a 12-core graphics processor, two more cores each than the base M5, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity, 16GB of unified memory as standard and configurations up to 32GB. The launches come a day before Apple hosts a Pro and Tell event in Los Angeles on October 28, which Bloomberg News has reported is expected to feature Apple's first touch-screen MacBook Pro.
Apple's own newsroom announcement confirms the models, prices, pre-order and availability dates and the performance comparisons, and Reuters reported the same headline figures independently. Those performance figures are Apple's comparisons against the M5 and M4 chips, not independent benchmark results, and the touch-screen model for the October 28 event remains a Bloomberg report rather than an Apple announcement.
The launch keeps Apple's starting prices unchanged while moving its mainstream Macs to a chip built around on-device AI work, from running language models locally to AI-assisted photo editing. The next test of the strategy comes on October 28, when the Los Angeles event is expected to show the higher-end MacBook Pro line, and on November 6, when the M6 machines reach customers.