Apple’s two compact desktops now share one increasingly serious job: keeping AI workloads off the cloud. The new Mac mini and Mac Studio stretch that idea from a five-inch entry machine to a workstation capable of holding frontier-scale models in unified memory.

The Apple Mac mini retains the compact enclosure introduced with the M4 generation. Its M6 configuration combines a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU, Neural Accelerators in every GPU core, and 16GB of standard unified memory, with up to 32GB available. Apple claims up to four times the AI performance and twice the graphics performance of M4. M5 Pro models begin with a 15-core CPU and 16-core GPU, scaling to 18 and 20 cores respectively, plus 64GB of memory and 307GB/s bandwidth.

The larger Mac Studio moves the same local-compute argument into professional workstation territory. M5 Max reaches an 18-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 128GB of memory, and 614GB/s bandwidth. M5 Ultra doubles down with up to 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, 512GB of memory, and 1.2TB/s bandwidth—enough, Apple says, to play 33 streams of 8K ProRes 422 at once. Thunderbolt 5 can also cluster multiple Studio systems for distributed inference.

Both desktops add Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, while the forthcoming macOS 27 supplies Apple’s next AI and automation layer. U.S. preorders are open, with availability September 22. Mac mini starts at $899 with M6 and $1,699 with M5 Pro; Mac Studio starts at $2,499 with M5 Max and $5,499 with M5 Ultra. The 512GB Studio configuration follows in late October.