Mac mini (2026)

The 2026 Mac mini is a five-by-five-inch aluminum macOS desktop, and the main choice is between two chips. The standard configuration runs the M6, Apple’s first chip built on a 2nm process, with memory from 16GB to 32GB, and suits photo editing and development. The more expensive configuration uses the M5 Pro, the chip from the 2026 MacBook Pro, with 24GB to 64GB of memory and Thunderbolt 5, for video editing and larger local models. Memory and storage are soldered, so the configuration you order is the one you keep. Apple announced both on August 25, 2026, and they went on sale on September 22.

Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread come standard on every configuration through Apple’s own N1 wireless chip, and wired networking is 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard with a 10Gb option at purchase. The port layout carries over from the 2024 redesign: three Thunderbolt ports, HDMI, and Ethernet on the back, two USB-C ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the front. The first round of hands-on reviews found the M6 faster than the old M4 Pro in single-core work and close to it in multi-core work, and found both chips quiet under load. Price drew the most complaints, since the M6 model starts $300 above the M4 model’s 2024 launch price with the same 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage.

Pros and Cons

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Mac mini (2026) Comparison Chart

4 configurations

Configuration	Processor	RAM	Storage	GPU	List price	Amazon price	Compare
M6/16GB/256GB	Apple M6	16 GB	256 GB SSD	M6 12-Core GPU	$899.00	Loading...	Details Performance Rating 5.7 Processor Twelve-core Apple M6 GPU Integrated M6 12-Core GPU RAM 16 GB Internal Storage 256 GB SSD Weight 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) USB Ports 5 USB-C (3 USB4) 2 front USB-C (10Gb/s), 3 rear Thunderbolt 4 (40Gb/s)
M6/16GB/512GB	Apple M6	16 GB	512 GB SSD	M6 12-Core GPU	$1099.00	Loading...	Details Performance Rating 5.7 Processor Twelve-core Apple M6 GPU Integrated M6 12-Core GPU RAM 16 GB Internal Storage 512 GB SSD Weight 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) USB Ports 5 USB-C (3 USB4) 2 front USB-C (10Gb/s), 3 rear Thunderbolt 4 (40Gb/s)
M6/24GB/512GB	Apple M6	24 GB	512 GB SSD	M6 12-Core GPU	$1299.00	Loading...	Details Performance Rating 5.9 Processor Twelve-core Apple M6 GPU Integrated M6 12-Core GPU RAM 24 GB Internal Storage 512 GB SSD Weight 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) USB Ports 5 USB-C (3 USB4) 2 front USB-C (10Gb/s), 3 rear Thunderbolt 4 (40Gb/s)
M5 Pro/24GB/512GB	Apple M5 Pro	24 GB	512 GB SSD	M5 Pro 16-Core GPU	$1699.00	Loading...	Details Performance Rating 7.2 Processor 15-core Apple M5 Pro GPU Integrated M5 Pro 16-Core GPU RAM 24 GB Internal Storage 512 GB SSD Weight 1.6 lbs (0.73 kg) USB Ports 5 USB-C (3 USB4) 2 front USB-C (10Gb/s), 3 rear Thunderbolt 5 (120Gb/s)

Specs shared by every configuration

Operating System	macOS
Dimensions width x length x thickness	5 x 5 x 2 inches (127 x 127 x 50.8 mm)
WiFi	Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be)
Bluetooth	6.0
Ethernet	1 Ethernet port at 2.5 Gbps
HDMI	1 Full-Size HDMI Port
DisplayPort	DisplayPort over Thunderbolt
VGA	No VGA Ports
Thunderbolt Ports	3
OCuLink	No
Internal SATA Ports	No SATA ports
Card Reader	No Card Reader
Headphone Jack	3.5mm
Fanless	No
VESA Mount	No
In the Box	Mac mini, power cord
Expandability	Memory and storage fixed at purchase. External Thunderbolt storage and up to three displays.

M6 chip and memory

The M6’s 12-core CPU is split into two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores, two more cores in total than the M4 and M5. The 12-core GPU carries a Neural Accelerator in every core, and the Neural Engine is a dual 16-core design. Apple rates the M6 at up to 1.2x faster multithreaded CPU performance than the M5, and against the M4 Mac mini it claims up to 4.8x faster LLM prompt processing in LM Studio and up to 2x faster storage.

Unified memory bandwidth reaches 170GB/s on the 24GB and 32GB configurations; the 16GB configurations run at 153GB/s. Memory tops out at 32GB, which is the practical ceiling on what a local model plus its context can occupy. In Alex Ziskind’s testing, a 27B-parameter model just over 16GB in size, which he said will not work on a 16GB machine, loaded on a 32GB M6 and ran at about 9.7 tokens per second, and the STREAM benchmark measured roughly 143 to 145GB/s of copy bandwidth against Apple’s 170GB/s rating. Our guide to running Google’s Gemma models on a mini PC covers where that ceiling lands for other models.

Ports, displays, and wireless

Two USB-C ports at 10Gb/s and the headphone jack sit on the front, and three Thunderbolt ports, a full-size HDMI, Ethernet, and the power inlet sit on the back. The M6 configurations use Thunderbolt 4 at 40Gb/s; the M5 Pro configurations use Thunderbolt 5 at 120Gb/s. The front ports handle accessories and data only: Tom’s Guide notes they “don’t support video out,” so every display connects at the back. There is still no USB-A and no card reader, so older peripherals and SD cards need a hub.

On the M6, Apple lists three-display support as two displays at 6K and 60Hz (or 4K at 165Hz) plus a third at 5K over Thunderbolt or 4K at 60Hz over HDMI. In two-display mode, one display can run at 8K and 60Hz (or 5K at 120Hz, or 4K at 240Hz) alongside a second at 5K over Thunderbolt or 4K over HDMI, and a single Thunderbolt port can carry up to two displays. The M5 Pro drives three displays at 6K and 60Hz or 4K at 165Hz over any mix of Thunderbolt and HDMI, raises the second display in two-display mode to 5K at 120Hz or 4K at 200Hz, and can run all three from a single Thunderbolt port over DisplayPort 2.1.

Notebookcheck found the Wi-Fi 7 module limited to 160 MHz channels, which caps transfers at about 2 Gbps. Its iperf3 runs averaged 1,960 Mbit/s receiving and 1,813 Mbit/s sending, and the connection stayed stable.

The M5 Pro configuration

The standard M5 Pro configuration has a 15-core CPU (five super cores and ten performance cores) and a 16-core GPU, and the build-to-order chip has an 18-core CPU (six super cores and twelve performance cores) and a 20-core GPU. Both use a single 16-core Neural Engine rather than the M6’s dual design, and both run 307GB/s of memory bandwidth against the M6’s peak of 170GB/s. The standard M5 Pro model ships with 24GB of memory and a 512GB SSD; memory can be raised to 48GB or 64GB and storage to 8TB, where the M6 stops at 32GB and 2TB. Apple sells one standard M5 Pro model; every other M5 Pro combination is configured to order.

The M5 Pro model also adds Genlock over its Thunderbolt 5 ports, which syncs a display to cameras that take an external clock, and it weighs 1.6 pounds against 1.5 pounds for the M6. Fstoppers pointed out that the M5 Pro has one video encode engine, so a queue of exports runs one after another, while decoding several 4K streams at once ran 2.7x faster in aggregate than a single stream.

Reviews of the 18-core M5 Pro put it well ahead of the M4 Pro in multi-core work. Macworld measured a 12 percent single-core and 38 percent multi-core gain in Geekbench and a 40 percent multi-core gain in Cinebench, and Fstoppers measured 13.0 percent single-core and 30.6 percent multi-core gains in Geekbench 6. Against the M6, the M5 Pro trades single-core speed for core count: Notebookcheck’s Cinebench 2024 results put the M6 at 1,468 multi-core points against 2,347 for an 18-core M5 Pro MacBook Pro, while the M6 led in single-core.

Noise, heat, and power draw

Most reviews that measured or described fan noise found both models quiet in everyday and CPU work, though Macworld noted that the small enclosure can struggle and get loud in high-end games. Notebookcheck reported that the M6 model “is usually inaudible,” with the fan often off, and measured up to 42 dB(A) under high CPU load and its stress test, a little quieter than the M4 Mac mini. Engadget never heard the fan noise its reviewer had noticed on the M4 Pro Mac mini under Cinebench, and Tom’s Guide found the M6 “completely cool to the touch and dead silent” in daily use. Apple rates idle noise at 5 dBA.

The M5 Pro kept its speed through long encodes. Fstoppers ran 12 consecutive all-core x265 encodes, about five and a half minutes of pinned CPU, and saw only a 3.5 percent drift between the first and last pass with zero thermal or performance warnings. PCMag found the M5 Pro model quieter than the M6 model during multi-core testing, though it felt a little hotter under load. Dave2D moved his four-camera live recording setup to a 24GB M5 Pro Mac mini and saw GPU load around 60 percent, against 75 to 80 percent on the M4 Pro Mac mini, whose fan sometimes kicked in on hot summer days.

Power draw on the M6 rose over the M4 at full load. Notebookcheck measured up to 74 watts at the wall under load, settling around 55 watts, and estimated that the chip itself runs about 10 watts higher than the M4 in multi-core work while delivering more performance per watt. Alex Ziskind recorded about 48 watts of CPU power on the M6 in an all-core Python test against 40 watts on the M4. Our 24/7 mini PC power-cost breakdown works out what a box drawing that much costs to run around the clock.

Reviewer Insights

Six Colors: an average generational step at a higher price

Jason Snell at Six Colors measured the M6 at 11 percent faster than the M5 in single-core CPU tests, 23 percent faster in multi-core, and 24 percent faster on the GPU, and attributed most of the GPU gain to the two extra GPU cores. He summed up the chip as “an average improvement, so close to dead-on average that it feels like it was made specifically to meet an internal metric for improved CPU and GPU performance.” He still called the base M6 enough “for most computing tasks that regular people will ever need,” and on the $899 price wrote that “it’s crossed an invisible threshold.”

9to5Mac: M4 Pro territory for the base chip

The 24GB, 512GB M6 that Chance Miller tested for 9to5Mac scored 4,074 single-core, 22,632 multi-core, and 92,542 in the Metal GPU test in Geekbench 7, which he put at 24, 48, and 71 percent ahead of the M4, and it beat the 12-core M4 Pro in both CPU tests while the M4 Pro kept its GPU lead. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test returned about 6,000 to 6,400 MB/s writes and 6,000 to 6,300 MB/s reads, against roughly 3,000 to 3,400 MB/s for 512GB M4 models. His main complaint was the 256GB base SSD, and his verdict on value was that the Mac mini is no longer an exceptional deal, “it’s just a really good value instead.”

Engadget: fast and quiet, rated 8.7 out of 10

Devindra Hardawar at Engadget gave the M6 model an 8.7 out of 10 after testing a configuration with 24GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. It was 16.5 percent faster than the M4 Pro Mac mini in Geekbench 6 single-core, while the M4 Pro kept a slight multi-core edge. It ran Cyberpunk 2077 at an average of 55 fps at 1080p on default Mac settings and transcoded a 4K clip to 1080p in 18 seconds. He wrote that “I also never encountered the loud fan noise I noticed on the M4 Pro Mac mini,” and advised caution on memory upgrades: at 32GB the M6 reaches $1,299, at which point he suggested the $1,699 M5 Pro model instead.

Notebookcheck: top single-core speed, rated 88 percent

Notebookcheck rated its 24GB, 512GB M6 review unit 88 percent. It measured 1,468 points multi-core and 221 single-core in Cinebench 2024 and wrote that “the M6 currently offers the best single-core performance you can get, period.” It measured multi-core performance roughly 40 to 50 percent above the M4 Mac mini and put the 12-core GPU about 30 to 35 percent ahead of the M5’s GPU in synthetic tests. Its cons were no maintenance options, the 160 MHz Wi-Fi limit, the power button placement, and a 12-month warranty.

Tom’s Guide: modern games at 1080p

Anthony Spadafora at Tom’s Guide found that Cyberpunk 2077 held a steady 56 fps at 1080p on the “For this Mac” preset on his 24GB M6. The machine scored 4,708 single-core and 21,405 multi-core in Geekbench 6, finished a 25GB 4K-to-1080p Handbrake transcode in 2 minutes 45 seconds, and copied a 25GB file at 6,371.5 MBps, more than double the M4’s result. He called it “the absolute best compact Mac desktop you can buy,” while criticizing the $899 starting price, the $200 memory and storage steps, and the underside power button.

PetaPixel: good for photographers, rated 7 out of 10

PetaPixel scored the base 16GB, 256GB M6 model 7 out of 10. It rated the machine a strong Lightroom and Photoshop computer, found the M6 ahead of the M5 MacBook Pro in nearly every DaVinci Resolve category, and noted a Lightroom Classic JPEG export result it attributed to a likely software bug. On video work, it wrote: “if you’re doing video editing, the base M6 doesn’t really offer anything particularly special. It’s good, not great.” It called the 256GB SSD a limitation, criticized the built-in speaker, and recommended the M5 Pro model for photographers and video editors who can afford it.

Alex Ziskind: developer builds and local AI on the M6

Alex Ziskind compared the M6 with the M4 Mac mini on developer and local AI work. An Xcode benchmark project built in 114 seconds on the M6 against 172 seconds on the M4, and a multi-core Python test finished in 21.5 seconds against 32.8 seconds on the M4 and 23.2 seconds on the M4 Pro Mac mini. With llama.cpp and a 9B model, prompt processing rose from 210 to 742 tokens per second and generation from 18 to 26.9 tokens per second, and a Flux image took 35 seconds against 1 minute 34 seconds on the M4. He advised skipping the 256GB model and choosing 32GB of memory for local AI work.

The Tech Chap: M6 against the M4 Pro

The Tech Chap put the M6 against an M4 Pro Mac mini across Geekbench, Cinebench, 3DMark, Blender, and local AI tests. He found the M6 24 percent faster in single-core, much faster in his AI tests, and behind the M4 Pro by about 16 percent in multi-core and about 20 percent in graphics. He called the 50 percent higher starting price frustrating but still recommended the machine.

Macworld: a fast M5 Pro at a price it calls bad

Jason Cross at Macworld reviewed an M5 Pro with the 18-core CPU, 48GB of memory, a 1TB SSD, and 10Gb Ethernet, a $2,899 build. Beyond the Geekbench and Cinebench gains over the M4 Pro, he measured about 20 percent more GPU compute, a 26 percent faster CPU-based HandBrake encode, and a hardware encode that finished in 41 percent less time. His pros list included “Small and quiet.” On price, he wrote: “This is a good computer at a bad price, and it’s not worth the upgrade if you’re not in desperate need of one.”

Fstoppers: a silent machine for photo and video work

Fstoppers spent a week on raw batches, 4K transcodes, and DaVinci Resolve work with an 18-core M5 Pro, 48GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD. Geekbench 6 medians were 4,302 single-core and 29,137 multi-core, and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test returned 11,956 MB/s write and 12,231 MB/s read. A 4K H.264 drone clip transcoded to ProRes 422 HQ at 8.0x realtime, and Resolve reported 37.4GB of the 48GB pool available to the GPU. On noise, it wrote: “I sat next to it through every one of those encodes, and at no point did I hear the fan.”

PCMag: Editors’ Choice for the M5 Pro, rated 4.5 out of 5

PCMag gave its $2,899 M5 Pro build (18-core CPU, 48GB, 1TB, 10Gb Ethernet) 4.5 out of 5 and an Editors’ Choice award. It found the M5 Pro model often roughly 25 to 30 percent faster than the M4 Pro version and ahead of the HP Z2 Mini G1a workstation in nearly every benchmark it ran. It also found that the M5 Pro Mac mini “was quieter than the M6 model during multi-core testing.” Its cons were the much higher base price and small storage at the starting price.

Bobby Tonelli: M5 Pro for video editors

Bobby Tonelli tested an 18-core M5 Pro with 64GB of memory and 4TB of storage on a roughly seven-minute 4K R3D project in DaVinci Resolve. The H.264 export took 2 minutes 25 seconds and a ProRes 422 HQ export took 1 minute 13 seconds; Cinebench scored 718 single-thread and 8,578 multi-thread, and the Blender Classroom scene rendered in 2 minutes 21 seconds. His advice was that the M6 with enough memory covers photo work, email, and light editing, while heavier Resolve and Final Cut work justifies the M5 Pro, and that buyers who never move the machine should also price a Mac Studio.

Buy the M6 with more than 256GB, or the M5 Pro for video editing

The M6 configuration suits buyers who want a quiet, small, low-power Mac, and reviewers found it strong for photo editing, development, and everyday work. Step up from the 256GB base SSD if you can; 9to5Mac, PetaPixel, and Alex Ziskind all advised against it. If you already own the Mac mini with M4 chip, reviewers measured roughly double the SSD speed, about a quarter more single-core speed, and much faster local AI prompt processing; a machine used mostly for browsing and office work gains little from the swap.

The M5 Pro configuration is the pick for video editing and long exports, 3D rendering, larger local models that will not fit in 32GB, and Thunderbolt 5 storage or capture hardware. Skip either model if you need internal expansion, USB-A without adapters, or a broad game library, all of which a Windows mini PC handles better. To weigh it against other small desktops, use Starry Hope’s Mini PC Comparison Tool.

Frequently Asked Questions