Apple’s second day of launches this week saw it follow its tempting iPad mini upgrade by pumping up the processor in two of its most popular Macs, even while it injected artificial intelligence into Creator Studio.
Apple’s 14-inch MacBook Pro is popular but sits in a funny place in Apple’s notebook lineup, with the powerful and popular MacBook Air biting at its heels and the more performant and powerful (though not yet M6) MacBook Pro models sitting above.
We already know what the M6 chip is capable of, because it is already inside the Mac mini (which will be made in the US later this year). We know it delivers better single-core scores on Geekbench than the 10-core M5 MacBook Pro. We also know it beats that last MBP in multi-core. Now that same chip is available in a 14-inch MacBook Pro — a really promising dose of power and performance in a highly portable pro Mac that now packs a mighty 24-hour battery life.
The chip gives you a 12-core CPU, a 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators in each core, a dual 16-core Neural Engine, and faster (16GB, upgradable up to 32GB) unified memory. What that means is power. And what that means is productivity — 30% faster graphics compared to last year’s model.
For those upgrading from M1, the performance gains are even more significant, with up to 11x faster graphics and up to 13x faster AI performance. The idea is that you’ll pick up your highly portable pro portable and take it anywhere you need it to be.
What’s new in Apple’s new portable pro laptop other than the processor?
Available in Space Black and Silver.
Pre-order from October 28, in stores November 6.
You don’t even need me to say it anymore, but the introduction of M6 chips inside the iMac makes the all-in-one desktop even more powerful and performant. This tops out a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU, and Dual 16-core Neural Engine.
Those fast processors combined with the fast, 170GB/s memory bandwidth means you’ll get twice the graphics performance of the M4 iMac. The Mac ships with 16GB of unified memory, but you can upgrade up to 32GB if you like spending money.
Inevitably, the new iMac is faster for, well, everything. You’ll be hitting pro performance comparisons all over again as Apple silicon continues to redefine expectations across the industry, putting pro performance in reach of most people. It’s all about AI at Apple at the moment, so expect 12 times faster performance in some tasks compared to the M1, Apple said.
Some specifications:
The new iMac is on pre-sale from October 28 and in stores from November 6. It costs $1,499 with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and 16GB of RAM, or $1,699 with a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU (16GB of RAM).
Of course, once you have put together the world’s leading mass-market AI ecosystem, you have to do something to show that power off. Apple has done this with a selection of interesting updates to its Creator Studio suite of creative tools. They’ll ship in November.
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