Apple M6 Mac mini and M5 Ultra Mac Studio Are Now Available

Apple says the new Mac mini and Mac Studio began arriving to customers and Apple Store locations on September 22. The Mac mini is available with M6 or M5 Pro, while Mac Studio is available with M5 Max or M5 Ultra. That turns Apple’s August hardware announcements into shipping desktop products rather than another specification preview.

US pricing starts at $899 for Mac mini with M6, $1,699 for Mac mini with M5 Pro, $2,499 for Mac Studio with M5 Max and $5,499 for Mac Studio with M5 Ultra. Those are Apple’s US starting prices before configure-to-order upgrades; they should not be treated as worldwide pricing or street pricing.

The M5 Ultra Mac Studio can be configured with up to 512GB of unified memory and Apple specifies 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth. That combination is unusual for a compact workstation because the same large memory pool is available to the CPU and GPU rather than being split into conventional system RAM and discrete GPU VRAM pools.

There is an important availability boundary: Apple says the 512GB Mac Studio configuration is coming in late October. The Mac Studio family is available now, but “available now” does not mean every advertised memory configuration can ship today.

Mac Studio includes Thunderbolt 5, and Apple now explicitly positions Remote Direct Memory Access over Thunderbolt 5 as a way to cluster multiple Mac Studio systems for distributed AI inference. Apple claims up to 3x faster distributed AI inference compared with a single system in its tested configuration.

RDMA matters because it is intended to move data between systems with less CPU involvement than an ordinary application-level copy path. It does not merge several Macs into one physically shared memory pool, and Apple’s 3x figure should not be generalized to every model or inference stack. Software still has to partition work effectively across the connected machines.

The base M6 Mac mini uses a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU, starts with 16GB of unified memory and can be configured to 32GB. Apple lists up to 170GB/s of memory bandwidth. The M5 Pro version raises the ceiling to an 18-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 64GB of unified memory and 307GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Both Mac mini variants add Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and 2.5Gb Ethernet, with 10Gb Ethernet optional. The M6 model uses Thunderbolt 4 on its rear ports while the M5 Pro model moves to Thunderbolt 5. Those I/O differences matter for high-speed external storage and expansion and are a reason not to treat the two Mac mini configurations as differing only in processor speed.

The September 22 milestone is primarily availability, not a second silicon launch: Apple disclosed M6, M5 Ultra and the new desktop specifications in August. Buyers can now order shipping configurations and compare real retail configurations, while the highest-memory 512GB Mac Studio remains a late-October option.

For local AI, the standout specification is memory capacity rather than a single TOPS-style number. Models that exceed the practical VRAM capacity of a conventional discrete GPU can potentially fit inside the M5 Ultra’s unified pool, but fitting a model in memory does not by itself establish useful token throughput, latency or price-performance. Those questions require workload-specific independent testing of shipping hardware.