Mac mini With M6 and M5 Pro Review Roundup [Video]

Reviews of Apple's new Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro are now online ahead of its September 22 launch. Testing from The Verge and other publications points to substantial performance gains in the familiar compact enclosure, though the higher $899 starting price drew criticism across much of the coverage.

Apple introduced the new Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro on August 25. The M6 model starts at $899 with 16GB of memory and a 256GB SSD, while M5 Pro starts at $1,699 with 24GB and 512GB. Our M6 versus M4 comparison covers the generational changes, and the 2026 Mac mini versus Mac Studio guide examines where the higher configurations overlap. Current offers are available through the price tracker for the M6 Mac mini and M5 Pro Mac mini.

The Verge

One of the few publications to test both chip tiers used a 24GB M6 model and a 48GB M5 Pro configuration. The M6 completed a 4K Premiere export in 2 minutes and 34 seconds, compared with 1 minute and 51 seconds for M5 Pro. Importing 1,253 50-megapixel RAW images into Lightroom Classic produced a much smaller gap of about 30 seconds, but AI subject detection across 188 photos pushed the M6 into swap memory while M5 Pro maintained its pace.

That difference led the publication to recommend M5 Pro or Mac Studio for sustained video, visual-effects, and 3D work, while describing M6 as the better fit for general use and occasional creative projects. Its verdict on pricing was concise: “The Mac Mini is still a great deal; it just doesn’t feel like the steal it used to be.”

Ars Technica

Ars Technica found the M6 roughly 8 to 10 percent faster than the M5 family in single-core benchmarks, about 20 percent faster than the base M5 in multi-core tests, and around 10 percent ahead in graphics. Against M4, its results showed single-core gains of 20 to 30 percent, with multi-core and graphics performance improving by 50 to 80 percent in many tests.

The review called it “an impressively fast and quiet little computer” capable of covering roles from an entry-level desktop to a midrange coding or video-editing system. Its objections centered on the $899 price, non-upgradable memory and storage, and the 256GB SSD in the base configuration.

Tom's Hardware

Tom's Hardware tested an M6 configuration with 24GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. Its Geekbench single-core result was 21 percent above the previous M4 Pro Mac mini, while the M6's multi-core score of 21,045 came close to the 16-core M4 Pro's 22,661. The publication also measured nearly twice the write speed and more than twice the read speed of the base M4 Mac mini.

Performance remained consistent through ten Cinebench 2026 runs, with the average reported system temperature reaching 64 degrees Celsius and the fan settling around 2,615 rpm under load. The review concluded that the M6 “blows it away in CPU and SSD performance” compared with the standard M4, but said the new pricing weakens the Mac mini's traditional value proposition.

Six Colors

Six Colors focused on the M6's mix of two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores. Its testing put the chip 11 percent ahead of M5 in single-core performance, 23 percent ahead in multi-core work, and 24 percent faster in GPU tests, with the additional GPU cores accounting for much of the graphics increase.

The publication characterized M6 as an average generational improvement rather than an architectural leap, but found the base model more than capable for ordinary computing, servers, and lighter AI work. “Even the performance of the base M6 model is more than enough for most computing tasks that regular people will ever need,” it said.

Wired

Wired gave the M6 Mac mini a 9/10 rating and called its performance “unprecedented power in a tiny box.” A 16GB review unit generated a 20-step Flux.2 image locally in 1 minute and 40 seconds, while an M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 48GB finished 20 seconds sooner. Smaller 16-billion and 9-billion-parameter language models remained responsive, but a 70-billion-parameter model exceeded the available memory, and a longer agentic task failed to finish after 30 minutes.

Gaming results were more favorable. Cyberpunk 2077 reached 53 frames per second in the reviewer's test and 82 fps with light upscaling. The review nevertheless identified 16GB of memory as the limiting factor for more ambitious local AI work, recommending the 32GB M6 configuration or M5 Pro for buyers pursuing that use case.

You can watch several embargo-day video reviews below.

Stephen Robles

ZY Cheng

Dave2D

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