Apple also introduced a new 14-inch MacBook Pro today featuring the M6 chipset.
This entry-level MacBook Pro retains the design of the current M5 MacBook Pros, so the changes are all under the hood. Starting at $1,999, the updated MacBook Pro bumps the chipset from M5 to M6, with two additional CPU and GPU cores.
The M6 MacBook Pro’s baseline configuration includes 16GB of unified memory and 1TB of SSD storage, which can be upgraded to as high as 32GB of memory and 4TB of storage. Like the M6 iMac, the new MacBook Pro can sustain up to 170GB/s of memory bandwidth if you buy the 24 or 32GB configurations, which facilitates things like LLM token processing. The 16GB model has 153GB/s of memory throughput.
Apple is rumored to be introducing the first touchscreen OLED MacBook Pros tomorrow, but for this entry-level MacBook, the screen is a Liquid Retina XDR non-OLED display. It’s still a great display with up to 1600 nits of peak brightness and an optional nano-texture treatment that I personally love, but check back here tomorrow if you’re waiting on OLED.
The updated MacBook Pro also features a 12MP Center Stage camera, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI port, MagSafe 3, an SDXC card slot, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Apple also says the M6 MacBook Pro can last up to 24 hours on a single battery charge, and can charge to 50% in just 30 minutes when you use Apple’s 96W power adapter instead of the 70W adapter that’s in the box.
As for speed, Apple says the M6 MacBook Pro is 30% faster on graphics workloads and 25% faster on on-device AI tasks than the M5 model. The Neural Engine is also 1.9x faster than the M5.
Overall, this is a very straightforward update to the existing entry-level MacBook Pro. That’s not terribly exciting for those who want to live at the bleeding edge of Apple hardware, but it’s a great way to get a fast laptop with a fantastic display. We’ll have to wait to see how it performs in practice, but with its active cooling, the new M6 MacBook Pro should be a very capable laptop.
The M6 MacBook Pro will be available for preorder starting tomorrow, October 28, with deliveries beginning November 6.
