Apple's new M5 Ultra Mac Studio packs its "most powerful chip ever," while the Mac mini jumps to M6

Published Aug 25, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Summary Apple's Mac Studio has been refreshed with its M5 Max ($2,500) and M5 Ultra ($5,500). The M5 Ultra utilizes an UltraFusion quad-die design: up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth. The new M6 Mac mini features a 12-core CPU/GPU and starts at $900; Apple claims 40% CPU boost, 2x ray-tracing GPU. Just ahead of its fall iPhone event, Apple has refreshed its Mac Studio with its M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips and given its Mac mini a fresh configuration with its new M6 chip and a higher-end version of the M5 Pro that is featured in this year's MacBook Pro. On the Mac Studio side, Apple's lineup was split last year between the M4 Max and M3 Ultra (despite its lower number, the M3 Ultra is actually faster than the M4 Max — Apple never released an M4 Ultra chip). As expected, this is just a hardware refresh, and the Mac Studio looks exactly like it has since 2022 when it was first revealed. The new Mac Studio with an M5 Max chip features 36GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and starts at $2,500. This is the same price as the M4 Max following its price increase in June. On the other hand, the $5,500 M5 Ultra configuration starts at 96GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, making it $200 more than the M3 Ultra configuration, which is a bit surprising given the ongoing RAM shortage. Credit: Apple / XDA Regarding the M5 Ultra specifically, Apple says the chip uses its "UltraFusion technology to form a quad-die architecture for the first time in an M-series system on a chip" The company goes on to say that the chip features an up-to-36-core CPU and up-to-80-core GPU with a massive 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth, 50 percent more than the M3 Ultra features. Other new features include support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Apple says its new Mac Studio configurations are set to release on September 22nd, but the highest-end M5 Ultra version with 512GB of RAM won't launch until late October (its price hasn't been revealed yet). Apple's tiny Mac mini is the first device to feature its M6 chip The M6 starts at a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU Credit: Apple Apple's pint-sized M6-powered Mac mini starts at $900, while its M5 Pro starts at $1,700. This is an increase of $100 over the Mac mini's M4 generation, which again, isn't that bad given the RAMpocalypse and the skyrocketing cost of other devices. Like the Mac Studio, the new Mac mini features the same overall design as its predecessor. The M6 Mac mini starts with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, while the M5 Pro Mac mini starts with 24GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The M6 Mac mini features a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, while the M4 version features a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU. In its press release, Apple says that the M6's faster cores offer a 40 percent boost in CPU performance over the M4's, and that its 12-core GPU is twice as fast at rendering graphics with ray tracing. Lastly, both Mac mini configurations feature faster storage, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 6. Apple says that its Mac mini hardware refreshes are set to release on September 22nd.