Apple’s 2026 Mac desktop lineup tested: We break down all four options

I'm a big Mac fan. And I'm indifferent. And we're here to talk about the brand new Mac Mini and Mac

Studio models for 2026. All right, Joe, so tell me about the Mac Mini with the new M6 in it

Should I get it? Yes and no. I think it really depends on your level of appreciation for Mac OS

as always is the case with Macs. Now, however, to get in on the ground floor with the Mac Mini

the price has risen considerably from the launch of the M4 model. Right, but everything's risen considerably

Yes, and that also plays into Apple's favor when we get into the performance and how these things do

But yes, to start, to get in, it's $900. And when the M4 model, the previous model, released, it was $600

It got bumped up mid-cycle, actually late cycle, to $799. So it's less of a difference if you were shopping for a Mac Mini last year

but way more of a difference if you were shopping for a Mac Mini or already bought one a couple

years ago. And this is all seemingly because of the rise in prices of RAM and storage

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's going to raise the prices of everything because

usually those prices get put onto the consumer and we all love that and that's wonderful

But yeah, so should you buy – I think it really depends on whether you really are into macOS already or you're deeply curious about it for the performance that it gets you versus other comparable mini PCs on the Windows side

And that comparison couldn't be better right now for the Mac mini

And it already was incredible previously for the M4 model, and that trend is only continuing

Right. So for us, the only thing we've tested recently is the Asus Ascent QN10

And that's got a Snapdragon X2 Elite in it. And that does perform really well on AI tasks

Yes. So it's not quite head-to-head still, though. That's like top for PC

And even then, it just barely competes, it seems like, with the M6

That's an extremely important point. This is the base level. And it's twice the – well, not twice

The one we tested is twice the price. Right. But it's still, I think, $1,300 for the, like, entry-level QN10

Right. Absolutely. And outside of AI, like even just general mini PCs, we've tested a few – several recently, honestly

And when we compared them with the Mac Mini M6, they got blown away

We had a Geekom model that cost $1,600. This is, again, $900 to start

Our test model was $1,300 with a little bit more memory. But the point is, even on silicon testing, it just blew away the AMD Ryzen

I think it was the Ryzen AI 9 470 was in that mini PC

And then if you go into a mini PC that's even higher end on the Windows side

we're talking things like what we tested recently was an Asus Nook. one of those build-it-yourself bare-bones mini PCs

with an Intel, I think it was the X7 358H. And it's got that brand new dedicated graphics

in there on the integrated chip, which is way better than what they've done previously

M6 GPUs still blew it away. Right, and that's the thing with a lot of the new chips

is while the processor performance or the main CPU tests and even the NPU tests are sort of comparable

Yeah. It's the GPU that's really taking away from the PC market there

Yeah, I think so. Though, you know, honestly, in our productivity testing

even the M6 kind of blew away the other competitors. So it's really, and what's remarkable here is we're used to

at least on PC mag seeing, I think industry-wide, But, you know, generational bumps, we're used to seeing maybe 10% to 15% gains generationally

Now, this is skipping M4 to M6, so that helps. But we'll get into the M5 Pro version in a minute where it's the same story

We're seeing like 20% to 30% gains, which is pretty remarkable. So, and you know what

It's hard to deny. This thing is freaking adorable. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, it fits in my hand

You could throw it in a bag. Five by five inches. Yeah, and the form factor itself hasn't changed

The design is the same as the M4 version, and you still get all the same ports on back

and the power button is, for better or worse, still on the corner underneath, right

And should we still care about that? I get it. I mean, most mini PCs have the power button on the front

I don't personally find myself turning off my system pretty much ever unless there's a problem

usually going in sleep mode. So I don't really care too much about where the power button's placed, personally

I will say the Mac Mini's a little difficult to mount behind a monitor already

Right. So if you were to mount it behind a monitor, now it's even more difficult to turn the system off if you need to, depending on how you mount it

Yeah, but this thing is so tiny, you just toss it in your bag. Right. It's like if you have a desk setup at two locations, you're just taking this little desktop with you. Absolutely

And it's quiet, right? Oh, yeah. It's really quiet. And cool. It runs cool as well, which was great

I mean, under sustained loads for, like, gaming that I tested, yeah, it gets hot. I mean, any system gets hot if you're going to run a video game for longer than 10 minutes

But even under sustained load productivity testing, which some of those tests take 10 minutes or longer, it was cool throughout the entire thing

All right. So who is this one for? This is like the – if we're talking about the entry model, that base configuration, that's for average home user or home office

It ranges, right? Because that's how Macs work. So you can apply a Mac to your house and just whatever you want to do at home, but they're also applicable to business

So in any case, it's the ground-level Mac, which is a shame because the ground-level Mac even two years ago was only $600

It was kind of a marvel for that. It kind of blew every budget PC out of the water

And that's why they're all gone and impossible to find. Yes, exactly. There was a huge – a few folks have been paying attention

There was a huge AI boom for these machines where people were taking these and running them for agentic AI purposes

Now I think you just skirting by with 16 gigs of RAM which is what this comes with to start For agentic AI it sort of the bare minimum It similar on Windows where you need minimum 16 gigs to run Copilot It a similar situation with Apple Intelligence and Siri AI

But yeah, I think it's for the entry-level Mac fan. It's just a shame that now that's changed again

and we're back up to close to $1,000 in price for that sort of constraint or that conceit

Yeah, right. But again, even anything comparable on the Windows side is actually more expensive and not actually performance comparable

Right. A saying comes to mind, a rising tide floats all boats, but unfortunately this rising tide is price

Yeah. But in terms of the design, just to get back to that for a moment, like a lot of folks are going to look at this and say

oh, it looks, it's the same thing. And this is a thing with Mac products often is, you know

they take quite a while to do redesigns on their products. They really lean into sort of the design ID for a given product

for longer than some other brands would. But I'm not personally too concerned about it because really connectivity standards haven't really changed a ton since the previous model

This still has Thunderbolt 4 on the back, so you're going to get 40 gigs a second on there

Still got HDMI. You got your Ethernet. This changed a little bit where now you get 2.5 gigabit per second as the default, and then you can upgrade that for $100 to get 10 gigs

And this has the Bluetooth 6, right? Yes, that's a big update

And Wi-Fi 7. Yeah, I think it's a big update personally, especially if you run on Wi-Fi 7 in your house

The previous model only had Wi-Fi 6E, I think. It might have only been 6. I'm pretty sure it's 6E

But going to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 is pretty huge for a system that doesn't really have much connectivity otherwise

It's very potent connectivity, right? And you've got these Thunderbolt 4 ports. They're very versatile

You can run, I believe, up to three displays from the Mac Mini M6

Same goes for the M5. You just get a bit more on the resolution that you can pump out

But, yeah, it's a vastly powerful machine for its size. And the design doesn't really change that

And maybe next time we see one, would I like to see Thunderbolt 5 on an M6 or an M7 Mac Mini

I don't even know. Because I don't know what use cases the general audience or even the professional audience in that matter, maybe more so those folks, would want Thunderbolt 5 on a base-level Mac Mini

I think Thunderbolt 4 is enough. Do you think we'll see a Mac Mini Neo

Oh, wow. That could be exciting. That could be really exciting. Where they take this form factor, different colors

They scale back the chip to one of the mobile processors. Well, it's possible

I mean, that would be a good way to lower the price. Yes. Oh, wow

That's really exciting. I never considered that. That would be really cool. That would be really cool. Let's hope

But, yeah, otherwise, you know, I think the M6 Mac Mini is unchanged

It's the same it's ever been. It's just a little pricier. but you're getting a lot for that increase in price right it's like a relatively speaking you're

going from 600 to 900 that's a 30 increase you're seeing a relative 30 bump for that money which i

think is rare all right so that covers the m6 uh this also has an m5 pro available for it um say

again same body same everything it's just a presumably faster chip even though we're moving

back a generation in naming. Yeah, it is kind of odd, right? Like you have the M6, it looks shiny

and new. And then you're like, wait, M5 Pro, we've had that for a year now. It is kind of odd. But

the difference is in the core counts and how they're applied. So the M6 chip, just to backtrack

a little bit, is a 12 core CPU, 12 core GPU. The M5 Pro is still more powerful than that in

multi-core processing loads because it simply has more cores. So I believe it starts with 16 core

CPU and an 18 GPU, and then you have the option for, I think, $200 to upgrade that version

of the M5 Pro to an 18-core CPU and a 20-core GPU

So you're already working with a huge advantage in terms of multi-core loads versus the M6

And that's where the difference is. And that's why there's such a difference in price here. It's about a $900 difference, which almost makes it like a different product

But on top of that, you get more memory too, correct? Yes

You have higher memory capacities here. The M6, I believe, tops out at 32 gigabytes

This one tops out at 64 for the M5 Pro. And not to mention that, but more importantly

and this is something we saw in benchmark testing, it's not just the memory capacity, because that's kind of a losing game right now

with the memory crisis ongoing, AI demand mopping it all up. It's about memory bandwidth

How much speed, how much throughput can you put through those memory modules versus the others

And this is where the M5 Pro especially beats out comparable chips

especially things like, for instance, the AMD Ryzen 9 395 Max Plus

which is their sort of answer to Apple's approach to processor design

where it uses the unified memory structure instead of traditional RAM. Even in that case, it just doesn't have the memory bandwidth to keep up with

For instance, the M5 Pro can reach up to 307 gigabits per second of memory bandwidth, which is huge

whereas I believe the AI Max Plus 395 can do, I think it's 256 gigabits per second

so you're already at a huge advantage. So you brought up unified memory, and that's kind of a blessing and a curse a little bit

because if you're a PC user, maybe you've gotten used to being able to throw in an extra stick after a while

and beef up your memory, and you haven't been able to do that for a while

No. Yeah. So with the ongoing shortages, you don't want to, I guess, underbuy at this point

You want to make sure you're buying exactly what you need now and like potentially five, ten years

Yes. I've written this exact thing in my reviews. Yeah. Is you want to configure your systems for the future because you don't really have any opportunity to upgrade after that

Right. Whereas even in some mini PCs on the Windows side, you can get in there, you can pop the top off, you can change the SODIMs out, change the storage

That's just not going to happen here. And it hasn't really – I don't knock the Mac for that these days because it just hasn't been a factor for so long that I think both consumers and professionals have gotten used to this fact

Right. And you really can't deny what it seems to do for the performance

It's really wild. And like similar to M6 to M4, we're seeing 20% to 30% gains between M5 Pro to M4 Pro, which is only a single generational jump versus two

So it really an interesting story And that also helps alleviate the price bump here which is a little more substantial than it was comparatively with the M6 model The M5 Pro model I believe starts at Our model that we tested had a little bit more memory

I think it had 48 gigabytes. That was $2,800. But, however, when compared with a like-priced $2,700 top-end Windows Mini PC, this one, again, the Asus Nook, it had a considerable lead over it

It wasn't a blowout. Right. But we're talking about several percentage points here

And I think that's the thing is like when you change – when you go to buy, you're going to buy for what you're using now

But also you really have to plan ahead right now. Absolutely. You do

So there's really no way around it. Even if you're like, well, I might get into Agentic AI

Right. Right. Exactly. I don't know that anybody chooses to get into it. Right

I don't know. But, yeah, you really have to plan now for that potential change in whatever you're doing

And I guess that brings us to who's the M5 Pro for

Yeah, I think the M5 Pro is for sort of a cross-section of folks. I think it's more geared toward professionals and maybe amateur creators, things like that

On the creator front, this is definitely a better buy for those purposes

the GPU is going to just get you much further, especially video editing. If you're just like a photo editor or something like that

you probably could get away with the M6 model because it's really dependent on CPU there

in apps like Photoshop and Affinity, things like that. Where you get into video editing, that's where it leans on the GPU

and you're going to want those extra cores. So, yeah, but also you mentioned AI

and I know that the M6 model is going to be very popular for that, but I think it's going to be very popular for consumer AI, if I can make a distinction, right

You're just at home. You want to talk to Siri AI. You want it to automate some processes for you

This is more for the developer. This is more for the person who's actually creating AI tools using existing models

And what really leans into that or lends to that is the Thunderbolt 5 ports that you get on the M5 Pro model versus the M6

And that gets you up to 120 gigabytes per second of connection speed

And what that unlocks is the ability to sort of daisy chain these systems together

And then you kind of share the compute resource of all the systems, and that way you unlock access to much bigger models that require larger capacity memory stores

Right. And then you couple that with the advanced memory bandwidth, and you're off to the races

So, and since we're talking about those ports, there's a good chance

especially if you're doing video editing, that you're going to need extra storage

Yes. Because, I mean, the M5 Pro starts with 512 gigs. Is that right

Yeah, it's really rough in both cases. I should mention, like, the M6 model starts with 256

This one starts with 512. In either case, it's not a good look for starting prices

Right, so you're probably going to need more gigabytes of storage there. Yes. So, yeah, I guess that's another thing to take into consideration is that you're probably going to have to add on storage at some point

Yeah, and the tough thing with that is, yes, Thunderbolt 5 is incredibly fast, but it's never going to be local storage

Right. And it's tough now because the storage prices are also commensurately increasing in price

And it's sort of – we were used to $200 increments, right, when you're buying a Mac

Like, you know, doubling your RAM costs $200, doubling your storage. It's definitely exponentialized, if I could make up a word there

and you're seeing ballooning in prices between tiers of storage and stuff like that

You could spend, I think when I priced it up, you could spend as much as $3,800 on storage on this device alone

And that's probably not worth it in the long run unless you're using it for extreme professional cases, things like that

Right. AI development. You can obviously get by with external storage. It's just not going to be as fast if you want to rely on it for specific uses

Right. So the M5 Pro model starts at $16.99, which is a bit up from, I believe, the M4 Pro model, which started at $12.99 to begin with

So yeah, M5 Pro, definitely for the professional or the amateur sort of creator at home who really wants to just get more out of their system

Maybe they're specific enthusiasts, but otherwise I wouldn't bother. All right, so that takes us through the Mac Mini with the M6 and the M5 Pro

and above that also came the new Mac Studio and that doesn't even have an M6 chip in it, right

Isn't that weird? Yeah. Yeah, it is strange. A lot of people will look at that and go, well, the M6 is the newest

What's going on here? What we're looking at is a slow rollout. This is what Apple does for all of its new M series chips

You get the M base level chip first and often they launch in iPads, oddly enough

We've seen that happen in the past. We have. This time we're seeing it launch in a Mac Mini, a little more appropriate

But that is just the ground floor for that. And it's a brand new lithography for them

It's two nanometers in size on the die, which is the smallest we've gotten

So that's exciting. But they're going to roll out the M6 Pro and M6 Max

potentially later in 2026. We don't know. Or more likely, possibly early 2027

Right. We usually see some sort of Apple release coming up here in late October or November, right

So there might be still a MacBook Pro or something to come

Right. And the thing is here, the M6, you're going to see in benchmarks that the M6 is going to outperform chips like the M5 Max and even the M5 Ultra, which is a quad-die chip

It's on the interconnect that they've used called UltraFusion. And that's because of the new lithography

Right. It's a 10-nanometer chip or 2-nanometer chip. And that's just going to do better on a single-core basis

and that's why the Mac Mini is better for the base level one is better for general audiences

because those single core performance tasks like web browsing documents spreadsheets things like that they all run

on a single core most of the time whereas when you get into the Mac Studios

you're getting into immense amounts of cores for these chips you've got the M5 Max

and then that itself is actually two M5 chips put together That's a dual core or a dual die chip

But then the M5 Ultra takes two of those M5 Max chips which those themselves are already on an interconnect and they created what they call a quad interconnect And then you getting into the 80 GPU

You're getting into immense processing. Right, and with all those cores, with the massive amount of cores, a massive price comes along with it

Yes, yes. So what does it start at? $2,500? $2,499, yes, for the M5 Max

And I believe it's more than $5,000 for the M5 Ultra model

And it just goes up from there. I think the unit we tested was up over $12,000

So it's a lot. It's not a hobbyist computer, really. No, not even. I said the M5 Pro Mac Mini would be for the enthusiast at-home amateur creator or things like that

I wouldn't even put the Mac Studio in that class. I think if you're buying a Mac Studio for yourself, you might have messed up and you should go back on the website and reconfigure before you hit buy

If the Mac Studio is coming to you and it's not from a fleet manager at your production studio or something like that

You always want to hope somebody else is paying for something that expensive. Yes, absolutely. But that's the one I want if I'm gaming on a Mac, right

Yes, if you want to game on a Mac. Yes, it is possible. And look, to their credit, they have made massive gains in gaming performance

It's really impressive. you can actually get to run on a Mac. I had some luck with Cyberpunk

testing it on the Mac minis and getting very playable frame rates

obviously playing with AI rendering and things like that. But that's more of a side thing

If you're a professional who works with Macs and you want to game on the side at night

after you're done pushing the latest release of a code base or a new cut of a video

then yes, you can get into gaming. So that was a joke. But yes, thank you for the explanation

But yes, I guess the key question is, which do I go with

Am I going to go with the Max or the Ultra? And now, like, what's going to separate

Who am I to buy those? Right, exactly. So the M5 Max model, there's actually less of a distinction these days now because the M5 Ultra, just to talk about that real quick

Like Apple's Ultra chips used to be taking two of the previous generation's chips together and putting them into a single product

Right. Now we're putting current generation chips into that sort of format

And that's why they call it QuadDie because, again, those themselves are interconnected

So the M5 Max version of the Max Studio is definitely for an even higher level of creator, particularly for video

Maybe the break-off point should be high-res video for the M5 Pro, maybe 1440, 1600p video

Right. And M5 Max in the Max Studio, maybe 4K, 8K video

That's what you're looking at. And obviously, you have a lot of AI, you know, applications that you could use for the M5 Max model

But if you're really getting into developing large-scale, you know, new products using AI models

You're going to want to use the M5 Ultra product. And not to mention even then, because it's already pushing $12,000 in our test units

They all also, of course, have Thunderbolt 5. And they can handle the interconnect between the systems over that

Because those could be daisy-chained. Yes. And then you're looking at the memory bandwidth on the M5 Ultra can reach, I believe, 1.2 terabytes per second, which is insane

Now imagine daisy-chaining that power, and you can get into two, three, four terabytes per second of memory bandwidth, which is just nuts

And that's what it takes these days to operate at that level of cutting-edge AI development

So that's where I would really recommend you look if you're in that camp

Yeah, and just to be clear, this is still the Mac Mini in front of us. The Mac Studio is considerably larger but still really compact

Still really small. Yeah, I mean, if you're used to having like a giant desktop tower, the studio is just remarkably small

And it's heavy. It is. It's not something you want to throw in your backpack

I think it's 8 pounds. Yeah, it's 8 pounds, which is dense. It's dense for a thing of its size

Yeah. Now, what this does call into question, you know, 80-core GPU, you think, whoa, that's going to be massive

And it is. However, if we're talking amongst workstations, it still doesn't hold a candle to NVIDIA's RTX 8 6000 Pro models where you have a dedicated GPU on a card, on a PCIe slot

That's still going to blow away the M5 Ultra GPU. It's just a matter of physics

You're not going to get around that. It has its own power delivery. It has its own cooling where this is all cooled on the same heat sink and all that

So it's just not going to compare in that case. So if you're in need of either AI compute that requires massive amounts of fan-cooled, self-powered GPU, you're not going to get that here

Maybe you could reach it. Maybe if you have – we didn't do this testing, but if you have multiple M5 Ultra models and you daisy-chained together, could you reach the power level of a singular PC

Yes, of a star. Possibly. Who knows which one happens first? But jokes aside, you're still not going to compare it to something like – I believe my colleague Brian West ever tested it against a Dell Pro Max Tower and a Lenovo ThinkCenter workstation, and it just didn't compare in those regards

So, yeah, you could get there. But then you're going to be spending almost in triplicate of what you would spend on that PC workstation

So there's still a place, folks. There's still a place for PC. And there's plenty

There's plenty. And the Mac doesn't really change that. And again, you're going to hope that somebody else is putting the bill for that

Absolutely. Absolutely. My goodness. You're looking at – if you want to connect four of these together with Thunderbolt 5, you're looking at potentially $40,000

Yeah. So, yeah. All right. Thank you, folks, for watching. I've been Joe Osborne for PCMag

And I'm Josh Goldman with CNET. And you can check back on both of our respective websites in the coming weeks for more coverage on the Mac Mini from M6 to M5 Pro to the Mac Studios with the M5 Ultra

And we'd love to know what you think about these things. If it's something you want, I'm still indifferent, and I'm assuming..

I'm still a fan. Yeah. So let us know in the comments what you think about these, and we'll see you later

Bye