Apple Launches M6 14-Inch MacBook Pro and New iMac

Apple has announced a 14-inch MacBook Pro and a new iMac with its M6 chip, issuing the MacBook Pro release and the iMac release on 27 October, the day before its launch event in Los Angeles. The MacBook Pro starts at £1,999 and the iMac at £1,499 in the UK.

Both can be pre-ordered from 28 October and reach customers and Apple Stores from Friday 6 November. Apple’s pitch for both machines leans heavily on on-device AI, alongside the usual claims of faster processors and graphics.

In brief

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 starts at £1,999 (£1,899 with education savings); in the US it is $1,999.
The iMac with M6 starts at £1,499 for a 10-core model and £1,699 for a 12-core model.
Apple claims up to 24 hours of battery life for the MacBook Pro, “the longest ever in a Mac”.
The OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro that Bloomberg reported on is not part of these announcements.

What is in the 14-inch MacBook Pro

Apple says M6 “features an advanced 12-core CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core”, paired with a 12-core GPU that has a Neural Accelerator in each core. Apple says the CPU has two more cores than before. Apple claims graphics up to 30% faster and AI workloads up to 25% faster than on M5, and says its Dual 16-core Neural Engine is up to 1.9 times faster than M5’s.

The base machine comes with 16GB of unified memory, configurable to 32GB, with 170GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple puts battery life at up to 24 hours. The laptop also gains Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, keeps its Liquid Retina XDR display with up to 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness, and offers a nano-texture option. It has three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, an SDXC slot, MagSafe 3 and a headphone jack, and comes in space black and silver.

In Apple’s own testing, an M6 MacBook Pro produced the first token from a local large language model 1.3 times faster than an M5 model, and rendered in Blender 1.3 times faster. Shelly Goldberg, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering, said: “With the powerful M6 chip, we’re taking performance to the next level, with a boost in CPU speed and graphics and even more powerful capabilities for on-device AI.”

What changes in the iMac

The 24-inch iMac keeps its 4.5K display and thin design, now in seven colours. The 10-core model costs £1,499 (£1,449 with education savings); the 12-core version with a 12-core GPU costs £1,699 (£1,599). Only the 12-core models get four Thunderbolt 4 ports and 2.5Gb Ethernet, which Apple says is up to 2.5 times faster than before.

Apple claims the iMac is up to 18 times faster than “the most popular Intel-based iMac”, with up to twice the graphics performance of the M4 model and up to five times faster on-device AI. In Apple’s tests, running a model in LM Studio was five times faster than on M4, and Excel calculations 1.5 times faster. Both machines ship with macOS 27 and Apple’s Siri AI.

What the UK store shows

Apple’s UK store already lists the M6 MacBook Pro from £1,999, or £61.44 a month over 36 months on its finance offer, and the UK iMac page lists the two M6 models at £1,499 and £1,699. The UK prices are numerically the same as Apple’s US dollar prices.

The UK edition of Apple’s releases still says pre-orders open in “35 countries and regions, including the U.S.”, without naming the UK. The store listing suggests the UK is among them.

Why Apple released the M6 Macs a day before its LA event

Apple usually saves new Macs for the stage. Putting them out by press release, a day before a hardware event that Apple’s marketing chief Greg Joswiak teased with “Can’t wait to pro and tell”, suggests these are not the headline products. The iPad mini with an OLED screen was also announced by release, on 26 October. That leaves the stage on 28 October for something Apple has not yet announced.

The most-discussed candidate is the OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro that Bloomberg reported on. Neither release mentions it. The M6 model replaces only the entry 14-inch MacBook Pro: Apple’s UK store still sells 14-inch and 16-inch models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. A redesigned higher-end model would fit that gap, but until Apple announces it, it remains a report and nothing more.

The other message is about AI. Apple measures both machines against local AI tasks, such as how quickly a language model gives its first answer, rather than only against video exports or code builds. That matches the direction set by the M5 MacBook Air, and 16GB of memory as standard matters for running models on the device. The 32GB ceiling on the base MacBook Pro, though, still limits the size of model a buyer can run locally compared with the Pro and Max chips.

All of the performance figures come from Apple’s own testing on pre-release hardware. Independent reviews will show how far they hold up once the machines ship on 6 November.