On 25 August Apple announced a new generation of the Mac mini with two chips: the all-new M6, and the M5 Pro for heavy work. Pre-orders opened the same day through Apple’s online store in thirty countries, with delivery starting 22 September.
What this means for anyone in Kuwait
Apple does not sell its devices directly in Kuwait. Its Kuwait site carries no online store at all — instead there is a “where to buy” page pointing to authorised resellers, and for Macs it names Gait and Xcite.
So the date that matters to the reader here is not the day pre-orders opened, but 22 September, which is when Apple says the machine starts reaching its stores and authorised resellers. Local prices are set by the reseller and have not been announced, so do not estimate the price by converting the dollar figure.
Apple’s announced prices
- Mac mini with M6 — from $899, and $799 for students and education.
- Mac mini with M5 Pro — from $1,699, and $1,599 for education.
M6: what actually changed
The chip is built on a 2-nanometre process, with 12 CPU cores and 12 GPU cores, two more of each than the previous generation. The real novelty is that every GPU core now carries a neural accelerator, a first for the Mac mini. Alongside it sits a dual 16-core neural engine.
Apple’s own figures, all measured against the M4 Mac mini: AI performance four times faster, graphics and storage twice as fast, and processing 40 per cent faster.
Unified memory is 16GB as standard, rising to 32, with 170GB/s of bandwidth.
The difference between the two versions is not only speed
This is the point that gets lost in launch coverage: the two versions differ in ports and memory ceiling, not just in speed.
- The M6 version has three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a 32GB memory ceiling.
- The M5 Pro version has three Thunderbolt 5 ports, memory up to 64GB at 307GB/s, a CPU up to 18 cores and a GPU up to 20.
For anyone buying the machine to run AI models locally or to edit raw video, the ceiling is the constraint rather than the speed.
What the two versions share
Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and a 2.5-gigabit Ethernet port with a 10-gigabit option. Two USB-C ports and a headphone jack on the front, HDMI on the back.
macOS 27 is available now as a public beta, and ships as a free update in the autumn.
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