14-inch MacBook Pro with M6: from 2,329 euros

On 27 October Apple announced a new entry-level MacBook Pro. The 14-inch MacBook Pro gets the M6 chip, while the design and the display stay the same. Pre-orders open on 28 October (18:10 CET), and deliveries start on 6 November.

M6 with 12 cores

The M6 has a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, in both cases two more than the previous generation. Each GPU core has a Neural Accelerator. The Neural Engine has two times 16 cores and memory bandwidth goes up to 170 GB/s.

Apple gives a number of comparisons with the M5. Graphics are up to 30 percent faster, on-device AI tasks up to 25 percent and an Xcode build up to 1.3 times. Compared with a 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1, that would be up to 11 times faster graphics and up to 13 times faster AI performance. These are figures from Apple’s own testing.

Display, ports and battery

The display is the familiar 14.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR display with mini-LED and ProMotion, with 1,000 nits for regular content and 1,600 nits peak for HDR. A nano-texture display is optional. The ports are three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card reader, MagSafe 3 and a headphone jack. Wireless is Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, previously Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

According to Apple the battery lasts up to 24 hours of video streaming, and with a 96W adapter it charges to 50 percent in about 30 minutes. The camera is a 12 megapixel Center Stage camera. It comes in space black and silver and runs macOS 27.

Dutch pricing

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 starts at 2,329 euros, 100 euros more than the M5 version. That is the configuration with 16 GB of memory and 1 TB of storage. You can choose 24 or 32 GB of memory and 2 or 4 TB of storage.

For business users

If your M1 or Intel Mac is due for replacement, this is the entry model to look at. If you already have an M5, the gains according to Apple’s own figures are mainly in graphics (up to 30 percent) and AI (up to 25 percent). Also keep an eye on the new MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen, announced for the same date. Siri AI arrives in beta with macOS 27.2, but not in Dutch.