Apple Unveils 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac with M6 Chip, Claims Up to 24 Hours of Battery
Apple unveiled a new 14-inch MacBook Pro powered by its M6 chip on Tuesday, October 27, rating the notebook at up to 24 hours of battery life. The company also announced an iMac built around the same chip. Both were revealed a day ahead of a “Pro and Tell” event scheduled for Wednesday, according to Reuters.
The M6 pairs a 12-core CPU with a 12-core GPU. TechCrunch reports Apple's claims of up to 30% faster graphics and up to 25% faster AI workloads than the M5. The chip carries a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, the dedicated block that accelerates machine learning tasks. Apple previously described the M6 as its first 2 nm chip, a reference to the manufacturing process node, when it introduced the M6 and M5 Ultra in August. Times of India reports that the update adds two more CPU cores.
Unified memory, which the CPU and GPU share instead of drawing from separate pools, starts at 16GB and can be configured up to 32GB. Memory bandwidth, the rate at which data moves between memory and the processor, reaches up to 170GB/s, up from 153GB/s on the M5 chip. Apple's newsroom release describes the battery rating as the longest Apple has given any Mac, and calls the chip's performance per watt industry-leading.
Connectivity moves to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. The port set includes HDMI, MagSafe 3, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SDXC card slot, and a headphone jack. The camera is a 12-megapixel unit. The notebook supports fast charging to 50% in 30 minutes when paired with a compatible high-wattage USB-C power adapter.
The MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 and comes in space black and silver. The new iMac starts at $1,499 and features a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display, offered in blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange, and silver. Both machines can be preordered starting October 28 and will be available starting November 6.
The new models sit alongside products Apple introduced earlier this year and in August. In March, Apple launched MacBook laptops with M5 chips starting at $1,099, and its 14-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro models started at $2,199 with 1 terabyte of storage as standard, up from 512GB. In August, Apple also unveiled a Mac mini featuring M6 and M5 Pro, alongside the M6 and M5 Ultra chips.
In my view, the figures that will matter most to engineers are the ones that can be measured under sustained load: the bandwidth increase, the Neural Engine throughput on real inference workloads, and whether the 24-hour rating holds across mixed tasks rather than video playback alone. Apple's percentages are relative to its own M5 baseline, and the comparison conditions behind them will determine how useful they are for capacity planning.
The broader context here is a product line that now spans two chip generations at once, with the M6 arriving in a 14-inch notebook and an iMac while the M5 Pro remains in the MacBook Pro range. For buyers, the decision will likely come down to memory ceiling, port requirements, and the price gap between the $1,999 and $2,199 starting points. For developers and creative professionals who run local models or heavy media pipelines, the 32GB configuration and higher memory bandwidth are the parts of the announcement most likely to change how they work.
