Apple's M6 Macs start at $1,499, ship Nov 6

Apple's Oct 27 announcement puts the M6 chip into two machines at once, the $1,499 iMac and the $1,999 14-inch MacBook Pro, and sets both to ship on Nov 6. The centerpiece is a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, which Apple says is 1.9x faster than M5 and up to 13x faster at LLM time-to-first-token versus M1. That comparison reaches back to the first Apple Silicon generation, framing the upgrade pitch around how quickly a local AI model can begin producing a response rather than raw chip specs alone.

The MacBook Pro configuration Apple detailed pairs that engine with a 12-core CPU, 170GB/s memory bandwidth, Wi-Fi 7 and 32GB max unified memory. Read together, those additions point to a machine tuned for running AI models on the device itself — a use case Apple ties to Apple Intelligence. The headline speed claims are Apple's own, so independent testing will be the real measure of whether the gap versus M1 holds up in everyday use.