If you were waiting for the cheapest MacBook Pro to get a new chip, it now costs more. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, which Apple announced on October 27, starts at $1,999. That buys 1 TB of storage, the same amount the M5 model has come with since March at $1,699. Pre-orders open October 28, and deliveries start November 6.
What the extra $300 buys
The M6 has 12 CPU cores and 12 GPU cores, two more of each than the M5. Apple rates graphics up to 30 percent faster than the M5 and on-device AI work up to 25 percent faster. In its app tests (Blender, Xcode, Affinity and a local language model), the gains over the M5 run from 1.2x to 1.3x.
Wireless moves up to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, through Apple’s N1 chip. The Wi-Fi Alliance credits Wi-Fi 7’s biggest speed gain to wider 320 MHz channels. Those only run in the 6 GHz band.
So the faster Wi-Fi does nothing for you until your router supports Wi-Fi 7 on 6 GHz too.
Everything else carries over. The screen still peaks at 1,600 nits for HDR, and the weight is still 1.55 kg. Ports are the same too: HDMI, an SD card slot, MagSafe and three Thunderbolt 4. Apple rates the battery at up to 24 hours of video streaming, the same figure it gave the M5 model in March.
The fine print on memory and ports
The base model has 16 GB of memory, running at 153 GB/s on Apple’s spec sheet. The 170 GB/s in Apple’s headline needs a memory upgrade. That gap is the one we’d weigh most. Apple sells this laptop on running AI models locally, and those lean hard on memory size and speed, so the cheapest configuration is the weakest fit for the pitch.
Its Thunderbolt 4 ports top out at 40 Gb/s, and the M5 Pro version gets Thunderbolt 5 at three times that speed. You can connect two external displays, one fewer than on the M5 Pro. Fast charging to half full in 30 minutes needs a 96 W or larger USB-C adapter.
Our take
If you own an M5 MacBook Pro 14, skip this one. The screen, battery rating and ports are unchanged, and Apple’s own app tests put it 20 to 30 percent ahead. Coming from an M1 or an Intel Mac, it’s a real upgrade, but price the 24 GB version before you settle on the $1,999 one. And if a store still has the 1 TB M5 below $1,699, we think that’s the better deal for most people.
