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Apple M6 MacBook Pro and iMac: Pre-Orders Open Today, From $1,999 and $1,499
Apple’s new M6 MacBook Pro and iMac open for pre-orders today, Wednesday, October 28, and reach stores on Friday, November 6. Apple announced both machines on Tuesday by press release, a day before its “Pro and Tell” event. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 starts at $1,999, and the 24-inch iMac with M6 starts at $1,499 — the same starting prices Apple set in June, so neither machine got more expensive.
The MacBook Pro
The 14-inch MacBook Pro gets the full M6: a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, two more cores each than the base M5, with Neural Accelerators in every GPU core and a dual 16-core Neural Engine. Memory starts at 16GB and goes up to 32GB, with bandwidth up to 170GB/s, and battery life is rated at up to 24 hours, which Apple calls the longest ever in a Mac. Apple says graphics are up to 30% faster than the M5 and on-device AI work, like processing prompts for a local language model, is up to 25% faster.
Everything else is familiar: the same Liquid Retina XDR display, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe 3 and a headphone jack, in space black or silver. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 are new. Education pricing starts at $1,899.
The iMac
The iMac is the bigger jump, because it last moved in 2024 with the M4 chip. The $1,499 model has a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, and the $1,699 model gets the full 12-core chip. Apple claims up to twice as fast graphics and up to five times faster on-device AI than the M4 iMac, plus SSDs up to twice as fast and optional 2.5-gigabit Ethernet. The 24-inch 4.5K display and the seven colours carry over, and ports scale with the chip: two Thunderbolt 4 on the base model, four on the higher one. For Intel-based iMac upgraders, Apple claims up to 18 times faster performance than the most popular Intel-based iMac.
Don’t mix this up with today’s event
One confusion to avoid: the machines on pre-order today are not the touchscreen MacBook Pro expected at Apple’s “Pro and Tell” event this afternoon. That redesigned model, with a touch OLED display, is Bloomberg-reported, not Apple-confirmed, and it is a separate machine from the M6 entry-level MacBook Pro. Since nothing ships until November 6, waiting a few hours for the event costs nothing — and it decides whether the right Mac to buy is the one on pre-order today or the one announced tonight.
Who gains most? M4 iMac owners get a large jump, and Intel Mac owners get a very large one. M5 MacBook Pro owners get a modest one: Apple’s own comparisons are against the M5, and the gain there is real but not dramatic. The M6’s real story is on-device AI: with a Neural Accelerator in every GPU core, these are the first entry-level Macs built to run local AI models fast, without sending your work to the cloud.