First impressions: Apple 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, the quiet chip swap scheduled one day before A...
No keynote. Apple slipped the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 out as a Tuesday press release, and the timing is hard to miss when Wednesday belongs to the touch screen MacBook Pro everyone has been waiting on. Dear MacBook Pro, there’s nothing personal here. Launching the day before your own flashier stand-in is a rough spot for any laptop.
I carry a MacBook Air. That makes me the exact person the entry Pro gets pitched at, the Air owner Apple wants to glance up the lineup and feel a little underdressed. Whether a chip bump alone pulls that off is what I want to pick at.
Two extra cores and a 24-hour promise
Twelve CPU cores now, up from 10, on what’s being reported as Apple’s first 2nm chip. The GPU picks up two cores of its own, each with a Neural Accelerator bolted in, and Apple’s lab says the result is up to 30 percent more graphics muscle than M5. I’d want to watch a long Blender render before trusting the 1.3x figure Apple attaches to ray tracing, but on paper it’s a bigger step than I expected from a Tuesday press release.
My old Dell Inspiron had me looking for an outlet before the workday was over. Apple says the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 can last 24 hours, a new record for any Mac. That’s a big claim, and I’d want to have a hands-on time before spending the money.
Shelly Goldberg, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering, calls the 14-inch model “the pro laptop of choice” for college students on up. The ports argue her case better than the silicon does. Full-size HDMI and an SDXC slot both stuck around, and a photographer dumping cards in a hotel room won’t care about Blender scores at all.
Read the fine print first
Apple’s scariest multipliers, 11x graphics and 13x AI, are measured against a 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 from 2020. Fine print only. Next to M5, the multithreaded gain looks closer to 1.2x, a number I’d have liked to see up top.
The $1,999 starting price gets you only 16 GB of RAM, and Apple won’t let you configure more than 32 GB. A strange limit for a machine meant to run language models on-device.
Siri AI comes with an asterisk, too. It’s a beta in macOS 27.2, and Apple’s footnotes already warn about everyday limits on server-side requests, with expanded access costing money later. Buy the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 for the hardware you can count on today, and treat the AI as a bonus that may arrive with a meter running.
Where the M1 crowd comes in
Apple is aiming the M6 at people who bought an M1 MacBook in 2020 or 2021 and haven’t upgraded since. Many are still happy with their old machines, and they’re not rushing to change that. The pitch is up to 4 more hours of battery life and an extra Thunderbolt port. Students pay $1,899 with the education discount. I’d pay closer attention when I had to spend hours exporting files on my MacBook Air.
My take for now
I’m interested, but only as a possible M1 replacement. Preorders start October 28, when Apple is also expected to show off a MacBook Pro with an OLED touch screen and M5 Pro or M5 Max chips. That’s an awkward time to ask $1,999 for the familiar chassis. I’d wait to see the redesigned model’s price before choosing between a faster base chip and a display I can poke with a finger.
Steve Jobs once argued that touch surfaces “don’t want to be vertical.” That was 2010. Apple’s rumored touch screen MacBook Pro could put that statement back in the spotlight. I’ll give it 24 hours, then look for sustained-load results and a week of everyday battery testing before making up my mind.
