Apple Gives the $1,999 14-Inch MacBook Pro an M6 Chip, Wi-Fi 7 and 24-Hour Battery Life

The entry-level pro laptop keeps its design but gains two CPU cores, two GPU cores and Apple's N1 wireless chip. Pre-orders open Wednesday, the same morning Apple holds its "Pro and tell" event in Los Angeles.

CUPERTINO, Calif. - Apple on Tuesday moved its least expensive MacBook Pro to the M6 chip, a quiet spec update that lands one day before the company’s “Pro and tell” event in Los Angeles. The new 14-inch model starts at $1,999, opens for pre-orders on Wednesday, Oct. 28, and arrives in stores and on doorsteps on Friday, Nov. 6, Apple said in its announcement.

The outside has not changed. The inside has. M6 brings a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, two more cores of each than the M5 chip it replaces. Apple says graphics are up to 30 percent faster than M5 and on-device AI work, such as processing prompts for a large language model, is up to 25 percent faster. The Neural Engine is now what Apple calls a Dual 16-core design, 32 cores in all, which the company says runs up to 1.9 times faster than M5’s.

Apple’s M6 chip has a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU. Image: Apple

MacRumors reported that the CPU splits into two super cores, four performance cores and six efficiency cores. Memory bandwidth rises from 153GB/s to 170GB/s, but only on configurations with 24GB or 32GB of memory. The base machine ships with 16GB.

The most practical upgrades may be the ones that do not show up on a benchmark chart. Apple’s N1 wireless chip adds Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. The laptop can now drive two external 4K displays at up to 165Hz, up from 144Hz, according to MacRumors. Battery life is rated at up to 24 hours, which Apple calls the longest ever in a Mac, and the machine can reach 50 percent charge in 30 minutes with a 96-watt or higher USB-C adapter.

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing chief, announced the new Macs on X. Screenshot: @gregjoz on X

Everything else carries over: the Liquid Retina XDR display with up to 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness and an optional nano-texture finish, a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, six speakers, HDMI, MagSafe 3, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SDXC card slot and a headphone jack. It comes in space black and silver.

The ports on the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6. Image: Apple

The $1,999 price buys 1TB of storage. That sounds generous, but Apple dropped the 512GB version of the previous model in March, MacRumors noted, so there is no cheaper way in. Configurations run up to 32GB of memory and 4TB of storage, and the education price starts at $1,899. Pre-orders open at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time in 35 countries and regions.

Apple compares the new machine with the M1 MacBook Pro to make the case for upgrading. It claims up to 13 times faster time to first token when processing a prompt for a large language model and up to 11.7 times faster ray-traced rendering in Blender. Owners of M5 models get more modest gains of about 1.3 times in the same tests, by Apple’s count.

Apple pitches the new model at developers, creators and students. Image: Apple

“With the powerful M6 chip, we’re taking performance to the next level, with a boost in CPU speed and graphics and even more powerful capabilities for on-device AI,” said Shelly Goldberg, Apple’s vice president of hardware engineering.

Video: Apple / YouTube

The bigger Mac news may still be ahead. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported that Apple is expected to show a touchscreen MacBook Pro at Wednesday’s event, and Engadget noted that the 16-inch MacBook Pro was not part of Tuesday’s update. Apple also released a new iMac with M6 on Tuesday, a day after the OLED iPad mini.