Apple's Mac refresh clears the desktop order before the September 9 phone event

Somebody signed the purchase order for M4 minis as build boxes, and somebody has to say on Monday whether the M6 is worth a swap. Apple picked the comparison for them. The up-to-40% CPU figure and the up-to-4x AI figure are measured against a Mac mini running the 10-core M4 with 32GB of memory and 2TB of storage ^[13], and because the mini line's previous generation was that M4 machine, those percentages cover two chip generations rather than one ^[22].

The spec deltas underneath are smaller. The M6 adds two CPU cores and two GPU cores over the M5, 20% more of each ^[4][17]. Memory bandwidth goes to 170GB/s from 153GB/s, close to 11% ^[6][16]. The neural engine is the one worth reading twice: two 16-core engines replace one, so 32 cores against 16 ^[5], a doubling of hardware carrying a claimed 4x on AI tasks ^[18]. Apple did not break out where the rest of that multiple comes from, and until your own model runs on one, neither can you.

The Studio is a different purchase. Its published gains sit in I/O and display work rather than chip generation: Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 through the N1 chip, plus genlock over USB-C and support for eight displays ^[9]. The M5 Ultra's 36-core CPU splits into 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, and Apple rates it at 1.25x single-threaded and 1.3x multithreaded against the M3 Ultra in the machine it replaces ^[10]. A quarter more single-thread against a part two generations old is the figure to hold against your slowest compile step, more useful than the core count.

The sort takes two facts you already have in your CI timings: whether the slow job is single-threaded or wide, and whether the machine sits on one desk or serves a queue. Single-threaded on a desk points at the mini, where the per-core generation gain lives. Wide and serving a queue points at the Studio, where 36 cores and the faster storage path do work a rack of small boxes cannot. Wide on one desk is the video room, and that is who genlock and eight displays were specified for. Single-threaded serving a queue is a fleet of minis, and there the M5 Pro option matters, because "Mac mini" on a purchase order now spans two chip generations ^[3] and the asset tag needs the chip written on it.

The subscription line is smaller and more irritating. Twelve months of the monthly increase comes to $24 a person, while the annual plan carries $20 of it, a $4 gap in favour of annual billing ^[20], which across 100 reimbursed seats is $2,400 a year added at the monthly rate ^[21]. That is the fourth increase since the service launched ^[14]. The change most likely to generate tickets costs nothing: US English Magic Keyboards now show glyphs where the edge keys used to read tab, caps lock, shift and return ^[11], so the onboarding screenshot that tells a new hire to press caps lock no longer matches the hardware in the box.

If the honest answer to the refresh question is that the M4 boxes are queueing and near the end of their depreciation schedule, that is a replacement-cycle argument, and it wins without borrowing Apple's percentages.