Apple Drops M6 Macs Before Its Rumoured Touchscreen Reveal

By Daniel Rao | 27 October 2026

Apple has just launched two new Macs that it clearly does not want you to think too hard about — because the Mac everyone is actually waiting for arrives tomorrow. The 14-inch MacBook Pro and the iMac, both rebuilt around Apple's new M6 chip, went on sale by press release on Tuesday, one day before the company's "Pro and tell" event in Los Angeles, where Bloomberg has reported Apple will unveil its first touch-screen MacBook Pro. That timing is not an accident. It is a holding pattern with a price tag.

Do not mistake that for a dismissal. The M6 machines are genuinely faster, they last longer on battery, and for one particular group of buyers — anyone still clinging to an Intel Mac or an M1 machine — they are arguably the best value Apple has ever put in this chassis. But for everyone else, the honest question is not whether the M6 is good. It is whether it is worth buying 24 hours before Apple shows you what comes next.

Photo: A MacBook Pro from an earlier generation. File photo — this is not the new M6 machine, which keeps the same design. Credit: Premeditated, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

What Apple actually announced

The announcement, issued from Cupertino on Tuesday, covers exactly two machines. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 starts at $1,999 ($1,899 with education pricing), and the new iMac with M6 starts at $1,499. Customers in 35 countries and regions, including the United States, can pre-order both from Wednesday, 28 October, with availability starting Friday, 6 November.

Both machines run macOS 27, both get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and both are built around the same pitch: AI work that happens on the device, not in the cloud. Apple says the M6 MacBook Pro delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics and up to 25 percent faster AI performance than its M5 predecessor, with up to 24 hours of battery life — the longest ever in a Mac. The new iMac, jumping straight from the M4 chip, delivers up to five times faster on-device AI performance than the model it replaces.

We compared Apple's press materials line by line with Reuters' wire report and the M5 spec sheets, and the headline numbers check out as Apple's own claims — which is worth stating plainly, because every percentage in this story comes from Apple's testing, not independent benchmarks. No reviewer has had these machines long enough to verify them yet.

Inside the M6 chip

The M6 is not a revolution. It is a thorough, slightly impatient revision. The chip carries a 12-core CPU — two super cores, four performance cores and six efficiency cores — paired with a 12-core GPU that has Neural Accelerators built into every core. That is two more CPU cores and two more GPU cores than the M5. The Neural Engine doubles from a single 16-core unit to a dual 16-core design, which Apple says delivers up to 1.9 times the AI throughput of the M5.

Memory bandwidth rises to 170GB/s, though only on the 24GB and 32GB configurations; the base 16GB model stays at the M5's 153GB/s, a detail Apple does not put in its headlines. The M6 itself is not brand new either — Pocket-lint reports it made its debut in August in the redesigned Mac mini — so this launch is really about spreading an existing chip across the rest of the entry-level Mac line.

Against the M1, the numbers get silly in the way only Apple comparisons do: up to 11 times faster graphics and up to 13 times faster AI performance than the 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro of 2020. Against the machine most people are actually upgrading from — an M4 or M5 — the gains are real but measured: about 1.3 times faster in Blender renders, Xcode builds and the time an on-device language model takes to start answering.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro: same laptop, sharper edges

Everything about the new MacBook Pro will feel familiar, and Apple is not pretending otherwise. The design is unchanged: space black or silver, the same Liquid Retina XDR display with up to 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness and a nano-texture option, the same 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, the same six-speaker sound system, and the same generous port selection — three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, MagSafe 3, an SDXC card slot and a headphone jack.

What changed is under the skin and at the margins. The base configuration now starts with 16GB of unified memory, configurable up to 32GB, and 1TB of storage as standard — the 512GB option was quietly dropped in March, so the $1,999 starting price buys you more storage than it did a year ago. Fast charging reaches 50 percent in 30 minutes with a compatible higher-wattage USB-C adapter, and the machine can now drive two external 4K displays at up to 165Hz, up from 144Hz.

"The 14-inch MacBook Pro is the pro laptop of choice for a wide range of users — from college students, to business professionals across every industry, to multidisciplinary creators doing it all on one device," said Shelly Goldberg, Apple's vice president of Hardware Engineering. "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. With its amazing battery life, remarkable Liquid Retina XDR display, and even faster connectivity, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 delivers a fantastic combination of performance, capability, and value."

Goldberg's pitch is aimed squarely at upgraders, and the numbers back her up on that front: Apple claims up to 14 additional hours of battery life for anyone coming from an Intel-based Mac, and up to four more hours for M1 owners. If your laptop still has an Intel sticker on it, this is not a close call.

The iMac skips a generation — and gets the bigger upgrade

Quietly, the iMac is the more interesting of the two launches. Apple last refreshed its all-in-one desktop in 2024 with the M4 chip, so this machine jumps straight past the M5 to the M6 — a two-generation leap that shows in the claims. Alongside the fivefold AI improvement, Apple says the new iMac offers up to twice the graphics performance of the M4 model, up to 18 times the performance of the most popular Intel-based iMac, and storage up to twice as fast as before.

The rest is the iMac you already know: a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display with 500 nits of brightness and support for more than a billion colours, a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, a three-microphone array and a six-speaker system with Spatial Audio, colour-matched keyboard and mouse or trackpad, and the same seven colours — blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange and silver. The base model, at $1,499, pairs a 10-core CPU with a 10-core GPU; a 12-core version starts at $1,699. Both get Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports, optional 2.5-gigabit Ethernet, and support for up to two external 6K displays.

For a family computer or a design studio's front desk, this is a genuinely substantial refresh. The iMac had been the forgotten Mac — two years without an update is an eternity in this lineup — and the M6 finally drags it back to the front of the queue.

The awkward timing: tomorrow changes everything

Here is the part Apple left out of its press release. On Wednesday, the company hosts its "Pro and tell" event in Los Angeles, and Bloomberg News has reported it is expected to feature Apple's first touch-screen MacBook Pro — a redesigned machine with an OLED display that would make today's M6 MacBook Pro look, overnight, like the last of the old guard.

Apple's own marketing chief gave the game away more than a week ago. "Can't wait to pro and tell next week," Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, wrote on X on 19 October — a one-line tease that set off a week of fevered speculation and, notably, did not mention the M6 machines at all.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the Los Angeles gathering is an all-day product launch experience covering touchscreen MacBooks, a new iPad mini and M6 Macs — and Apple has already spent October warming up the audience, with a new iPad mini announced on Monday and its HomeView smart-home hub and refreshed Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini earlier in the month. The M6 MacBook Pro and iMac, announced by press release the day before the event, are the supporting act. Apple knows it, and so should you.

Our take: buy it if you're behind, wait if you're not

Let us be blunt, because Apple's own product calendar demands it. This is a good refresh wrapped in a botched bit of scheduling — or, more charitably, a deliberate one. Apple needed something new on shelves for the holiday quarter, and the M6 MacBook Pro and iMac do that job competently: same beloved design, meaningfully faster silicon, better battery life, no price increase. The $1,999 starting price is unchanged from last year, and in an era when every other manufacturer seems to be quietly raising prices, holding the line counts as a small act of decency.

But the calculus flips entirely depending on what you already own. If you are on an Intel Mac or an M1 machine, stop reading and pre-order: the leap is colossal, the value is real, and no touchscreen will make these machines slower. If you own an M4 or M5 MacBook Pro, though, buying this week would be shoddy judgment — you would be paying full price for a machine whose successor, in a new design with a touchscreen, could be unveiled within 24 hours of your order. Wait one day. See what Los Angeles brings. Then decide.

There is a broader point here too. Apple is now refreshing Macs at a pace that makes even its loyal customers dizzy — a new chip family every year, a smart-home blitz one week, a touchscreen revolution the next, all while its $2,000 foldable iPhone Duo fights for shelf space and rivals openly mock its pricing. The M6 Macs are fine. The strategy around them feels frantic, and customers can sense frantic. Apple used to make you feel clever for buying at the right time. Right now, it mostly makes you feel nervous.

Pricing and availability

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 starts at $1,999 in the US ($1,899 with education pricing), with 16GB of unified memory and 1TB of storage standard, configurable up to 32GB of memory and 4TB of storage. The iMac with M6 starts at $1,499, with a 12-core CPU and GPU version from $1,699. Both can be pre-ordered from Wednesday, 28 October in 35 countries and regions, including the US, and arrive in stores and to customers from Friday, 6 November.

One day after that, we will know whether these are the Macs to buy — or the Macs to skip. Watch this space.

Sources: Reuters; Apple Newsroom press releases (14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, 27 October 2026); Bloomberg News reporting via Reuters; MacRumors; TechCrunch; Pocket-lint; The Shortcut; XDA Developers.

Daniel Rao covers Apple, AI hardware and the business of personal computing for TechPulse USA. He has reviewed laptops for a decade and still owns an Intel MacBook Pro — which, after today, he is finally considering replacing.