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Tech News
Apple revealed refreshed Mac mini and Mac Studio models about two weeks before its September 9 event instead of unveiling them on stage. According to The Information, the company moved up the announcement because demand for these machines for AI workloads exceeded expectations, leaving some configurations backordered for months.
A tech roundup recommends external displays for buyers of Apple's newly released Mac mini and Mac Studio, highlighting Apple's own Studio Display and the newer Studio Display XDR as standout choices. The Studio Display offers a 27-inch 5K panel, a 12MP Center Stage webcam, True Tone technology, and Thunderbolt 5 ports, while the XDR variant adds mini-LED technology and a 120Hz refresh rate.
Apple's Mac Studio, available with M5 Max or the fused-together M5 Ultra chip, offers up to 80 GPU cores, 512GB of RAM and a 16TB SSD, along with more ports than the Mac mini, including four Thunderbolt 5 connections. The Mac mini starts at $899 and covers most everyday needs, while the Mac Studio starts at $2,499 and targets professionals with intensive workloads.
Sonnet has released the Echo 21 Thunderbolt 5 SuperDock, an updated version of its Echo 20 dock that swaps Thunderbolt 4 for Thunderbolt 5 across all its ports. The $499 dock offers nine USB 3 ports, 10Gb Ethernet, 140W power delivery, an M.2 SSD slot for up to 8TB of storage, and support for up to three external displays, all through a single cable connection to a Mac.
Apple has introduced a new Mac Mini and Mac Studio lineup featuring the M6, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra chips, with the M5 Ultra standing as the company's most powerful processor to date. The chip offers an 80-core GPU, up to a 36-core CPU, up to 512GB of unified memory, and quadruple the LLM prompt performance of the previous M3 Ultra, built using a quad-die design that fuses two M5 Max chips. Prices have risen across the board, with the Mac Mini M6 now starting at $899 and the top Mac Studio configuration with M5 Ultra starting at $5,499.
Thunderbolt 5 upgrades on Thunderbolt 4 by offering up to 120Gbps in one direction and 40Gbps in the other, compared to Thunderbolt 4's symmetric bandwidth, while also supporting 240 watts of power delivery. Both standards share USB-C connectors and support data, video and power over the same cables, and Thunderbolt 5 remains backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 4, 3 and USB4 devices.
Apple unveiled a refreshed Mac Studio built around its M5 Max and new M5 Ultra silicon, promising up to 4.3x faster on-device AI performance, 1.8x faster graphics, and support for up to 512GB of unified memory. The desktop also gains Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thunderbolt 5, with the latter allowing multiple units to be clustered for tripled AI inference speeds. Pre-orders opened today, positioning the machine as Apple's flagship workstation for AI researchers and creative professionals.
Apple has updated the Mac mini and Mac Studio with two new chips: the M6, its first 2nm chip, and the M5 Ultra, now the most powerful chip in its lineup for AI tasks. The hardware itself sees no major feature additions beyond the spec bump, but Apple's messaging emphasizes their suitability for local AI inference and development.
Amazon has lowered the price of Apple's 4-pack AirTag 2 bundle to $79.99, down from $99, marking the lowest per-unit price of $20 tracked since its 2026 release. The retailer had already discounted the bundle to $89.99 and then $85 in recent days before this latest cut. Other deals include Apple's M5 MacBook Pro configurations discounted by $320 and $500, plus a $25 Anker Find My wallet card and a heavily discounted LG 6K Thunderbolt 5 monitor.