Apple's new 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac keep last year's starting prices, but the upgrade menu has some costly surprises. Here's what to pay and when.
Apple's new 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M6 chip starts at $1,999 in the US, £1,999 in the UK and $2,799 CAD in Canada. That's the same as the M5 model it replaces. Orders open Wednesday, October 28, at 1:10 p.m. ET, and it reaches stores on Friday, November 6.
Inside, you get two more CPU cores, two more graphics cores, faster AI processing and Wi-Fi 7. The design, screen, ports and 24-hour battery rating are unchanged. Two catches: storage upgrades cost more than last year, and only the 24GB and 32GB models get the faster memory bandwidth.
The M6 MacBook Pro price starts at $1,999 in the US, exactly what Apple was charging for the M5 model it replaces, and pre-orders open on Wednesday, October 28. Apple’s new 14-inch laptop gets two extra CPU cores, two extra graphics cores and faster wireless, but the outside hasn’t changed at all.
If you’ve been holding off on a new Mac, the headline price is good news after a year of rising memory costs. The fine print is less friendly: bigger storage now costs more, and the cheapest model skips one of the chip’s speed upgrades. Here’s what you’ll actually pay in the US, UK and Canada, and whether it’s smarter to wait a day.
The base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 costs $1,999 in the US, £1,999 in the UK and $2,799 CAD in Canada. For that you get the full M6 chip with 12 cores on both the CPU and graphics side, plus 1TB of storage and 16GB of memory, in silver or space black.
In Canada, the base price is the same as the M5 model sells for today. That matters because Apple raised a lot of Canadian prices in June, so many buyers expected another bump.
Orders open on Wednesday, October 28, at 10:10 a.m. PT (1:10 p.m. ET). The first laptops reach customers and Apple stores on Friday, November 6. The same dates apply to the new iMac.
If you want a specific color or a 32GB build on launch day, order early. Custom configurations usually take longer to ship than the stock models sitting in stores.
The M6 is Apple’s first 2nm chip, and it first appeared in the Mac mini in August. In the MacBook Pro it has 12 CPU cores and 12 GPU cores, two more of each than the M5. Every graphics core now has its own Neural Accelerator, a small block built for AI math, and there’s a Dual 16-core Neural Engine.
Apple’s own numbers against the M5 model:
Apple’s N1 wireless chip also comes to the cheapest MacBook Pro for the first time, bringing Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Before this, only the M5 Pro and M5 Max models had it.
Everything else is carried over. You get the same 14.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR screen with an optional nano-texture finish, the 12MP Center Stage camera, six speakers, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, MagSafe 3, an SD card slot and a headphone jack. Apple rates the battery for as long as 24 hours, its best figure on any Mac so far, and a high-wattage USB-C charger gets you to 50% in 30 minutes.
The first catch is storage. Going from 1TB to 2TB adds $500, and 4TB adds $1,500. Last year the 4TB option was an extra $1,200, so the top upgrade has gone up by a few hundred dollars. Apple hasn’t explained the change, but it lines up with the current shortage of memory chips.
The second catch is memory speed. Apple quotes bandwidth of up to 170GB/s for the M6, up from 153GB/s on the M5. Apple’s spec page shows that only the 24GB and 32GB models get the faster figure. The $1,999 model with 16GB stays at 153GB/s, the same as before.
For email, browsing, photo edits and school work, you won’t notice. If you plan to run local AI models or edit big video projects, the 24GB model is the better buy anyway, because the extra memory matters more than the bandwidth.
Apple also refreshed the 24-inch iMac with M6. It starts at $1,499 in the US and £1,499 in the UK, the same as the M4 model, and it skips the M5 generation entirely.
Apple says the iMac is up to 5x faster than the M4 model for on-device AI and up to 2x faster for graphics. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 now come on the base model too, and storage is up to twice as fast.
The colors are the same seven as before: blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange and silver. Two small changes may annoy buyers. Swapping the Magic Mouse for a Magic Trackpad now costs $50 instead of nothing, and the new 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port is a $30 add-on.
For most people, it’s worth waiting at least a day. Apple holds its Pro and Tell event on Wednesday, and a MacBook with an OLED touchscreen is widely expected there, along with a redesigned MacBook Pro using Apple’s higher-end chips. Neither is confirmed until Apple shows them.
Here’s a simple way to decide:
It starts at $1,999 in the US, £1,999 in the UK and $2,799 CAD in Canada. The base model has 1TB of storage and 16GB of memory.
Pre-orders open October 28 at 1:10 p.m. ET, and the laptop goes on sale in stores on Friday, November 6.
No. Apple only updated the 14-inch model with the standard M6 chip. The bigger, higher-end models still use the M5 Pro and M5 Max for now, though a redesigned high-end MacBook Pro is expected at Apple’s event on Wednesday.
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