Apple's M6 Lands in the 14-Inch MacBook Pro and 24-Inch iMac

Apple put its new M6 chip into two Macs at once on Tuesday, the 14-inch MacBook Pro and the 24-inch iMac, with the 14-inch base machine starting at $1,999 and the iMac at $1,499. Preorders open Wednesday, October 28, and both ship November 6. For working photographers, the release changes two practical decisions at once: which laptop to buy for HDR editing on location, and which desk machine to buy when the archive sits on a NAS.

The M6 adds two CPU cores and two GPU cores over the M5, and both new machines pick up Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Apple's MacBook Pro announcement details a 12-core CPU built from two super cores, four performance cores and six efficiency cores, paired with a 12-core GPU that carries a Neural Accelerator in every core.

What does Apple claim for performance?

Apple quotes up to 30% faster graphics than the M5 model, up to 1.9x faster Neural Engine performance, and up to 1.2x faster image processing in Affinity — or 3.3x faster than the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1. These are manufacturer figures tied to specific benchmarks, not independent tests; the image-processing numbers in particular depend on which Affinity operations Apple measured.

The base 14-inch MacBook Pro now starts with 1 TB of storage and 16 GB of unified memory (memory shared between CPU and GPU), configurable to 24 GB or 32 GB. Apple rates it for up to 24 hours of video streaming, the longest battery life it has claimed for any Mac. Storage options run 1 TB, 2 TB or 4 TB, and the M5 Pro and M5 Max versions of the same chassis remain on sale alongside it.

Why the display matters for HDR work

The Liquid Retina XDR screen stays the laptop's core argument for photo buyers. It runs at 3,024 x 1,964 pixels, holds 1,000 nits across the full panel, peaks at 1,600 nits on HDR content, and covers P3 with a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio — enough range to edit HDR photos in Lightroom without an external monitor. A nano-texture option cuts reflections for work near windows or outdoors.

The port set covers the essentials of a location kit: an SDXC card slot, HDMI, MagSafe 3, a headphone jack and three Thunderbolt 4 ports. The machine weighs 1.55 kg and comes in space black or silver.

What changes on the iMac?

The iMac jumps from M4 straight to M6, skipping a generation. Apple lists up to 2x faster graphics than the M4 model for photo editing in Affinity, up to 5x faster on-device AI performance, and an SSD with up to twice the read and write speed, which matters when large libraries open at the start of a session.

The 24-inch iMac ships in two configurations:

• 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, 16 GB memory configurable to 24 GB, up to 1 TB storage, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one 6K external display
• 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU, 16 GB memory configurable to 32 GB, up to 2 TB storage, four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two 6K external displays, nano-texture glass, standard 2.5Gb Ethernet

Apple says the 2.5Gb Ethernet is up to 2.5x faster than the previous iMac's wired connection; it is optional on the 10-core model. The 4.5K Retina display runs at 4,480 x 2,520 pixels and 500 nits with P3 color, and the chassis comes in blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange and silver.

Which machine fits which photographer?

The two split cleanly by workflow. The MacBook Pro is the machine for HDR editing and location work, with its XDR screen, built-in card reader and full-day battery. The iMac is the desk machine, and its faster SSD plus 2.5Gb Ethernet suit photographers whose archive lives on a NAS (network-attached storage).

One ceiling deserves attention. Both machines top out at 32 GB of memory, which handles most Lightroom and Photoshop work comfortably, but photographers building very large layered composites will want the M5 Pro MacBook Pro, which scales to 64 GB. Storage planning matters on the base iMac as well: it starts at 256 GB, so the working library should live on an external SSD over Thunderbolt 4.

Pricing holds steady relative to the outgoing generation: $1,999 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro (M6), $1,499 for the 10-core iMac and $1,699 for the 12-core iMac, with preorders from October 28 and availability November 6. Until independent benchmarks arrive, buyers can treat Apple's multipliers as upper bounds and expect real gains closer to the graphics claims than the AI ones.