Apple's biggest hardware day of the year is here. According to MacRumors, five products go on sale today — the OLED iPad mini, the M6 iMac, the M6 MacBook Pro, and Apple's first-ever touchscreen MacBook Pros in 14- and 16-inch sizes. Pre-orders are landing on doorsteps and the machines are reaching Apple Stores and authorized resellers, starting in Australia and New Zealand and rolling west through the day.
The headline is the touchscreen Mac, and the price is the story. The 14-inch PROLED model starts at $2,899 and the 16-inch at $3,399 — and both run M5 Pro or M5 Max silicon, last spring's chips. Sitting right next to them on the shelf is the $1,999 14-inch MacBook Pro with the newer M6: a 12-core CPU and GPU, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and up to 24 hours of battery, which Apple calls the longest ever in a Mac. The cheap Mac got the new chip. The expensive one got the new screen. That inversion is the entire buying decision in one sentence.
It gets sharper in the fine print. Apple's headline "up to 170GB/s" memory bandwidth doesn't apply to the $1,999 base model — the 16GB configuration runs at 153GB/s, identical to the M5, and only the 24GB and 32GB configs get the faster pipe. The advertised number, in other words, costs extra. And if you do decide on the touchscreen model, don't count on Apple's website: base 14-inch configurations in Space Black are shipping in three to four weeks, and many other configs in two to three. Your local store is the fast lane today.
Don't overlook the sleeper of the launch. The OLED iPad mini starts at $699 and is Apple's cheapest OLED iPad — an 8.5-inch Super Retina XDR display, A20 Pro chip, the first IP67 rating on an iPad, and an Acoustic Display that produces sound through the screen itself, sealing the enclosure with no speaker holes. The one real knock, per early reviews, is the 60Hz display with no ProMotion. Meanwhile the M6 iMac starts at $1,499 ($1,699 for the 12-core version) with Apple claiming up to twice the graphics performance of the M4 model.
What to watch now is the verdict the first owners deliver. The touchscreen Mac's tandem OLED, Dynamic Island, and 2,000-nit brightness are genuinely best-in-class — the question is whether pro users actually reach up and touch their screens, or whether the feature quietly becomes a spec-sheet bullet. If the first wave of editors and photographers treats touch as a workflow change, Apple just set the default for the next decade of Macs. If they don't, the $1,999 M6 machine — newer chip, better value, in stock today — is the one history will remember as the smart buy.
— via MacRumors