Apple didn't wait for the event. A day before its "Pro and tell" gathering in Los Angeles — where Bloomberg expects the first touchscreen MacBook Pro — Apple quietly dropped two M6 machines by press release: a refreshed 14-inch MacBook Pro and a new 24-inch iMac, both starting at familiar prices and both making the same pitch. The chip is the product now.

The M6 is the first Apple silicon with a dual Neural Engine — two 16-core engines instead of one — and Neural Accelerators built into every GPU core, according to Reuters. On the MacBook Pro, that translates to up to 30 percent faster graphics and up to 25 percent faster on-device AI work than the M5, plus up to 24 hours of battery life — the longest Apple has ever claimed for a Mac. The iMac gets the bigger leap: up to 5x faster on-device AI performance and twice the graphics of the M4 model, with memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s and SSD speeds doubled thanks to PCIe 5.0, per MacRumors.

Everything else is deliberately boring. The iMac keeps the same design, the same seven colors, the same 4.5K display and 12MP Center Stage camera. The MacBook Pro keeps its Liquid Retina XDR display, its ports, and its Space Black and Silver finishes. Both gain Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 via Apple's N1 chip. Apple's message is that you don't need a new shape when the silicon inside does something new — specifically, running large language models locally, which Apple keeps framing as a privacy story as much as a performance one.

But read the spec sheets and the story gets less clean. The base 16GB MacBook Pro doesn't get the faster 170GB/s memory bandwidth at all — only the 24GB and 32GB configurations do, according to MacRumors. And the prices, while unchanged from June, tell their own story: the entry 14-inch MacBook Pro now starts at $1,999, where a year ago it was $1,599. The iMac starts at $1,499 for a 10-core M6 with 256GB of storage, or $1,699 for the 12-core version with four Thunderbolt ports.

"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," said Shelly Goldberg, Apple's vice president of Hardware Engineering, in Apple's announcement.

The timing is the tell. Dropping the M6 Macs a day early clears the deck for tomorrow, when the touchscreen MacBook Pro — the genuinely new thing — gets the stage to itself. Pre-orders for both M6 machines open Wednesday, October 28, with availability starting Friday, November 6. If tomorrow's event lands the way Gurman expects, this week will be remembered as the week the Mac got a touchscreen, not the week it got a faster chip. Apple just made sure the chip got its own headline first.

— via Reuters