Over the last several years, the Mac mini has become one of the most compelling Macs in Apple's lineup. It combines impressive performance with a compact footprint, making it versatile enough for all kinds of workflows. I've spent the last week using the M6 Mac mini, and it pushes that formula even further.

From the outside, the new Mac mini looks identical to its predecessor. Apple gave the Mac mini its first proper redesign in more than a decade in 2024, dramatically shrinking its footprint to just 5 by 5 inches. That same design persists today, and it's still incredibly easy to love. The amount of power Apple has packed into this tiny footprint is nothing short of impressive.

Connectivity updates include 2.5Gb Ethernet now standard on both M6 and M5 Pro configurations, Wi-Fi 7 instead of Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 6 instead of Bluetooth 5.3. My review unit features a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU, 24GB unified memory, and 512GB storage. The M6 chip has two additional CPU cores compared to M4 and M5, and is Apple's first 2nm processor for Mac. Memory bandwidth increased from 120GB/s to 170GB/s. Apple says graphics performance is up to 2x faster than the M4 Mac mini.