Apple Mac Mini (M6) Review – Right Place, Wrong Time

Product Name: Mac Mini (M6)

Brand: Apple

Offer price: 5599

Currency: MYR

• Appearance - 8.5/10
  8.5/10
• Efficiency - 9/10
  9/10
• Features - 8.5/10
  8.5/10
• Materials - 9/10
  9/10
• Performance - 8.5/10
  8.5/10
• User Experience (UX) - 8.5/10
  8.5/10
• Value - 7.5/10
  7.5/10

Summary

Sticking to the same formula, the new M6-powered Mac Mini has the same pros and cons as before, although it certainly has been born in a wrong time where price surge now runs rampant in this industry, hurting its value proposition.

Overall

8.5/10

8.5/10

Pros

• Small form factor
• Performance aplenty
• Very quiet in operation

Cons

• No USB-A ports
• Costly RAM & SSD add-ons

Unboxing & Walkaround

With the new M6 silicon, comes the new Mac Mini – however, as you’d know with Apple products, they generally don’t make big changes on the design when it comes to Macs unless age got the best of them. That is still the case here, so the tiny 5-inch metal box that is the Mac Mini (M6) is the same as before on the outside. The box only includes the power cable, the documentation, and the main unit itself, so make sure to buy add-ons like mouse and keyboard as needed if you haven’t owned one.

The Mac Mini sticks to a 5-inch square form factor that keeps the vents strictly at the bottom of the chassis, where a portion of it is for intake, and the remainder is for exhaust. The M6 is a low-power chip that doesn’t require plenty of cooling to begin with, so it doesn’t require more aggressive cooling designs like the one found in Mac Studio where the exhaust is visible at the rear of its chassis.

As before, no physical changes in the I/O department, meaning two USB-C ports in front (with 10Gbps speeds) alongside a headphone jack, followed by 2.5GbE LAN, HDMI, and a trio of Thunderbolt 4 ports behind. Note that LAN port can be optioned with 10GbE if your workload requires it. Unfortunately, no USB-A ports to be found here, so plugging a USB drive or connecting a wired mouse can be a hassle, or straight up a no-go if you do not own a dongle.

Specifications

Apple Mac Mini (M6, A3534)

Full specifications available in product page.

Performance

SSD

Apple uses its own custom SSD designs for storage, and with that brings some interesting characteristics. While this is in line with most high-performance PCIe 4.0 SSDs in the Windows realm, the sequential write speed actually exceeds most of them (most PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market don’t exceed much beyond 7,000MB/s), likely owing to its custom controller architecture that offloads the controller duty to the motherboard instead of the M.2 module itself.

Cinebench (CPU)

Apple’s CPU is extremely capable in the single-core department for many years at this point, so M6 having an extra pair of cores over M5’s 10-core design ought to give it even more compute muscle than ever. In fact, our data suggests M6 might be the most powerful mobile/SFF-based processor we’ve ever tested, beating the likes of AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with sixteen Zen 5 cores, or the Intel Core Ultra 9 386H, also with sixteen cores. It also bested the M3 Max chip found in the 14-inch MacBook Pro released 3 years ago.

Do note that we’ve skipped emulation performance testing via Cinebench R20 as Apple is ending support for Rosetta 2 in the next version of macOS, with macOS 27 being the final major release to support apps that was written for Intel-based Macs.

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Geekbench

Above are the measured numbers from Geekbench’s test suite. Note that these are Geekbench 7 numbers, so we cannot compare with the historical data based on Geekbench 6, which we have used for all the previous Mac system reviews.

Novabench

While we have established that M6 is among the fastest mobile chip there is, NovaBench disagrees – the AMD Ryzen Max+ 395 leads in the CPU department by a large margin, and even the 3-year-old M3 Max is ahead, even if only by a smidge. In any case, the M6 chip is miles ahead of many laptops both in the Apple and Windows realm, including a big jump in CPU scores over the M5-powered MacBook Pro.

GPU

On the GPU department, we tested both Cinebench 2024’s GPU benchmark and for a gaming-adjacent one, 3DMark Steel Nomad. Regarding former, it is no match against the Max silicon going as far back as M3 Max, so if your work involves Cinema 4D, best stick to those (or the M5 Pro variant); if you do game, the GPU performance comes scarily close to the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, which houses an equivalent mid-range laptop GPU in Radeon 8060S. Gaming on this machine wouldn’t be completely unreasonable, to say the least.

V-Ray

We also tested M6 on the V-Ray benchmark, and at 1396 vpaths, it isn’t far off of the M4 Max’s 1899 vpaths, meaning the M6’s 12-core GPU is already 74% as powerful as the M4 Max’s 40-core GPU. You can imagine M6 Pro or M6 Max coming up next is going to be a rendering beast.

The Good

Apple hasn’t changed the formula of the Mac Mini, so all the good things said about its predecessors are still applicable here. The small form factor makes it easy to tuck under a display, and the classic Apple aesthetic makes it well-blended into the desktop setups.

The new M6 is excellent – more CPU cores, more powerful GPU, and faster memory (for 24GB+ versions), too – so there is very little to complain about. If you ever need more performance, M5 Pro is available as an option; otherwise, M6 gets the job well done while being almost completely silent, which is basically Apple’s trademark feature these days.

The Bad

One thing that slightly annoys me when using the Mac Mini is trying to connect a mouse to it. Granted, there are many ways to do that – ranging from using the Magic Trackpad, Magic Mouse or a plain old Bluetooth mouse – but if there are situations where all you get is a wired USB-A mouse, which isn’t a completely crazy idea because some gaming mice does lack Bluetooth functionality, you’re stuck without a USB-A port; same idea if you’re dealing with thumb drives as well. Bring a dongle for such cases.

Verdict

Our 24+512GB specification of the M6-powered Mac Mini lands at RM5,599, though cheaper options are available (as low as RM3,799 for the 16+256GB option). You can go for more RAM and storage as needed, but do keep in mind the price will go up a lot the further up you go.

It is indeed unfortunate that the cost of entry to the Mac hardware has ballooned this much thanks (but no thanks) to AI scooping up global memory and NAND supply, and the emergence of local AI such as OpenClaw and Hermes is not helping the case either – it has been known that Macs are getting bought en masse to set up server farms in similar fashion to what crypto gold rush has done to consumer GPUs several years ago, so outright availability may be a concern.

For what it is, the M6 Mac Mini is a brilliant little machine that gets the job done, and done proper. Barring any super demanding workloads like heavy 3D work and large AI models, this Mac Mini should be able to tackle anything while keeping your desk discreet and quiet.

Special thanks to Apple for providing the Mac Mini (M6) for this review.