Mac mini M6 vs Mac mini M4, what changed and whether the extra $300 is worth it

The Mac mini M6 is between 23 percent and four and a half times faster than the M4 model it replaces, depending on what you ask of it, and it lists at $899 against the M4's $599 launch price. That $300 is the whole question. Apple announced the M6 and M5 Pro minis on 25 August 2026, and the reviews are in, so here is what the published numbers say the extra money buys.

The M6 has a 12-core CPU, built from 2 super, 4 performance and 6 efficiency cores, and a 12-core GPU. The M4 has 10 CPU cores and a 10-core GPU. Memory bandwidth rises from 120GB/s to 153GB/s on the 16GB base model, per Apple's specifications. Both start at 16GB and 256GB of storage and both stop at 32GB of memory, so the ceiling for a big local AI model has not moved. The ports and the 155W power rating are the same on paper, except that the M6 has 2.5Gb Ethernet where the M4 has Gigabit.

Prices are Apple's own: $899 for the M6 and $599 for the M4 at its October 2024 launch. We have no street price for the M4 today, so check its product page for the live Best Buy price before you assume the gap is still $300.

Tom's Guide ran Geekbench 6.7 on both minis in its M6 review, so these two pairs come from one lab on one version. Single-core scores were 4,708 for the M6 and 3,838 for the M4, a gain of 23 percent. Multi-core scores were 21,405 and 14,838, a gain of 44 percent.

For games, the only figure published for the M6 is 57 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p on the For This Mac preset from Tom's Guide, with Engadget reporting 55 fps at the default Mac graphics settings. We have no published game figure for the M4 mini to set beside them, and we will not guess one. Either way, this is a 1080p machine, not a replacement for a gaming PC.

The gap is wider where memory bandwidth and GPU cores matter. In the community llama.cpp scoreboard for Apple Silicon, a 7B model at 4-bit (Llama 2 7B Q4_0) generates 35.7 tokens per second on the M6 against 24.1 on the M4, up 48 percent. Reading a 512-token prompt runs at 988.9 tokens per second against 221.3, 4.5 times faster. At 8-bit (Q8_0) generation is 21.0 against 13.5, up 55 percent. These are user submissions, not a lab's, so treat them as a reliable ranking rather than an exact number.

Blender Open Data shows the same shape for rendering. The median Metal score over its three scenes is 2,656.1 for the M6, from 17 submitted runs, and 1,275.8 for the M4, from 33. That is 2.1 times the score.

At list price the M6 costs 50 percent more and returns 44 percent more multi-core speed, 48 percent faster text generation and a bit over twice the Blender score. For anything that leans on the GPU or on a local model, the extra money is well spent. The biggest gap is in reading long prompts, where the M6 is 4.5 times faster.

For email, browsing, office work and light photo editing, the single-core gain of 23 percent is the number that matters, and an M4 mini at a real discount is still a good machine. Buy the M4 only if you find it well under list. If the gap is anywhere near the full $300, buy the M6.

Timing is on the M6's side as well. Our buyer's guide shows Apple's Mac mini has averaged 714 days between updates, and this one landed in August, so it is the start of a cycle, not the end.

More Macs, with every cited benchmark, are on the Mac mini hub and the Apple section. To put two of them in a table of your own, use the compare page.