Apple Mac Mini (M6) Review: For the AI Curious
Apple Mac Mini (M6) Review: For the AI Curious
Apple Mac Mini (M6) 评测：献给对 AI 好奇的你
WIRED WIRED 评测
TIRED 不足之处
The Mac Mini has gone through a Peter Parker-esque transformation this year. Just six months ago, it was a meek, unassuming little Mac starter kit, content to fulfill the role of being Apple’s smallest and most affordable Mac. It was so easy to overlook that Apple even skipped its M5 refresh last year. 今年的 Mac Mini 经历了一场“彼得·帕克式”的蜕变。就在六个月前，它还是一个温顺、不起眼的 Mac 入门套件，安于扮演苹果最小巧、最实惠的 Mac 角色。它甚至因为太容易被忽视，导致苹果去年直接跳过了 M5 版本的更新。
But at the beginning of 2026, the world was flooded with agentic AI frameworks like Claude Cowork, OpenClaw, and Perplexity Computer. Suddenly, the Mac Mini became a hot commodity for running AI models. Before long, it was completely sold out and hard to find for most of the year. Even Apple was caught off guard. 但在 2026 年初，Claude Cowork、OpenClaw 和 Perplexity Computer 等智能体（Agentic）AI 框架席卷全球。Mac Mini 突然成了运行 AI 模型的热门抢手货。没过多久，它就彻底售罄，大半年里一机难求。连苹果自己都被打了个措手不及。
And now, it’s back. Powered by the M6 chip and a newfound sense of importance, the Mac Mini is owning its heroic identity—and crushing the competition. 现在，它回归了。在 M6 芯片的加持下，带着一种全新的使命感，Mac Mini 正在拥抱其“英雄”身份，并横扫竞争对手。
An Old Friend
一位老朋友
The M6 Mac Mini isn’t designed to be flashy. It’s meant to blend into your desk’s workspace, maybe even hidden behind your monitor or in a closet. That’s not necessarily because it’s ugly or poorly made, though. The chassis was redesigned for the 2024 M4 release, adopting a boxier look and overall smaller form factor. It fits in your hand, with a footprint of just 5 x 5 inches. It’s tiny and well crafted. Everything is inside, including the power supply—no huge power brick to have to find a spot for. M6 Mac Mini 的设计并不追求浮夸。它的初衷是融入你的桌面工作空间，甚至可以隐藏在显示器后方或储物柜里。但这并不意味着它外观丑陋或做工粗糙。其机身在 2024 年 M4 版本发布时进行了重新设计，采用了更方正的外观和更小的整体尺寸。它仅 5 x 5 英寸大小，单手可握，小巧且做工精良。所有组件（包括电源）都集成在内部，你无需再为巨大的电源适配器寻找安放空间。
Ports remain the same. Two forward-facing USB-C 3 ports (up to 10 gigabytes per second), as well as a headphone jack and a power indicator light. On the back, there are three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, an Ethernet jack, and the power adapter port. Using the available USB-C ports and HDMI on the back, you can connect up to two 5K 120-Hz external displays (such as the Studio Display XDR or BenQ 5K MA270S) or three 4K displays. 接口保持不变。正面有两个 USB-C 3 接口（最高支持 10Gbps 传输速度），以及一个耳机插孔和电源指示灯。背面则配备了三个雷电 4 接口、HDMI 2.1、以太网口和电源接口。利用背面的 USB-C 和 HDMI 接口，你可以连接最多两台 5K 120Hz 外接显示器（如 Studio Display XDR 或明基 5K MA270S），或者三台 4K 显示器。
One controversial design is that the power button is still hidden underneath the back left corner of the computer. If you know where it is, just tilt the Mac Mini to the side and reach your finger back—easy. If you don’t know (or keep forgetting, as I do), it means having to flip the thing over entirely, with all your cables attached. It remains a silly design decision in my view, but it’s nowhere near as egregious as the Magic Mouse it pairs with (sold separately), which still infamously charges from the bottom. But I digress. 一个备受争议的设计是电源键依然隐藏在电脑背面的左下角。如果你知道位置，只需将 Mac Mini 侧倾，手指伸到后面即可——很简单。但如果你不知道（或者像我一样总是忘记），就意味着必须在连接着所有线缆的情况下，把整个机器翻过来。在我看来，这依然是一个愚蠢的设计决策，但它远没有其配套的（需另购）妙控鼠标那么离谱——后者至今仍因底部充电设计而臭名昭著。不过，扯远了。
I still wish it had an SD card slot (forward-facing, like the Mac Studio) though. Plenty of photographers and videographers would be well suited for the Mac Mini, and yet they’ll need to buy an additional dock or adapter. And yes, some color options, like the iMac, would be nice. But from the outside, it’s the same well-built, compact mini PC it’s always been. It’s the performance under the hood where you’ll need to dig in to see the extra value in this latest generation. 我依然希望它能配备一个 SD 卡槽（像 Mac Studio 那样前置）。许多摄影师和摄像师其实非常适合使用 Mac Mini，但他们却不得不额外购买扩展坞或适配器。当然，如果能像 iMac 那样提供多种配色就更好了。但从外观上看，它依然是那个做工精良、紧凑小巧的迷你 PC。你需要在引擎盖下挖掘，才能看到这一代产品带来的额外价值。
AI Gains
AI 性能提升
Right off the bat, I was eager to test a couple of new components in the M6 Mac Mini. First, there are the advances in the M6 chip itself. This is our first glimpse of the next generation of Apple Silicon, and the first built on a 2-nm process node. It represents a significant step up in transistor count on the die—46 billion in this case. That’s around a 35 percent increase in transistor density, which translates to higher efficiency and more performance. In theory. 上手伊始，我就迫不及待地想测试 M6 Mac Mini 的几个新组件。首先是 M6 芯片本身的进步。这是我们首次窥见下一代 Apple Silicon，也是首款基于 2nm 工艺节点制造的芯片。它在晶体管数量上实现了显著飞跃——达到了 460 亿个。这意味着晶体管密度提升了约 35%，理论上转化为更高的效率和更强的性能。
The M6 Mac Mini also adds two more CPU cores than the M4 model, for a total of 12. That’s a 21 percent increase in single-thread performance and a 36 percent improvement in a multi-threaded run. Those numbers sound impressive, but compared to the M5 in the MacBook Air, they’re not as substantial. It’s only around 10 percent faster than the M5 Pro chip in the MacBook Pro in single-threaded performance (and unsurprisingly, much further behind in multi-threaded). Those two extra CPU cores, though, do prop up the multi-threaded performance, even compared to the base M5 chip. It’s hard to do apples-to-apples comparisons to only a laptop. M6 Mac Mini 的 CPU 核心数比 M4 型号增加了两个，总计 12 核。单线程性能提升了 21%，多线程运行性能提升了 36%。这些数字听起来很惊人，但与 MacBook Air 中的 M5 相比，差距并没有那么大。在单线程性能上，它仅比 MacBook Pro 中的 M5 Pro 芯片快约 10%（多线程表现则不出所料地落后更多）。不过，那两个额外的 CPU 核心确实支撑起了多线程性能，即使与基础款 M5 芯片相比也是如此。仅与笔记本电脑进行同类比较是很难的。
Like previous Mac Minis, it has a fan inside. And when you get to work on something heavy, you’ll definitely hear it start to make some noise. It’s not terrible, but if you’re coming from a MacBook, you’ll definitely notice. That active cooling ensures you get stronger performance from that M6 chip than you would in a MacBook Air (though I won’t be able to do a side-by-side comparison until the M6 MacBook Air comes out, presumably in 2027). 和之前的 Mac Mini 一样，它内部配有风扇。当你处理繁重任务时，肯定会听到它开始发出噪音。虽然不至于难以忍受，但如果你是从 MacBook 转过来的，一定会注意到这一点。这种主动散热确保了 M6 芯片能发挥出比 MacBook Air 更强的性能（尽管在 2027 年 M6 MacBook Air 发布之前，我无法进行直接对比）。
Apple skipped the M5 generation for the Mac Mini, so this is the first time the Mac Mini gets the Neural Accelerators built into each GPU core. That means improved local AI inferencing, which brings me to the second thing I really wanted to try out. Despite the base model only having 16 GB of RAM, it took an average of 1 minute and 40 seconds to generate a 20-step image in Draw Things using the Flux.2 model on the M6 Mac Mini. This is a 9-billion-parameter AI model being run completely locally, without going to the cloud. My 16-inch M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 48 GB of RAM was faster, however, generating this same image 20 seconds faster. Still, I was really impressed by the M6, and I chalk it up to the beefed-up GPU. 苹果在 Mac Mini 上跳过了 M5 世代，因此这是 Mac Mini 首次在每个 GPU 核心中内置神经加速器。这意味着本地 AI 推理能力的提升，这也引出了我真正想尝试的第二件事。尽管基础款仅有 16GB 内存，但在 M6 Mac Mini 上使用 Draw Things 运行 Flux.2 模型生成一张 20 步的图像，平均耗时 1 分 40 秒。这是一个完全在本地运行、无需连接云端的 90 亿参数 AI 模型。相比之下，我那台拥有 48GB 内存的 16 英寸 M4 Pro MacBook Pro 更快，生成同一张图像快了 20 秒。不过，M6 的表现依然让我印象深刻，我认为这归功于其增强的 GPU。
The M6 chip also includes a “dual” Neural Engine. Apple hasn’t talked extensively about how exactly this works, but claims that it delivers twice the “peak compute” to speed up on-device AI workflows and that these frameworks can automatically access and use both Neural Engines at the same time. This will enhance all kinds of in-app features that creatives may appreciate, such as detecting edits in raw footage in Final Cut Pro. This can be done relatively seamlessly. It doesn’t necessarily apply to running models on-device as a replacement for ChatGPT or Gemini. M6 芯片还包含一个“双”神经网络引擎。苹果并未详细说明其具体工作原理，但声称它能提供两倍的“峰值计算”能力，以加速设备端的 AI 工作流，并且这些框架可以自动同时访问和使用两个神经网络引擎。这将增强创作者们可能喜欢的各种应用内功能，例如在 Final Cut Pro 中检测原始素材的剪辑点。这可以相对无缝地完成。但这并不一定适用于将本地运行的模型作为 ChatGPT 或 Gemini 的替代品。