What of the new Mac Minis? (Fall 2026)

SpectraLayers
1

I am someone who does quite a bit of unmixing songs in Spectralayers. Since these typically involve large amounts of data being consumed by individual tasks, there is a decision that has to be made: Is a “base” M6 fully loaded with RAM and Storage going to perform better than the M5 PRO ( with appropriate amounts of RAM and Storage)?

The theory is that in Spectralayers, you have unmix/denoise/spectral-repair operations which lean on ML inference, and that is what Apple claims is the biggest generational jump with the M6, with the new per-core Neural Accelerators.

I know it is early but want to hear what Steinberg engineers and Power Users are thinking on this topic.

Best, alphabrackets

2

The development team of SpectraLayers is limited by the machine learning frameworks they use. You can find a detailed answer here: It is time for Steinberg to add MLX / Core ML support in Spectralayers, for Macs - #2 by Robin_Lobel

Basically, I assume that certain unmix features will be faster, but others like Unmix Song or Unmix Soundtrack will not.