With Mac Mini’s and MacBook Pro’s, also keep in mind, Apple doesn’t usually provide the fastest CPU’s. They shoot more for rendering speeds and other work. More cores, slow down a CPU, and the CPU’s of higher core counts are slower in actual CPU speed. The idea is Macs can multi-task quite well. Unfortunately for the MacBookPro, Apple also lowered the speed priority in trade-ff of lowering heat cooling and power requirements.
Real-time playback at 96Khz sampling is also going to suffer if you don’t have the ability to set higher read buffers in your DAW for ASIO outputs, for example.
See if just one plugin consumes lots of CPU.