Apple has updated its Mac Mini and Mac Studio desktops with new internals while keeping their exterior designs unchanged. The Mac Mini now ships with either the M5 Pro or the all-new M6 chip, Apple's first built on 2-nanometer technology, featuring a 12-core CPU, a 12-core GPU, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine for improved AI performance. The Mac Studio gains an M5 Ultra option, and both machines return to steady availability after months of limited stock.
Uber announced a live video streaming feature that lets parents or guardians watch their teen's ride in real time using the driver's selfie camera. The feature, currently live in nine U.S. markets including Atlanta, Cleveland, and Rhode Island, will expand nationwide in coming weeks, and both the driver and teen are alerted whenever a parent starts watching.
Startup Keenable, founded by former Yandex search executive Andrey Styskin and AI scientist Matthias Petri, has emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and angel investors. The company has built a search index spanning over 100 billion documents designed specifically for AI systems rather than human users, and its API is already being used by AI labs and inference providers for training and live retrieval, including a new partnership with voice AI company Gradium.
WhatsApp rolled out new account-security features, letting users replace their six-digit two-step verification PIN with a longer alphanumeric password and add multiple passkeys to one account, useful for people switching between iOS and Android. Android users will also see added context on calls from unknown numbers, such as the caller's country or shared groups.
Andy Dunn's startup Pie has launched a new feature called Community Homes, giving its roughly 300,000 users permanent group pages instead of just event listings. The homes include shared feeds, admin controls, shareable pages, and event-planning tools, letting anyone in the group post updates, not just organizers. Pie, backed by investors like Forerunner, Lightspeed, Accel and Ev Williams, plans to add group chats and casual hangout prompts next.
Perplexity has released Portable Computer, a version of its agentic 'Computer' platform designed to run entirely on local hardware, starting with Nvidia's DGX Spark desktop and Linux machines with RTX GPUs. The system keeps models, files, and processing on-device by default, only asking permission to route individual steps to cloud-based frontier models when needed, meaning local tasks incur no billing credits.
Nothing has unveiled OS 5.0, built on Android 17, introducing adaptive color tints for icons and widgets that pull hues from the user's wallpaper while keeping the brand's monochrome look intact. The update also bundles a standalone Glyph Interface app centralizing lighting controls, plus new lockscreen clockfaces and homescreen customization tools.
A National Bureau of Economic Research survey found that more than 90 percent of executives reported no impact from AI on their firm's employment over the past three years, and 89 percent saw no gains in labor productivity. Despite this, companies are continuing to cut jobs while citing AI as justification, according to University of Pittsburgh professor Mark Ma.
Nvidia announced that its GeForce Now cloud gaming service will support Valve's Steam Controller and Steam Machine later this year, initially for the Steam Deck and Steam Machine app, with Windows and macOS support coming afterward. The update accompanies other GeForce Now additions, including DLSS 4.5 controls, GOG single sign-on, wider Fire TV Stick availability, and Firefox browser support.
France's General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) confirmed that hackers accessed a file containing 678,000 records of individuals and businesses, including names, family quotients, reference tax income and withholding tax rates. Some leaked samples also reportedly included addresses, phone numbers, emails and dependent counts. The attacker's access was cut off in late June, but the breach itself was only discovered in mid-August after the stolen data appeared for sale online.
Fiat Ventures announced it is unifying its growth consultancy, previously known as Fiat Growth, with its venture investing arm under one new brand called FGV Capital. Alongside the rebrand, the firm closed a $35 million second fund focused on fintech's overlap with AI, healthcare and commerce, backed by LPs including Reinsurance Group of America, MassMutual and Bank of America. General partners Marcos Fernandez and Drew Glover said the two businesses will remain operationally separate despite sharing a brand.
Apple unveiled two new chips, the 2nm M6 and the quad-die M5 Ultra, alongside refreshed Mac desktops built around them. The M6 combines super, performance and efficiency cores for the first time and adds a Neural Accelerator to each GPU core, while the M5 Ultra fuses two M5 Max chips into one processor with up to 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores and 512GB of unified memory. Neither desktop gets major new features beyond faster specs and higher pricing.
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