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Apple is set to release the iPhone Duo on October 23, HomePod mini 2 on October 30, and new Macs with an OLED iPad mini around November 6, followed by HomeView and Apple TV 4K on November 13, according to analyst Mark Gurman. Gurman says Apple stores will undergo a major floor reset the evening of November 5 into November 6 to accommodate the new Mac and iPad mini launches.
Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf told CNBC the company grew strongly under the Biden administration and said its contract wins are based on merit, not political ties. The comments follow scrutiny of co-founder Palmer Luckey's appointment to the Pentagon's Project Meridian group days before Anduril secured a shipyard contract worth up to $2.9 billion, on top of a $20 billion DOD deal won in March.
Apple and Meta announced a collaboration allowing developers to run Meta's new 816-billion-parameter open-weight model, Muse Spark Open, locally on Mac Studio computers. Users can pair two to four Mac Studios to run the model for tasks like coding and video analysis without relying on cloud servers. Executives Mark Zuckerberg and John Ternus publicly confirmed the project on social media after months of joint work.
The Washington Post obtained a donor list showing tech, telecom and crypto companies as the largest contributors to President Trump's White House ballroom project, totaling more than $183 million. NVIDIA, Apple and Dish Network co-founder Charles Ergen each gave $25 million, with Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, Google, Amazon, Cisco, Blackrock, Lockheed Martin, Gemini and Coinbase among other donors. About $77 million of the funds remain unaccounted for since the donations aren't subject to public disclosure or campaign finance rules.
A new open-weight AI model, Muse Spark Open, has been released and optimized to run on Mac Studio machines with Apple's M5 Ultra chip, reportedly allowing two linked Macs to function like a single machine with a terabyte of unified memory. The release also includes custom Helion GPU kernels in SGLang that the developers say speed up performance on NVIDIA and AMD hardware, and the model underwent additional safety post-training evaluated against an internal scaling framework before release.
Ledger has announced a new hardware crypto wallet designed to resemble a smartphone. The launch comes as the company faces renewed scrutiny over how it handled earlier reports of backdoored devices, which surfaced months before some crypto wallets were drained of funds.
SK hynix's Solidigm unit is reportedly linking a proposed 3D NAND fab investment in the U.S. to Washington approving more equipment export licenses for its Dalian, China facility. The Dalian plant, which makes 192-layer NAND for Solidigm's data-center SSDs, relies on U.S. toolmakers Applied Materials, KLA and Lam Research, whose shipments need government licenses. The Commerce Department approved limited 2026 shipments last December but has not yet authorized exports for 2027, according to Reuters.
A new wave of films and documentaries, including 'The Social Reckoning' and a Musk documentary by Alex Gibney, dramatize and investigate the personal conduct of major tech executives. These productions draw on existing investigative journalism, such as Frances Haugen's whistleblower allegations against Meta, to portray figures like Mark Zuckerberg in a far less flattering light than earlier works like 'The Social Network'.
Representative Ritchie Torres has proposed federal legislation that would direct the FTC to create rules guaranteeing that purchased video games are owned outright rather than licensed, and would require games with online-dependent features to offer offline modes before servers are shut down. Torres cites NBA 2K25, which is being pulled from digital stores on October 30 and losing its servers on December 31, as an example of the problem the bill targets.
Volvo and Nvidia announced an expanded version of their near decade-long partnership, under which Volvo will integrate three Nvidia technologies: the Hyperion sensor and compute hardware, the Alpamayo driving software stack, and the Halos safety evaluation layer. The system is designed to handle both urban streets and highways, combining AI-based and classical software approaches with multiple sensor types for redundancy. Volvo did not disclose financial terms or specify which model will launch first, though executives said a new vehicle using the stack will arrive within the decade.
Anthropic announced that METR, a nonprofit AI evaluator, has been granted employee-like access to review its models and safety practices, with results to be published. The company says it has also engaged SecureBio and Accenture as evaluators and is in early talks with other groups including Hugging Face, following its commitment last month to stronger third-party assessment and its signing of the White House Accord on Super Intelligence.
The Federal Trade Commission has issued subpoenas to OpenAI and Anthropic seeking documents related to AI safety incidents. The agency is reportedly examining whether the companies' practices violate consumer protection laws.