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Asahi Linux released its 7.3 progress update, reporting that its macaudio driver—requiring substantial ALSA core changes—is now ready for upstream kernel review after roughly 3,100 lines of driver and Devicetree code. The project also submitted its AVD video decode driver, about 13,000 lines, just three months after it appeared in the downstream tree, alongside initial Devicetrees for M4 Pro, Max and M5 chips.
In the latest Apple @ Work column, IT writer Bradley Chambers argues that while Apple hardware prices have risen, Macs remain relatively affordable compared to historical pricing and performance gains. He points to growing enterprise AI token costs, driven by agentic tools performing multistep tasks, as a factor that could make Apple Silicon's upfront cost seem minor by comparison.
Herdr has released a native desktop application that organizes terminal sessions and coding agents into workspaces called 'spaces,' each containing tabs and splittable panes. The app includes an agents sidebar that tracks the status of coding agents across all spaces—marking them as Working, Blocked, Done, or Idle—and lets terminals keep running after the window closes. It installs via shell script on Linux/macOS and PowerShell on Windows, and can also install its companion herdr-core component if missing.
Apple released a new 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M6 chip, keeping the same design and most features as the M5 model. The M6 adds a 12-core CPU and GPU, improved Neural Engine, and up to 170GB/s memory bandwidth, plus Apple's N1 wireless chip bringing Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support. Apple cites gains including up to 30 percent faster graphics and 25 percent faster AI workloads compared to the M5.
The Browser Company announced it will retire Arc, its browser known for its unconventional interface, on December 22, directing users toward Dia, its newer AI-focused browser available for Apple Silicon Macs and Windows 11 PCs. New Arc account creation has already stopped, and mobile features like tab sync and Browse for Me will be disabled on November 23 ahead of the full desktop shutdown and account deactivation.
Perplexity has expanded its Computer app so users can run its entire AI agent experience, including the orchestrator and harness, locally on an Apple Silicon Mac with at least 36GB of RAM. Users can pick between two local models, Qwen 3.6 or Perplexity's own fine-tuned PPLX Pro, and still call on over 15 frontier models when needed. The feature is rolling out now to Perplexity Pro, Max and Enterprise subscribers via the Mac app.
A new alpha tool called Mac.apk enables Android applications to run directly on Apple Silicon Macs without an emulator, virtual machine, or underlying Linux kernel. Apps appear as native macOS windows in the Dock, use the Mac's GPU and CPU directly, and support light/dark mode switching. It requires macOS 26.4 or newer and is distributed as a signed, notarized disk image.
Apple's upcoming macOS 27 (Golden Gate) will automatically remove Rosetta, the translation layer that lets Intel-built apps run on Apple Silicon Macs, with full support ending in macOS 28. IT admin Bradley Chambers notes that while most traditional apps will prompt users to reinstall Rosetta, some menu bar utilities from vendors without native Apple Silicon builds are failing silently with no warning.
A developer built siltop, a terminal-based system monitor designed specifically for Apple Silicon Macs, after finding that btop could not read chip-level data like watts, GPU usage or cluster clocks. Siltop reports CPU, GPU and ANE power draw, per-cluster clock speeds, temperatures and fans without requiring sudo access, pulling data from macOS's SMC, IOReport, Mach and sysctl interfaces. The tool reportedly uses about 1.3% of one CPU core at a 1-second refresh interval, less overhead than btop and comparable to macmon.
Apple released a new version of its MLX framework that can run the frontier-class Muse Spark Open model, which has nearly a trillion parameters, locally on Mac Studio hardware. Apple reports that a cluster of four Mac Studios with M5 Ultra chips achieves over 36 tokens per second using tensor parallelization, and that single machines with up to 512GB of unified memory can also run the model, scaling to multiple units via an RDMA over Thunderbolt driver.
Microsoft's new Surface Laptop Ultra, built with an Nvidia RTX Spark N1X chip, starts at $2,599 and can be configured up to $5,899 depending on processor and memory. The base 24GB unified memory model ships with Windows 11 Home, while higher-tier configurations come with Windows 11 Pro and up to 64GB of memory. During a review briefing, Microsoft gave only a vague answer when asked whether the 24GB base model has enough memory for tasks like running AI models locally.
Sill is a free Mac menu bar utility that mirrors a single window or the entire desktop to an iPhone or iPad, letting users interact with it via touch, trackpad, keyboard or Apple Pencil. It captures the screen with ScreenCaptureKit, encodes video using the Mac's hardware HEVC encoder, and sends input back over the same network, USB, Direct Wireless Connection, or a personal VPN like Tailscale, without any account or intermediary server.