GoKawiil
Tech News
Retailers including Amazon and Apple's refurbished store are running discounts across several Apple and Beats products, including AirPods Pro 3 at over 20% off, Apple Watch Ultra 4 models near $100 off, M5 MacBook Air up to $200 off, and the M5 Max Mac Studio at a $200 discount. Beats 360 headphones and a Beats USB-C cable are also at their lowest prices tracked so far.
Apple's newly launched MacBook Pro line, which includes the first touchscreen Mac with a PROLED XDR display, starts at $1,999 for a 14-inch M6 model with 16GB memory and a 1TB SSD. At the top end, a 16-inch model with an M5 Max chip, 128GB memory and a 16TB SSD option costs $14,549.
Designer Basic Apple Guy has released a recreation of the default wallpaper seen on Apple's new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, built from assets taken from Apple's 3D product model. The wallpaper has been upscaled and resized for both the Mac Studio Display and 16-inch MacBook Pro, and is available as a free download via his blog until Apple releases an official version.
Apple has published pricing for the 512GB RAM configuration of the Mac Studio, which is only available with the top-tier M5 Ultra chip featuring a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU. The upgrade costs $15,500 over the base 96GB configuration, bringing the starting price to $22,299 with 1TB of storage, and up to $29,799 with 16TB of storage. Units ordered now are expected to ship in late November to early December.
Apple has officially launched a new Mac Studio model featuring the M5 Ultra chip with a 512GB storage option. The release continues Apple's Mac Studio lineup, which targets professional users needing high-performance desktop computing.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Max chip, 36GB of RAM and 2TB of storage has dropped to $3,499, a 20 percent discount and $400 less than it cost just days earlier. Retailers say this is $150 below any previous sale price for this configuration, even after Apple raised prices across the lineup in June.
To mark iPhone Duo's shipping launch, retailers are discounting related Apple gear: AirPods Pro 3 are $50 off at $199, Apple Pencil (USB-C)—the only stylus iPhone Duo supports—is down to $69 (or $61 used-like-new), and the new Apple TV 4K remains available at a pre-order discount. Additional savings cover leather cases, power banks, and the new Mac Studio and M6 Mac mini.
Apple has expanded its Self Service Repair program to cover the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, the M5 Max/M5 Ultra Mac Studio, and the M6/M5 Pro Mac mini. Customers can now buy individual parts—such as displays, batteries, cameras, logic boards, and enclosures—along with the tools needed to install them, or rent the tools instead. The update coincided with Apple's announcement of new and expanded US supplier partnerships for iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo components.
Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weights AI model with 42 billion active parameters and a one-million-token context window, built with help from Apple's hardware team to optimize it for the M5 Mac Studio Ultra. The model's weights are now publicly available on HuggingFace under Meta's Muse Model license, though running it on Apple hardware requires two $5,499 M5 Mac Studio Ultras.
Meta launched an open-weight version of its Muse Spark LLM called Muse Spark Open, allowing users to download and run the model on their own hardware rather than access it only via cloud service. The model has 816 billion parameters and a 1-million-token context window, which Meta says makes it the most capable open-weight model available in the U.S. Apple collaborated with Meta to ensure the model runs efficiently on Mac Studio hardware.
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.
Meta launched Muse Spark Open, which it describes as the most capable open-weight AI model in the US, featuring 816 billion parameters and a 1 million token context window. The model is multimodal, built for coding and agentic tasks, and designed to run locally on Apple hardware, though it requires at least 1 terabyte of RAM and performs best on a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra chip. Meta paired it with its Muse Code coding terminal and demonstrated it fixing a Mastodon client and editing footage in DaVinci Resolve.