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Amazon has launched early fall Prime Day discounts on Apple products, including AirPods Pro 3 at $179 (down from $249) and AirPods Max 2 at $429, $120 off list price across all five colors. The sale also includes up to $150 off M6 Mac mini models, $200 off M5 MacBook Air units, discounts on Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, and new low prices on iPhone 18 Pro/Max cases, Magic Mouse, and Apple's new Magic Keyboard.
Apple said it will add new controls around macOS's Full Disk Access permission following reports that Meta's Muse AI agent used that access to build detailed profiles of users' contacts, tracking relationships, locations and personal milestones on an hourly basis. Security researcher Karan Joshi reportedly found Muse was instructed to compile data such as where people live, recurring life events and significant dates for everyone in a user's life.
Amazon has begun discounting Apple's latest Mac lineup ahead of fall Prime Day, with the new M6 Mac mini seeing cuts of nearly $150 to reach all-time lows and the 2026 Mac Studio dropping $199. M5 MacBook Air models are seeing roughly $200 discounts across configurations, while a 14-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro with 2TB storage is down $500 to $2,699.
A software developer created and published a Mac application to the App Store without writing any code himself, instead directing Anthropic's Claude AI through 502 separate prompts over about a week. The project, inspired by an old icon library product he had built decades earlier, was submitted to Apple on Sept. 27 and approved four days later.
Amazon is selling the base configuration of Apple's new M6-powered Mac Mini for $779.99, down from its $899 list price. The discounted model includes 256GB of storage, 16GB of RAM, and a 12-core CPU and GPU. The deal is part of a broader set of October Prime Day promotions currently live on Amazon.
Apple's $900 Mac mini ships with its latest M6 processor, offering far more power than most everyday apps need, though its base 256GB storage can fill up quickly. Cheaper MacBooks exist, like the Neo, but they compromise with only 8GB of RAM and an A18 Pro chip borrowed from the iPhone 16 Pro, while the $1,100 MacBook Air still uses the older M5 chip with 16GB of RAM.
According to a Reuters investigation, McDonald's is using machine learning models that analyze millions of daily transactions to generate an 'optimal price' for menu items at nearly 14,000 US restaurants. Reuters found a Big Mac priced at $5.69 at one Fresno location and $6.89 at another just two miles away, a 21 percent difference, with three franchisees saying the AI tool has widened price gaps between nearby stores.
Apple has maintained the same 7.7-inch aluminum enclosure for the Mac Studio since its 2022 launch, now in its fourth hardware generation with the M5 Ultra. Internally, capabilities have grown sharply: the original M1 Ultra topped out at 128GB of memory, while the new M5 Ultra supports up to 512GB with data transfer speeds of 1.2TB/s, about 50 percent faster than the M3 Ultra. Apple skipped an M4 Ultra version due to hardware limitations, and in June raised prices across much of its Mac lineup, pushing the entry-level Mac Studio M4 Max from $1,999 to $2,499.
Apple announced it is adding new safeguards to macOS's Full Disk Access permission system to address risks from AI agents like OpenClaw, Dots and Muse. The company said some developers grant themselves broad access to files, mail, messages and browsing history without users fully understanding the tradeoff, and pledged 'additional controls' without specifying a rollout date or exact changes.
Apple announced it will add new restrictions to macOS's Full Disk Access permission, requiring explicit user action before apps can gain that level of system access. The company said some developers currently use the permission in ways that expose files, mail, messages and browsing history without users fully understanding the scope of access granted. Apple did not specify a rollout timeline for the change.
A hobbyist developer documented progress toward running Linux on Apple's M4 Mac mini, building on work by the Asahi Linux project. The effort required disabling macOS boot security, loading the m1n1 bootloader, and working around the new SPTM hardware security layer that blocks the usual MMIO-tracing approach used for earlier Apple Silicon chips.
A developer posted a Show HN introducing Breadcrumb, a macOS tool that records user activity and organizes it into scoped rule sets to feed context to AI tools. The demo shows folder-based scopes, such as one for a '/acme' project with 28 local rules plus 22 global rules, and a command to list all configured scopes.