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Tech News
Meta launched Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter multimodal AI model it calls the most capable US open-weight model available, and said it can run on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple's MLX framework. Apple published its own technical post on MLX and the new model, and executives from both companies publicly praised the collaboration, which Axios reported had been months in the making.
Pulse Local, a new Mac budgeting app shown on Hacker News, downloads about 2.9GB of AI models to the user's machine so that financial questions are processed locally rather than sent to a remote server. When syncing accounts, the app fetches transactions via Plaid through Pulse's servers, but the developer says the data passes through server memory without being stored, leaving only connection metadata like institution name and last sync time on the backend.
Amazon is offering steep discounts on M5 Pro MacBook Pro configurations, including $600 off a 2TB 14-inch model and $500 off a 16-inch 24GB model. Both deals bring prices below Apple's pre-price-hike list prices from June. Other current deals include AirPods Pro 3 at $50 off, AirPods Max 2 at $120 off, the M6 Mac mini near $150 off, and a $199 clearance price on a Black Titanium Apple Watch Ultra 3.
A 2014 essay argues that modern dictionaries like the New Oxford American and Merriam-Webster offer flat, utilitarian definitions that strip words like 'example' or 'fustian' of color and nuance. The author contrasts this with Webster's 1913 edition, suggesting its entries were more vivid and rewarding to read for pleasure, not just lookup.
Amazon is selling the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro chip, 24GB RAM and 2TB storage for $2,399, down from its $2,999 list price. The retailer is also offering discounts on AirPods Pro 3, AirPods Max 2, the M6 Mac mini, iPhone 18 Pro cases and the USB-C Apple Pencil.
The Museo de Historia de la Computación spent 18 months building a full-size replica of the 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer that houses a working cluster of 30 Mac minis, mostly from 2012. Using a custom Python matrix-multiplication script, the cluster reportedly hit 1.3 teraflops on 64 active cores, down from a previous 1.5 teraflops run with all 70 cores online. The exhibit, built to mark the 50th anniversaries of the Cray-1 and Apple, lets visitors watch a calculation run on one core before seeing it spread across the cluster.
Crest is a new free and open-source web browser for Mac that draws design inspiration from Arc. It is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and is not affiliated with Arc or its maker. The project credits artwork from Lorc and Delapouite at game-icons.net under a CC BY 3.0 license.
BetterWispr is a new Apache 2.0-licensed dictation tool for macOS 14 and later that requires no subscription, account or API key. It runs speech-to-text locally using downloadable models or Apple's on-device speech recognition, letting users dictate into any text field via a hold-to-record shortcut like Option+Space.
Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain spent 18 months building a working replica of the Cray-1 supercomputer to mark the 50th anniversaries of its debut at Los Alamos and Apple's founding. The replica clusters 30 Mac Minis from 2012-2014 (25 dual-core i5s and five quad-core i7s, 70 cores total) for a peak of 1.5 TeraFLOPS, though one quad-core unit going offline has dropped current peak output to 1.3 TeraFLOPS. Unlike the original's industrial refrigeration system, the replica is cooled passively via a convection-tower design.
A Verge laptop reviewer describes starting to experiment with running AI models locally rather than relying on cloud services, citing privacy concerns about sharing personal data with companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic. The testing includes Apple's new M5 Ultra Mac Studio and upcoming Windows RTX Spark machines with up to 128GB of RAM, starting with the open-source self-hosted tool Hermes Agent, which runs free when used with local large language models.
Retailers are running weekend discounts on Apple products including up to $150 off the new M6 Mac mini, $200 off the Mac Studio, and the best pricing in months on the M5 MacBook Air. Deals also include AirPods Max 2 at $120 off, all-time lows on Apple Watch Series 12, iPhone 18 Pro cases starting at $41, and the first discount on the new Apple Magic Keyboard.
The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has built a 1:1 scale visual replica of the 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer, powered internally by a cluster of 30 Mac Minis from around 2012-2014. The project, which took 18 months to complete, marks the 50th anniversary of both the Cray-1 and Apple. Using 64 active cores running macOS Mojave with MPI networking, the cluster achieved 1.3 teraflops in recent tests, far exceeding the original Cray-1's roughly 160 megaflops peak performance.