Apple has updated its Mac Mini and Mac Studio desktops with new internals while keeping their exterior designs unchanged. The Mac Mini now ships with either the M5 Pro or the all-new M6 chip, Apple's first built on 2-nanometer technology, featuring a 12-core CPU, a 12-core GPU, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine for improved AI performance. The Mac Studio gains an M5 Ultra option, and both machines return to steady availability after months of limited stock.
wired.com
· 2026-08-25
Parallels Desktop 27 introduces a new Metal-based graphics driver enabling hardware-accelerated OpenGL 4.3 for Windows virtual machines running on Apple Silicon Macs. This unlocks professional Windows applications like ArcGIS Pro, ZWCAD, and Blender 4.3 that previously required this graphics baseline to function. Parallels also touts faster AI workload performance and new enterprise management tools aimed at IT departments.
9to5mac.com
· 2026-08-25
Rising electricity demand from AI data centers is spurring investment in solid-state power transformers, which use semiconductor switching instead of the century-old copper-coil design of conventional transformers. Unlike traditional units, which are hand-built and face multi-year delivery backlogs, solid-state versions can be mass-produced using materials like silicon carbide, making them smaller, lighter, and modular. Tech companies building AI infrastructure are especially drawn to them because they suit the direct current power setups increasingly used to run dense racks of AI chips.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-08-24
Alex Tarnava, inventor and patent holder of hydrogen water tablets used by roughly 100 wellness brands, has built a business selling about 40 million doses monthly without ever taking venture capital funding. He also created Inhale H2, a patent-pending medical gas and aerosolized drug delivery device priced at $6,499 that has sold out twice since its December launch. Tarnava says he bootstrapped everything despite a childhood spent below the poverty line.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-08-24
Researchers at Kyoto University led by Mitsuaki Kaneko, Shunya Shibata, and Tsunenobu Kimoto built a silicon carbide transistor that operates at 600°C using standard ion implantation, the same doping process used in commercial chip fabs. Their bottom-gate, double-well design narrowed the gap between designed and measured threshold voltage to under 0.1V at 400°C, a sharp improvement from the more than 2V drift seen in conventional layouts, while also curbing substrate leakage as temperatures rise.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-08-24
Waymo disclosed it built a proprietary 5-nanometer ASIC chip that pre-processes the massive stream of sensor data—including feeds from 13 cameras—before it reaches its self-driving system's core computer. The company says the chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS of processing power, putting it near the performance level of Nvidia's DRIVE AGX Thor chip, and is a key part of the vehicle now rolling out to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-08-23
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