Apple’s new CEO is expected to walk onto the Steve Jobs Theater floor eight days into the job. That is not the same thing as bringing back the old live keynote.

John Ternus officially became Apple’s CEO today. His first public test arrives almost immediately: the company’s “Surprise and shine” event on Wednesday, September 9, at 10 a.m. Pacific, live-streamed from Apple Park.

Fans have been asking the obvious question. After years of polished, pre-taped presentations, will Ternus restore the live, in-the-room keynote that defined Steve Jobs and, for a long stretch, Tim Cook?

The short answer: he is expected on stage. The long answer is that Apple has not announced a return to a fully live show.

Ternus has already appeared in product videos and on stage as hardware chief. That experience matters now that he is the face of the company.

What Apple has actually confirmed

Apple has confirmed the date, the venue, and the livestream. It has not confirmed the format of the presentation itself. Invitations went out with the tagline “Surprise and shine.” They name no presenter and no product.

Recent Apple events have followed a hybrid script: a small invited crowd at the Steve Jobs Theater, executives appearing in person for greetings, then a pre-recorded keynote on the big screen. Coverage of this year’s event still describes that same mix. Trusted Reviews put it plainly: Apple is expected to combine an in-person gathering with a prerecorded presentation, as it has in recent launches.

Why people think Ternus will still walk out

That hybrid format still leaves room for a live moment, and almost everyone covering the company expects Ternus to take it.

CNBC’s Apple reporters said investors and longtime watchers expect him on stage on September 9. Skipping it, they argued, would raise questions he does not want in his first month. The theater is small. The stream is not. Tens of millions of people watch these events. This is how a new CEO introduces himself.

That tracks with how Apple used WWDC in June. Cook hosted what was widely treated as his last major keynote as CEO. Ternus was on campus, mingling with attendees, and did not appear in the taped presentation. Hardware was not the story that day. It will be on September 9.

Why a full live return is a bigger leap than it sounds

Apple did not abandon live keynotes on a whim. The taped format gives the company control over demos, lighting, product shots, and timing. A foldable iPhone, if it arrives as expected, is a hinge-and-glass product. That is exactly the kind of device companies prefer to show in a controlled video rather than risk a live snag in front of the world.

A live keynote also changes the job. Jobs treated the stage as theater. Cook simply wasn’t good at it. Ternus is an engineer who spent 25 years inside hardware, not a showman by reputation. Appearing in person to open and close the event is a natural first step. Performing an hour of unrehearsed product theater is a different bet.W

What September 9 is actually for

The event is already loaded even without a format change. It is Ternus’s first major launch as CEO. It is expected to include iPhone 18 Pro models and, according to a wide range of reports, Apple’s first foldable iPhone. A rebuilt Siri is also in the mix after the WWDC preview. The standard iPhone 18 is widely expected to slip later, which would make this a premium-heavy fall show rather than the usual full-lineup dump.

The realistic headline for next week

Ternus will almost certainly step onto the floor of the Steve Jobs Theater. He will greet the room. He will be the person associated with whatever Apple unveils. It won;t be, on current evidence, a return to a live keynote.

MacDailyNews Take: From what we’ve already seen of Ternus on-stage, he could handle it:

If Apple flips back to the live format at the last minute, that will be news — and we’d love to see it, even if it risks mistakes, because it would be an important statement.

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Earlier today, Apple unveiled the new generation of Mac mini and Mac Studio, featuring the latest entries in the Apple silicon family of chips: the M6, available in the Mac mini, and the M5 Ultra, exclusive to the Mac Studio. You can read more details about the announcement and related specs in John’s overview.

As someone who’s been working with an M3 Ultra Mac Studio (on loan from Apple) with 512 GB of RAM for the past year (plus two separate M4 Mac minis) with a particular focus on local AI models and performance gains enabled by Apple’s MLX framework, I obviously am very interested in these new machines. To give you some context: my current workspace for my upcoming iOS and iPadOS 27 review, which lives in Notion, is entirely managed by a series of local agents running the latest DeepSeek-V4-Flash via MLX on the Mac Studio, which continuously scan the project for new notes, sources, and research material that is automatically categorized and linked in the chapters that I’m writing. So, yes, I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on the new Mac minis and Mac Studios soon. In the meantime, I thought it’d be fun to break down the local AI-related details from Apple.

First, the M6. While it may not be the powerhouse that the M5 Ultra is, it’s an interesting new chip because of its new 2 nm process and dual Neural Engine system:

M6 is built using cutting-edge 2 nm process technology, packing greater transistor density into a smaller die for a major leap in performance and power efficiency. M6 also introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, providing up to 2x the peak compute over previous generations to make on-device AI workflows run even faster. System frameworks can automatically utilize both engines simultaneously, enabling applications to see faster model execution.

But that’s not all: the new 12-core GPU (which has two more cores than the M4’s old GPU) now features Neural Accelerators in each core for the first time on the Mac mini. The result, according to Apple, is “4x faster AI performance and 2x faster graphics than Mac mini with M4”. If these numbers hold up and scale linearly, a local Mixture-of-Experts model such as Qwen 3.5-35B-A3B, which would run at ~17 tokens/sec on average on a base M4 Mac mini with 16 GB of RAM, could realistically generate output at over 60 tokens/second with the base model M6 Mac mini.

Based on what we’ve seen so far, the one downside of the M6 Mac mini is that it does not have Thunderbolt 5 ports; those are exclusive to the M5 Pro model, also announced today. As Apple also notes, Thunderbolt 5 allows multiple M5 Pro Mac minis to run local AI models as a single cluster (for example, using something like exo). Alas, that won’t be possible with the M6 Mac mini and its Thunderbolt 4 bandwidth bottleneck. Nonetheless, I’d be intrigued to compare the performance of the widely regarded Qwen3.8-27B and DeepSeek-V4-Flash models on the new M6 Mac mini.

Moving on to the flagship M5 Ultra Mac Studio, let’s start here:

With M5 Ultra, Mac Studio achieves up to 4.3x the peak AI compute performance of M3 Ultra and a staggering 9.8x more than M1 Ultra. Combined with up to 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, 50 percent higher than before, Mac Studio lets users run massive models entirely on device with complete privacy — without counting tokens or worrying about rising cloud costs.

As seen on the Mac Studio’s product page, the 512 GB RAM version of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio will only be available in “late October”. Unlike the M6, the M5 Ultra supports Thunderbolt 5, which will allow customers to run multiple Mac Studios in a cluster with shared memory to distribute inference across machines. And, according to Apple, a cluster of four Mac Studios yields three times the performance of a single Mac Studio.

Speaking from personal experience, I know that my M3 Ultra Mac Studio using oMLX can run DeepSeek-V4-Flash locally with generation averaging 35 tokens/second. Assuming a linear 4x increase, that would put the same model at over 120 tokens/second on an M5 Ultra Mac Studio. To put things in perspective, that kind of performance would be faster than any AI chatbot website, it’d be faster than many providers who offer a “fast” mode for their models, and it’d only be second to either dedicated NVIDIA PC clusters at home or specialized inference providers such as Cerebras or Groq…which are running in full-blown data centers. Sure, you would need a computer that is likely going to cost more than $20,000 to make it happen, but it’d still be possible on a single machine that is small, quiet, and that – in theory – any consumer can buy off the shelf.

It’s also interesting to consider the implications of M5 Ultra for running much larger models that would have typically required aggressive quantization to even stay in memory and produce any useful output. For example, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 (a 744B MoE model) could run at up to 17 tokens/second on an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512 GB of RAM; the same person was even able to get the massive Kimi K3 model to run on a single machine…with decoding performance up to 3 tokens/second. You see where this is going: by continuing to push the envelope of what is possible with M-series chips, Apple is gradually making it possible to run frontier open-weight models on local hardware that takes up as much space as four Mac minis stacked together.

Obviously, for now, this is all theoretical: we’re going to need actual benchmarks to objectively measure the improvements and performance gains of the new chips. But if Apple’s claims hold up – and I have no reason to believe they won’t – I believe both the M6 and M5 Ultra will meaningfully shake up the landscape of local AI models on macOS, reinforcing, once again, that Apple continues making the best computers for AI in the industry.

Microsoft:

Exchange Web Services (EWS) is approaching end of service in Exchange Online. We first announced this change was coming in 2018, when we announced that Exchange Web Services (EWS) will no longer receive functionality updates. In 2023, we announced that EWS will be disabled in Exchange Online in October 2026.

Today we’re announcing we will use a phased, admin controllable disablement plan that starts in October 2026 and concludes with a complete shutdown of EWS in 2027.

Apple:

Microsoft announced the upcoming end of service for Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online. Apple is actively working with Microsoft to update Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders to use the Graph API in a future update to macOS 27, including a declarative configuration for device management services.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Apple’s migration to Microsoft’s newer Graph API because EWS support in Apple Mail has long been buggy. It seems to have gotten worse in recent months, presumably due to server side changes as Microsoft prepares to shut it all down. Unfortunately, Apple is not as far along in the transition as I’d expected.

Jonathan Harbourne (and, alas, Claude):

What made a Mac feel like a Mac at work was the software that came with it. Mail that you could actually scan. A Calendar that was a separate application, so it could live permanently on a second screen instead of hiding behind a tab. Quick Look. Smart mailboxes. Spotlight that found things. Share sheets that worked everywhere. The system behaving as one coherent thing rather than a collection of vendor silos.

[…]

iOS and iPadOS Mail no longer depend on EWS. macOS Mail still does. Same company, same deadline, same protocol, and only one of the two platforms got the work done in time. Microsoft ended up writing the guidance Apple should have written, telling administrators in February that Apple Mail for Mac users would have to switch to Outlook until the applications were updated. […] Apple had years. It had a public deadline. It had, by Microsoft’s own account, one of the most widely used EWS applications in existence. And it let the clock run out.

[…]

Somewhere in every one of these migrations is a line in a change log that reads “users to move to Outlook”, as though a mail client were a fungible commodity, like swapping a stapler. […] This is not the death of the Mac at work. […] It is the death of the Mac experience at work.

Outlook for Mac feels very different from Apple Mail, and users are being squeezed from the Microsoft side, too. Microsoft will be ending the transition to New Outlook in October, but the new version is still missing many features that were present in Legacy Outlook (as well as Apple Mail). Microsoft had long promised that it would implement AppleScript in New Outlook before dropping support for the old version, but last week it changed course:

AppleScript workflows vary widely across organizations and often depend on behaviors from the classic app that don’t exist in the New Outlook. Because these patterns can’t be standardized, full compatibility isn’t feasible. We have decided not to move forward with this feature. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Back to Harbourne:

Access only ratchets one way. Mail was allowed because it worked, quietly, for years, over a protocol nobody was auditing. It has now been formally removed under a named cybersecurity policy. Getting it back would require someone in a security function to write a positive case for re-admitting a broad-permission third-party client to the corporate mail estate, and then put their name on it. Nobody’s career improves by doing that. Saying no costs nothing and is never wrong in hindsight.

So if Apple ships Graph support in Mail next year, the people who lost it will not get it back. The door didn’t swing shut. It was bolted, and the reason it was bolted is now written down in a policy document that will outlive the protocol that prompted it.

Apple has no leverage to change that, either. The organisations deploying Macs by the tens of thousands are not Apple partners in any meaningful sense. They are customers who buy boxes. There is no relationship to call on, no joint roadmap, no account team, nobody at Apple whose job it is to notice that a hundred thousand people just lost Mail.

October is when administrators will have to opt back into allowing EWS for a few more months, but some (like Harbourne’s) will be switching off support sooner.

Apple Mail and Outlook aren’t the only options, though. MailMaven supports both Graph and AppleScript.

Previously:

• MailMaven 1.2
• Bricking Microsoft Office 2019
• SpamSieve 3.2
• Microsoft Adds Free Outlook Tier
• “New Look” Outlook Shipping in October

Update (2026-08-21): See also: Reddit and Mac Power Users.

Update (2026-08-24): See also: Mac Power Users.

Previously:

• The Best Worst E-mail Client