Source: Logitech.

Today, Logitech introduced the MX Keypad. If it looks familiar, that’s because it’s one-half of Logitech’s existing MX Creative Console. However, instead of bundling a 3 x 3 keypad with a dialpad, the MX Keypad is just the keypad for $99.

I reviewed the MX Creative Console in 2024, and I still use it and write about ways to automate tasks with it. It’s an excellent pair of devices, so it’s not surprising that Logitech has adapted the keypad to a new use case.

Keypad, cable, and kickstand. Source: Logitech.

The MX Keypad’s hardware is identical to the keypad from the Creative Console. In addition to the keypad itself, it comes with a kickstand you can use to prop it up at an angle and connects via USB-C to your Mac. My MX Creative Console review has more detail about the hardware, along with images and a short video.

I like the MX Creative Console a lot, and according to Logitech, so did software developers looking for ways to automate their AI workflows. While Logitech didn’t expressly say why it dropped the dialpad for the MX Keypad, it makes sense to me having used the MX Creative Console for months. Dialpads are great for timeline-based creative work, but less so for development work. Yes, developers might want to use the dialpad to control screen brightness or volume, but by limiting the MX Keypad to just the keypad, Logitech was able to hit a lower price point, making the device more appealing to a bigger audience.

I’ve been impressed by the number of ways Logitech has opened its devices up to automators who like to tinker, too. Similar to devices like the Stream Deck, Logi Options+ lets you build Smart Actions based on keyboard shortcuts and macros. But there’s more than that. If you’d prefer to let someone else do the automation, Logitech runs a Smart Actions marketplace with plugins tailored to certain apps. For developers there’s also a Logi Actions API for building plugins with access to each Logitech device’s full capabilities.

Source: Logitech.

From a developer standpoint, the combination of automation options means the MX Keypad opens up a variety of possibilities like:

• launching agents,
• monitoring agent activity via the device’s dynamically updated keys,
• triggering saved prompts,
• activating voice input, and
• automating many other repetitive tasks.

Logitech is also teaming up with GitHub Copilot as part of the MX Keypad launch, similar to the partnership that was announced with Adobe as part of the MX Creative Console. There’s a Copilot plugin available that adds Copilot controls to the keypad’s keys. Logitech customers can also take advantage of GitHub’s offer for three months of GitHub Copilot Pro+ for free.

Logitech’s MX Keypad is primarily a repackaging of an existing device with a GitHub Copilot deal thrown in to make it a better value. But it’s good to see the company addressing the developer market more directly. Having used the MX Creative Console primarily for automation and development-type work myself, dropping the dialpad from the package to lower the price is a good tradeoff. I use the dial and its other buttons occasionally, but for automation, the keypad is where it’s at, and between Smart Actions and a full plugin SDK you can point your agent at, the MX Keypad is a great choice for automators.

The Logitech MX Keypad is available directly from Logitech and from Amazon.

Designed in California, the Apple history podcast from Myke Hurley and Jason Snell, is now live on Relay with two new free episodes, plus more for Kickstarter backers and Relay subscribers.

Over the summer, Myke and Jason ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for the new show, which will be released as topical series. The first series about the Apple II was released over the summer as part of a preview for the Kickstarter campaign.

Now, the first two episodes of Apple’s Mac OS Crisis are out and available to listen to for free. Those episodes will be followed by five more weekly installments. However, if you backed the Kickstarter or if sign up to support the show via Relay’s website, you get all seven episodes of the series immediately.

The latest series is about:

Apple’s Mac OS crisis in the ’90s, leading to the company acquiring NeXT and bringing Steve Jobs back.

Apple’s Mac OS Crisis also features special guest John Siracusa, who knows a thing or two about ’90s Apple. In addition to the audio-only version of Designed in California, the show is available on YouTube.

It’s been great to see this show come together over the summer. I know it’s been a lot of work, which is clear from the depth and quality of the episodes. I fully expect Designed in California to become the definitive podcast for Apple history nerds.

Source: Perplexity.

Perplexity has announced hybrid compute for Personal Computer on Apple silicon Macs. Personal Computer already combined cloud-based Computer tasks with access to local files and apps, but its AI processing was primarily cloud-based. Recently, Perplexity also introduced Portable Computer, a local-first version of Computer that can escalate work to the cloud with a user’s permission.

Hybrid compute approaches the problem from a different direction. Tasks start in the cloud but if a new local classifier detects potentially sensitive information, the user is alerted and asked whether they want to route it to a local model, although users also have the option to let the flagged data be used by a frontier cloud-based model. Gemma E4B, Qwen3.6 35B-A3B, and a Perplexity post-trained version of Qwen3.6 35B are available at launch for that local work, with more models to come in the future.

Tasks that don’t require sensitive information are handled in the cloud by frontier models that also orchestrate the cloud and local tasks. Users select the cloud orchestrator and Perplexity chooses the helper frontier models used.

Another key feature is that hybrid compute works with tasks begun from an iPhone or iPad, too. Those devices could already kick off a session, but now they can also run tasks that use sensitive information locally if your Mac is turned on and running Perplexity.

Yesterday, I got a demo of the feature that walked through three scenarios:

• an attorney researching a legal brief, with sensitive client data on their Mac, allowing them to update it locally,
• an analyst using web-based data to update a confidential slide deck for a presentation about a company’s financials, and
• a small business owner kicking off pricing research from her iPhone that was combined with private pricing data for her business that never left her Mac.

I haven’t tried hybrid compute myself yet, but if it works as advertised, it’s a big step forward for Perplexity, and one that a lot of its competitors are also chasing. AI agents are only as good as the tools and data to which they have access. Tool calling has been a big focus over the last year and more, but data privacy is an equally important issue that needs to be solved before more companies, especially those in regulated industries, adopt agentic tools like Personal Computer. It’s good to see Perplexity tackling this head-on.

Myke Hurley writing on The Enthusiast covers three themes from John Ternus’ new CEO bio that was updated today on the Apple Leadership page:

Number 2:

John has led much of the company’s focus in areas like reliability and durability, introducing new techniques that have made Apple products remarkably resilient

I would not have predicted this angle being so prominent, so I can only assume it’s something that’s important to Ternus. Ultimately, it’s good for customers too — you want your computers to last. Apple has also made inroads into the repairability of its products, which I feel goes hand in hand with this.

Of the three, this is the most interesting to me. I wouldn’t have expected durability to be so prominent either, but in addition to Apple’s repairability push in recent years that Myke highlights, I think this is Apple telegraphing something about the future of its products.

In a world where memory and storage prices have skyrocketed and show no signs of coming down to Earth anytime soon, durability becomes a differentiator that’s more important than ever. When you combine that with the system-level stability and performance efforts Apple has made across its OSes this year, I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more about the long-term value of Apple’s devices this fall.

On today’s episode of AppStories, Federico and I interview Andrew Ambrosino, the project lead for Codex. It’s a great conversation that covers a lot of ground, including:

• the long history and many iterations of Codex,
• the merging of Codex into a new version of ChatGPT based on web technologies,
• Computer Use and Computer History, which came along with OpenAI’s acquisition of Sky last year, and
• what goes into designing for user trust.

Then for AppStories+ subscribers, we dug into Andrew’s Mac origin story and some of his favorite Mac apps.

AppStories is available on Apple Podcasts and all your favorite podcast players, as well as YouTube. AppStories+ is a special ad-free, extended version of AppStories that’s delivered a day early in high-bitrate audio for $5/month or $50/year by itself or as part of a Club MacStories Premier membership that adds our weekly and monthly newsletters, app discounts, and other perks for $12/month or $120/year.

Parker Ortolani on the Pebble Index, the recently released AI smart ring:

Ambient computing is here at home on speakers and in the workplace with apps like Wispr Flow, it’s only a matter of time before we carry it with us everywhere.

The Pebble Index is the best preview of that future. The simple gesture of pressing your thumb to your index finger is unbelievably natural. Especially for quick interactions. I’ve found myself setting more reminders, recording ideas, and keeping lists up-to-date. And I know that everything is being logged on my phone in the Pebble app. Better yet, you can connect the Pebble Index to your other AI tools using MCP. There’s also no reason for skeptics to fret, it’s not always listening for hot words or logging everything it hears.

As Ortolani explains, the device ticks a lot of boxes that other AI gadgets just don’t:

The thing that I think strikes me hardest with the Index is that it’s just so socially inoffensive. It’s a form factor people already love, it’s not distracting, it’s not always listening, and it’s affordable. It could be the first truly noncontroversial AI-first hardware.

I ordered a Pebble Index months ago and it should be coming within the next week or so. I bought it for many of the features Ortolani mentions. It’s on-demand, discreet, and a form factor that doesn’t look out of place. The hardware and software matter a lot with a device like this, but if Pebble has nailed it, I can see it becoming my go-to way to jot down brief notes. I’m excited to give it a try and report back.

Dear MacStories reader,

It’s Zac here, the developer of Soulver — a notepad calculator you might have heard of. You type your thinking in plain text, and live answers appear in a column alongside as you go.

I started working on Soulver all the way back in 2005. The reason I’m still improving it 20 years on is the enthusiasm of the people who use it: nearly every day, someone writes to tell me how useful it is in their daily work. For many of them it’s one of those apps that stays open all day — for every budget, quote, and what-if.

This summer I released Soulver’s biggest update in 7 years, with 50+ new features. My favorite is trip planning: write out how many nights you’d like to spend in each destination, and Soulver works out the dates of every leg. Rearrange the itinerary and the dates update. There’s nothing quite like it.

Soulver continues to be a one-time purchase, not a subscription. By popular request, it’s now also a universal purchase: buy it once and it’s yours on Mac, iPad & iPhone. And this week, MacStories readers can get Soulver for $20 off: $39 instead of $59. The offer runs through September 11.

Soulver isn’t for everyone. But if you’re the kind of person who likes to think through problems with numbers step by step, give it a try — there’s a free 60-day trial, so you can see if it clicks for you.

Get Soulver 4 for $39 — $20 off for MacStories readers through September 11

Our thanks to Soulver for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Last night, I sat down with my Vision Pro and caught the first part of the Yankees–Red Sox game live in Immersive Video. I wouldn’t call myself a baseball fan these days, but I have fond memories of many summer evenings at Tiger Stadium and Wrigley Field, and I was keen to see how Apple’s immersive broadcast compared.

Having sampled Apple’s other Immersive Video content, but very little of its sports coverage, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Sitting down to watch, I was surprised by how much it felt like I was at Yankee Stadium. Before the first pitch was thrown, the broadcast focused on the Yankees’ starting pitcher as he warmed up. Periodically, the camera angle switched, giving viewers other angles on the pre-game preparations, while the announcers chatted about each team’s season leading up to the game.

Once the game started, the camera switched to positions near each team’s batting circle depending on which team was at bat, occasionally switching to shots behind home plate and in right-center field. During each at bat, a virtual scoreboard showed a 2D feed of the game like you’d see on a regular broadcast bounded by statistics. The additional angle and information were useful for fans, but as someone who was there primarily for the experience, it took away from the immersiveness a little to see a fake scoreboard floating in the sky over the stadium’s right field wall.

That said, the immersiveness was impressive. I found myself looking all around the stadium taking in the sights and spatial audio sounds. The detail was incredible. Fully surrounded by the stadium, I watched as a family walked by with popcorn and drinks and could even read the Poland Spring label on a water bottle in the bullpen.

Then, as I watched the Yankees at bat, I could see someone off camera spitting sunflower seeds in the dirt along the dugout. That sort of minute detail added to the immersiveness of the experience every bit as much as being surrounded by the video feed and soundscape, to the point that when a player entered my view from off camera, I instinctively tucked my legs under me to avoid him tripping over me.

At times, though, I also felt a little too close to the action. It was like I had slipped into a restricted area, an invisible participant, spying on unsuspecting people on the field, waiting for security to discover me and kick me out of the stadium. That feeling was probably driven by the combination of knowing that the broadcast was live and not having watched a lot of Apple immersive sports content, but it was still a little unsettling at first.

As for the game, I didn’t pay very close attention. I don’t follow either team, but it was still fun to watch the game unfold from up close. The dugout camera angles made it slightly harder to see the pitches as they were thrown than it would be from a more traditional outfield camera viewpoint, but it really didn’t take away from the experience.

Ultimately, I only lasted about a half hour. The experience was excellent, but baseball’s pace is just too slow for my taste, so ultimately, I packed up my Vision Pro and caught up on Silo instead.

If you missed the game, it’s available to replay in full along with highlights in the TV app on Vision Pro.

Throughout 2026, Federico and I have been working on a series of software projects and apps with the help of tools like Codex and Claude Code. Some of those are internal tools, but others are the sort of productivity apps from which anyone can benefit. It’s taken a while because we’re picky (and careful), but the time has come to start releasing the apps we’ve been working on.

Federico actually kicked things off earlier this year with RemCTL, an open-source command-line tool that makes every feature of Apple’s Reminders app available from a terminal. That makes it easy to integrate with automation workflows and agents. I’ve been using RemCTL since before it launched publicly, and it’s now deeply embedded in my everyday Codex workflow.

NotesCTL is perfect for complex research reports generated by agents.

Today, Federico released a Club MacStories+ and Premier preview of NotesCTL, a command-line tool for Apple’s Notes app that is available in the Club Discord community and on the Club Downloads page. Over the past couple of months, he’s reverse-engineered every aspect of how Notes works from the ground up. The result is a command-line tool for power-users that exposes every Notes feature for use with scripts, Shortcuts, and, of course, agents, including:

• tags,
• subfolders,
• pinning,
• rich links,
• attachments,
• checklists,
• headings,
• tables,
• audio recordings, and
• highlights.

NotesCTL’s Markdown Exporter.

With the help of an agent, NotesCTL is great for assembling deep research reports. And with its PencilKit support, you can turn SVGs into native drawings that you can edit and color with an Apple Pencil. It’s great for simple mockups and coloring pages for kids. NotesCTL can also transcribe audio recordings from the Notes app and then search the results. Plus, writers will appreciate the app’s Markdown Exporter.

NotesCTL can even create coloring pages for your kids to fill in with the Apple Pencil.

NotesCTL is nearly ready for public release, but if you don’t want to wait, you can access it today by joining Club MacStories+ or Premier. NotesCTL is the first software project that we’ll be releasing as a beta preview exclusively for Club members, but it won’t be the last. Software never seems ready to ship until, suddenly, it is, and we’ve been working on multiple parallel projects all year that are coming together nicely and will also be released early to Club MacStories+ and Premier members.

We’re excited to share everything we’ve been working on at MacStories for the past several months. NotesCTL is the perfect place to start, especially after RemCTL. Apple’s system apps are excellent, but for power users, they can sometimes feel limiting. Federico’s growing collection of CLIs is MacStories’ answer to those frustrations, one that lets power users enjoy the day-to-day elegance of Apple’s system apps, while extending the apps’ utility when you need it.

NotesCTL is currently available in the MacStories Software section of Discord and on the Club Downloads page where you’ll find it listed under “(2026) NotesCTL Beta Preview” for Club MacStories+ and Premier members and will be released publicly later this fall as an open-source project.

Today, Relay kicked off its annual fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to help combat childhood cancer. In the seven years since the fundraiser began, Relay and its dedicated community of listeners have raised over $4.8 million; a truly amazing figure.

We’d love it if readers joined us in supporting this cause again this year. You can make a donation by visiting here.

The Podcastathon is a big part of the annual fundraiser as Myke Hurley explains on The Enthusiast:

Every year, the Podcastathon for St. Jude is a huge part of our fundraising mission, and we’ve decided that this year we want to turn it into a full-on celebration by having the 12-hour event close out our campaign. So this year we’ll be streaming live on Friday, October 2nd, from the campus of St. Jude.

Also, if you’re not familiar with the story behind Relay’s annual St. Jude Fundraiser, be sure to visit 512 Pixels for the details.

Thanks in advance for checking out Relay’s fundraiser for St. Jude and to all who donate.

Hot on the heels of OpenAI’s addition of a cloud-based browser to ChatGPT Work, Anthropic has added an in-app browser to Claude Cowork in its desktop app. What’s interesting about the two browser implementations is that while both ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are meant to be used for general knowledge work, Claude Cowork’s browser is something of a hybrid that mixes aspects of OpenAI’s Codex built-in browser with its ChatGPT Work cloud-based browser.

First of all, I do not yet have access to Claude’s in-app browser, so the following is based solely on Anthropic’s announcement and other documentation. Still, the differences are worth understanding since the tools are aimed at different workflows.

Like Codex’s in-app browser, Claude Cowork’s in-app browser is built into the desktop app itself. That ties Claude’s browser to the instance of its app running on your Mac. Turn your Mac off or close the Claude app, and the browser becomes unavailable. Leave the Claude app running, and you’ll be able to control the browser session remotely through the Claude mobile app or the web.

From there, however, the browsers diverge. As you’d expect, the Codex implementation is developer-oriented, with tools to build, inspect, and annotate web pages along with access to a terminal, repos, and diffs. In contrast, Claude Cowork’s in-app browser opens automatically as needed for general-purpose web tasks instead of development tasks.

Also, while both ChatGPT Work’s and Claude Cowork’s browser implementations benefit from being isolated from your other day-to-day browser use outside those apps, their handling of login credentials is a little different. As I wrote in greater detail yesterday, ChatGPT separates the login process from the model’s activity and evaluates the login page for things like phishing schemes. Claude Cowork’s in-app browser offers two ways to log in: manually, or by importing cookies from logged-in sessions in another browser. Currently, Claude supports cookie imports on the Mac from Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, but not Safari. In addition to the security benefits that come with a browser that runs isolated from your everyday browser, Claude also requests permission before acting on a site for the first time, blocks high-risk sites, checks actions against the your requests, and uses the same prompt injection protections as its Chrome extension.

My first-run experience with ChatGPT Work’s cloud browser was a mixed bag but showed promise. Although I haven’t tried Claude Cowork’s browser yet, I’m glad to see Anthropic moving in the same direction as OpenAI here. Isolating agent browsing by bringing the browser into Claude and ChatGPT doesn’t solve every security issue, but it’s a good starting point. I expect we’ll see both Anthropic and OpenAI iterate quickly on this theme in the coming months.

The new ChatGPT widget for iOS.

The most recent update to the ChatGPT app for iOS has introduced a new feature that will make those who rely on the company’s AI assistant for work-related tasks quite happy: a customizable widget that lets you control which shortcuts can be placed for convenient access on the Home Screen.

The new widget is called ‘ChatGPT shortcuts’, and it comes in two sizes – small and medium. Alas, the company didn’t add support for large widgets on iPhone yet, nor did they roll out an XL widget for iPad users. I hope more sizes will be coming soon. Unlike the existing ‘ChatGPT’ widget, the new one allows you to personalize which shortcuts are visible on the Home Screen. Once added, long-press the widget, select ‘Edit Widget’, and you’ll be presented with options to choose which buttons you want to show and whether labels should be displayed underneath them or not.

What’s especially nice about these widgets is that they cover the full spectrum of “ChatGPT surfaces” now offered by OpenAI: Chat, Work, and Codex Remote. For each, you can swap default buttons for the following ones:

• Chat
  • New chat
  • Camera
  • Photos
  • Dictation
  • Voice
• Work
  • New work chat
  • Work camera
  • Work photos
  • Work dictation
  • Work voice
• Remote
  • New remote chat
  • Remote camera
  • Remote photos
  • Remote dictation
  • Remote voice

I’m a huge fan of Codex Remote for iOS and iPadOS: as things stand right now in the AI industry, OpenAI’s Remote “app inside an app” for iPhone and iPad is the only intuitive, full-featured solution to start new chats in a remote agent running on macOS directly from iOS and iPadOS. (I am as surprised as everyone else that Anthropic, who were first to the “remote control” space, haven’t shipped a comparable experience in Claude for iOS. Supposedly, that is coming “soon”.)

What do you want to open – Voice or Voice?

Even more impressively, Remote voice (a version of ChatGPT Voice that runs in Codex on the Mac and lets you have bidirectional conversations from the iPhone while the agent is running on the Mac and orchestrating threads there) can now also be accessed from Control Center and the Lock Screen via a dedicated control. Unfortunately, this control has the same icon as regular ChatGPT Voice (which runs in the cloud, not on your Mac). I know: it can all be very confusing, and I hope OpenAI brings some clarity to these icons soon. On a similar note, I wish OpenAI’s iOS team also offered the widgets’ new shortcuts as proper actions in the Shortcuts app. Right now, these launchers are only available from the Home Screen.

The new customizable widgets are the latest entries in a larger push by OpenAI to improve the performance of Codex Remote on iOS and other design changes for iPhone and iPad users. The ChatGPT app recently received a redesigned ‘latest photos’ picker in Chat and Work modes (long-press the + button in the text box, and you’ll see), a tweaked reasoning selector, and the cloud browser we covered earlier this week on MacStories.

Today, Apple announced that it will host an event it calls “Surprise and Shine” on September 9, 2026, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. The company is expected to announce the iPhone 18 Pro line, the highly-anticipated iPhone “Ultra”, as well as new Apple Watches and potentially new AirPods and HomeKit devices.

The event will be streamed live globally on Apple’s Events page as well as on YouTube and in the Apple TV app. Some members of the media were invited to watch the event in person at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park.

MacStories will be covering all the details of the event, so stay tuned and get ready for September 9.

Yesterday, OpenAI introduced a new ChatGPT Work feature designed to let it navigate websites that require a login without revealing your credentials to the model.

Like a lot of people, I spend far too much time clicking around websites that require a login, looking at analytics and other data, checking whether new sponsors have been booked for our podcasts, and more. It’s a tedious but necessary part of my week that slows me down and takes me away from writing and other creative work. ChatGPT’s new Work feature is designed to handle that sort of work for you.

The feature works by signing into websites using a virtual, cloud-based computer. That separates the browsing session from any browsing session on your local computer, walling the agent’s computer use off from your open tabs, cookies, browsing history, passwords, and other data. Because the login and browsing happen in the cloud, that also means work can continue whether you close the ChatGPT app or power down your computer.

According to OpenAI, an additional review model checks the sign-in request and credential destination for signs of phishing or deception. ChatGPT Work then pauses while the user signs in. Credentials entered through its secure sign-in form go directly to the cloud browser and are not visible to the model. After the user authenticates, ChatGPT resumes its work.

OpenAI also explains that its cloud-based browser doesn’t store your username and password. Instead, it saves cookies that allow you to return to a previously authenticated session. If you don’t want to remain logged in, ChatGPT’s cloud browser settings allow you to clear browser data for individual websites or all sites.

Similar to other features in ChatGPT and Codex, users have choices when it comes to which sites ChatGPT Work can access. “Always ask” is the default, requiring the agent to check with the user before using a website, but the permission level can also be set to “Auto approve” after ChatGPT checks a site for relevancy and risk or “Always allow,” which OpenAI discourages. Individual websites can also be allowed or blocked. These settings control website access, but consequential actions require separate confirmation.

ChatGPT Work’s browser control works best on a mobile device and with simple login systems.

I gave ChatGPT’s browser use a try and the results were mixed. I wasn’t able to get the feature to work at all using ChatGPT Work in Safari on my Mac. Some websites had security measures in place that prevented me from logging in. Other times, the cloud browser asked me to take over manually, but I was unable to do so because the UI was frozen or login panels didn’t appear.

Logging into a site with a CAPTCHA required manual intervention.

I had better luck using my iPhone. On one site with a simple username and password system, a login sheet appeared. I entered my credentials, was logged in, and the agent navigated the site to answer my queries. On Apple’s affiliate link dashboard website, I had to take over the browser interaction manually to satisfy a CAPTCHA, which worked after several challenges. Once logged in, the agent pulled and analyzed the data I requested. Also, after I’d signed in to both of those sites on my iPhone, I remained logged in to ChatGPT’s cloud browser, which meant I could also use them from my Mac.

In its current form, the idea of having ChatGPT Work browse signed-in websites on your behalf is better than its implementation. If you can get logged in, having an agent collect and analyze things like analytics data is fantastic. However, getting past the initial login screen is still too frustrating. That said, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the feature, which is available on eligible plans depending on rollout and workspace settings, for future use collecting and analyzing data that would otherwise require a lot of clicking around.

The Magic Keyboard isn’t the only accessory Apple updated today. As Juli Clover reports for MacRumors, the 40W Dynamic Power Adapter that can charge up to 60W was also updated for users in Europe and Vietnam:

The updated variant of the power adapter has a retractable two-prong design. The prongs pop back into the power adapter’s enclosure, making it easier to tuck into a bag or a pocket. Apple previously debuted a standard U.S. variant in September 2025 alongside the iPhone 17 models, and a type G plug version in November 2025.

At this price, why not buy two?

Plus, as Chance Miller covered for 9to5Mac, there’s a new Apple Polishing Cloth. It’s not clear whether the new cloth is different from the one that came before it, but in one respect it’s a big improvement. The updated Polishing Cloth has dropped in price to $9 from $19. In a world of high-priced memory and storage, I’ll take the pricing wins where I can get them.

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.

Source: Apple.

Earlier this year, Apple swapped the text on some of its laptop keyboard keys for glyphs. MacRumors reports that the trend has now spread to four of the company’s Magic Keyboard models:

On the new keyboards, the tab, caps lock, shift, return, and delete keycaps are labeled with glyphs rather than edge text.

The keyboards with numeric pads get even more glyphs than the more compact models.

It’s a small change, but I like it. I burn through keyboards pretty fast with the amount of typing I do, and these come just in time to replace the Magic Keyboard on I use with my Mac Studio that has a slowly disappearing “A” key.