Communities from Lansing, Michigan, to Pflugerville, Texas, are ending their relationship with Flock, largely over concerns regarding out-of-control surveillance, unwanted data sharing, high expenses, and reports of police abusing the tool.
Put another way: During the last 30 days, an average of three localities per day have halted contracts with Flock.
“Looking at that image, it’s gone parabolic!” Brian Hofer, the executive director of Secure Justice, told Ars.
Hofer, who until 2025 served as chair of the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission for 10 years, recognized that while 210 remains relatively small, the momentum is growing rapidly.
“When you see that now 165 [cancellations] are just in the first almost eight months of this year... At that speed, if it goes another year, we’re talking serious money,” he said. “That number is going to get huge, fast.”
When presented with this data, Flock Safety did not express concern. “So far in 2026, new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by approximately 10 to one,” emailed Courtney Terlecki, a company spokesperson. “That does not mean every community will make the same decision, and we understand that public safety technology deserves thoughtful public discussion and community engagement.”
She declined to say precisely how many new customers Flock has taken on this year, but the company has repeatedly said that its products are “trusted by over 5,000 communities.”
Criticism
After extensive criticism, Flock CEO Garrett Langley wrote in a recent blog post that Flock would reduce data retention defaults from 30 days to seven, among other privacy-minded changes.
Last Friday, Flock’s top lawyer wrote in another blog post that its newly modified terms of use “expressly prohibit customers and their users from using Flock Services to mislead, harass, stalk, or otherwise impose upon or violate the legal rights of another person.”
Those efforts have done little to quell political scrutiny.
This week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced that he was “investigating Flock Safety’s collection, retention, and dissemination of the data generated by its artificial intelligence surveillance cameras.”
Additionally, on Wednesday, after two Florida police officers were arrested for misusing Flock, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis gave a speech in which he said that Flock cameras were “out of control” in his state.
“When I see, like, a police officer using this to track, like, an ex-girlfriend, I’m like, you know what the hell’s going on?” DeSantis said.
Even advocates who have followed the pervasive expansion of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology—which predated Flock—are surprised.
“Maybe in the past it didn't feel like every red light cam really meant a pair of eyes was watching you, but with AI, that's increasingly becoming the reality,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center of Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, emailed Ars.
“And we're already seeing how AI can morph ALPRs into a mass surveillance dragnet," he added. "Flock lets its cameras be searched for keywords and people, cities are incorporating real-time facial recognition into camera networks, Border Patrol is using AI to scan ALPR data for driving patterns [and] pulling people over whenever the AI deems their driving ‘suspicious.’”
The scrutiny has become bipartisan after numerous widely reported incidents. “A Texas Sheriff’s Office used it to search for a woman who had had an abortion, and federal agents proposed using it outside gun shows,” Catherine Crump, a UC Berkeley law professor, emailed Ars.
“It definitely does not help that this is yet another Silicon Valley product that no one asked for that threatens to reshape people’s lives.”
Update, August 28: Secure Justice has updated its data and now says that 93 jurisdictions (up from 90) have ended Flock contracts this month alone.
Apple increased the price for a monthly subscription to Apple TV by $2, to $15, today.
Annual prices increased by 20 percent from $99 to $119. Current subscribers will receive one month’s notice before paying the new prices, Apple said, per Variety.
Apple TV doesn’t have commercials and is still cheaper than many of its biggest rivals, like Netflix (ad-free plans start at $20/month) and Disney+ (ad-free plans start at $19/month). However, Apple TV has a much smaller library than many subscription-based streaming services.
Apple also increased the cost of a monthly individual subscription to Apple One—which bundles the Apple TV streaming service with Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple Music, Apple News+, and iCloud+—from $20 to $22 today. The price bump tracks somewhat logically, considering new higher fees for Apple TV, as well as Apple Music, whose monthly price increased from $11 to $13 last month.
Last month, Apple also increased the prices of Apple One’s Family (from $26 to $28) and Premier (from $38 to $40) plans.
The higher prices come as Apple continues relying heavily on services revenue. In the quarter ending on June 27, services represented 28.1 percent of Apple's revenue compared to 71.9 percent from hardware. Apple’s services business also had a disproportionately lower cost of sales compared to its hardware business (13.7 percent for services versus 86.3 percent for hardware), adding to its appeal.
After years of spending massive amounts of money on content for its streaming service, Apple may be keen on bringing Apple TV closer to profitability. Although Apple originally framed the streaming service as a pathway to other Apple offerings, it would be reasonable for Apple to want more from the service now.
In 2025, The Information reported that Apple TV was Apple's only service offering that wasn't profitable, and, per an anonymous employee, it wasn’t expected to be so for at least its first 10 years. Notably, Apple has never disclosed profitability figures for its streaming service, but The Information’s report, citing two anonymous sources, claimed at the time that Apple TV was “losing more than $1 billion annually.”
Without the addition of ads, small price hikes could be the simplest way for Apple TV to drive revenue. However, this also risks harming another obvious avenue: getting more subscribers.
Florida's attorney general got a fiery rebuke and some ecclesiastical schooling from the state's Catholic bishops after he boldly threatened to block funding to Catholic schools unless the church bends to the state's ant-vaccine policies—policies allegedly intended to uphold religious freedom.
On July 31, Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a questionable letter to the bishops regarding exemptions to school vaccination requirements. Florida law requires public and private schools to allow vaccination exemptions based on religious grounds. But Catholic schools in the state do not accept religious exemptions; Florida's Catholic dioceses support vaccination and recognize no theological argument against it. The schools only accept exemptions based on medical conditions that are verified by a healthcare provider.
Uthmeier, himself a Catholic, wrote to the bishops in an open letter that, based on his own understanding of Catholicism, he saw "no legitimate religious reason to refuse granting religious exemptions." He reviewed select theological positions regarding the use of "abortion-derived vaccines," and suggested to the bishops that it was "morally reprehensible" that they not grant religious exemptions.
Beyond sharing his personal interpretations with the bishops, Uthmeier threatened to withhold state scholarships and vouchers from Catholic school if they don't change their position.
"Far from hallow"
The bishops responded with their own letter, which they made public last week. With a firm crack, they smack down Uthmeier's legal and theological arguments, while also noting that they're being unnecessarily nice in explaining to him why he's wrong. "[T]he Catholic bishops in Florida do not have to justify to your office their position on Catholic teaching and their reasons for the current vaccine policies," the write.
But "out of respect," they go on to demolish Uthmeier's points, citing the hierarchical nature of the Catholic church, the Religion clauses of the First Amendment, state laws, and previous court rulings. In all, "It is beyond cavil that the bishops, not the state, decide how to interpret and apply Catholic principles and theology."
They write:
The constitutional defect in your office’s inquiry is, therefore, not merely the conclusion it posits, but the inquiry itself. Whether Catholic doctrine requires, permits, or disfavors a particular exemption is a religious question entrusted to Catholic authorities, not state officials. The government may not decide that Church teaching is insufficiently religious, insufficiently consistent with Catholic doctrine, or insufficiently compelling to justify an ecclesiastical policy. Nor may it require Church leaders to defend their interpretation of Catholic doctrine before civil authorities as a condition of operating religious schools.
To the threat of withholding educational scholarships and other funding, the bishops call it "far from hallow and legally incorrect."
"The state cannot disqualify Catholic schools from the scholarship program merely because a state official’s views differ from the bishops' views."
Vaccine and the common good
As to their position on vaccines, the bishops explain their policy by first addressing a common religion-tinged criticism of vaccines: that the production of some of them involves using cell cultures that were originally developed from fetuses aborted in the 1960s. With the cell lines still in use, no new fetal cells or abortions are involved, and vaccines are purified so that no fetal tissue is in immunizations.
Some, like Uthmeier, claim that use of such vaccines goes against the church's belief in the sanctity of life. But, in fact, the church has repeatedly made clear that this is not the case. The Florida bishops reference a 2017 document from the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Italian Bishops’ Conference that getting vaccinated "does not signify some sort of cooperation with voluntary abortion" and can be done "with a clear conscience." The Florida bishops further clarify that it is "morally permissible" for parents to have their children vaccinated for the same reason.
The bishops say that some parents may still disagree, and for those parents, they "are free to choose a different educational path for their children. Catholic virtual schooling and home schooling are among them," the bishops write.
Their vaccine policy is "rooted in the desire to protect the common good and to encourage the proportional benefits of utilizing vaccines," the bishops write. "This position is rooted in our Catechism: 'Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them, taking into account the needs of others and the common good.'"
The bishops note the vaccines not only protect healthy children, but also vulnerable groups in their schools, including children who cannot be vaccinated due to medical conditions, expectant teachers, and elderly parents and grandparents.
State context
The bishops' stand against Uthmeier comes as Florida's Republican leaders continue to attack life-saving vaccines and vaccination requirements. Last year, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced that the state planned to end all vaccination requirements, including those for school children. He dramatically claimed that every vaccine requirement "drips with disdain and slavery."
On Monday, the state proposed a rule to remove requirements that children get vaccinated against chickenpox, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type B, and pneumococcal to enter school. The rule would also expand religious exemptions.
The bishops' letter highlights a fallacy often used by anti-vaccine advocates: that undermining vaccines and dismantling vaccination requirements upholds religious freedom, when in fact it can be an attack on that freedom. Just on Monday, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed weakening the wording of federal vaccine recommendations "in favor of individual autonomy and religious freedom." Yet, no major religion in the world forbids vaccinations, and most encourage and embrace them as a common good, like the Catholic bishops.
The bishops ended their letter noting that they periodically review their vaccine policy. But, they wrote, they stand firm in their rejection of religious exemptions and "will not succumb to affronts to religious freedom."
The great Dolly Parton has died. One of the last living major figures from 1960s country, Parton transcended anything any other country musician has ever done in the world of popular culture, becoming not only a living legend for her music, but an icon of love and hope. I don’t think Parton is above critique, both musically and politically, but for the most part, this is a person who made the world better because she lived in it. She was also one of the smartest American capitalists who ever lived and if you don’t think this is as central to her legacy as her music, you don’t know Dolly.
Born in 1946 in Pittman Center, Tennessee, Parton grew up real poor. This was the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and the poverty in this region was still intense, even with the Tennessee Valley Authority having done a lot of work to pull this region into the 20th century. How poor were they? Her father paid the person who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. She was always interested in music and her family pushed her in this direction too. Couldn’t be worse than the sharecropping her father did, though he managed to eventually get his own land and grew a little tobacco. Her mother was the singer in the family and Dolly always credited her mother with creating her interest in music.
Dolly sang in church from the time she was a small child and people recognized her talent. She began to sing on the radio at the age of 10, on the Cas Walker Show in Knoxville, which was an important regional country show back in the days when regional country music scenes existed. She first performed on the Grand Ole Opry at the age of 13, when she also recorded a single. Now, she could have just been a kid who liked music and had a brief moment of recognition. There’s a million of those over the century of commercial country music. But Parton was ambitious. Crazy ambitious. She wrote constantly and starring selling her songs by the time she was in her late teens. By 1966, she had written two top ten hits, one for Bill Phillips and one for Skeeter Davis. Not bad for a woman this young!
At first, Dolly’s producers tried to steer her from country. When she first signed with Monument Records in 1965, they tried to make her a bubblegum pop singer. She was young and blonde I guess, but lord that makes no sense at all, not with her voice. Luckily, she defeated them and not many young women could do that. But Dolly was always a force of nature.
Dolly’s first album, Hello I’m Dolly, from 1967 is an incredibly solid and promising country album. “Dumb Blonde” was always a piss take with her—as she would say, she was neither dumb nor blonde. It was written by Curly Putnam and not with the irony Dolly would bring to it. She was so obviously hyper-intelligent and could play this look and stereotype for her own purposes that she put the song over and it was her first hit, peaking at #24 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart.
Dolly’s brilliance as a performer was clear enough by her third album, 1968’s Just Because I’m a Woman. Three songs here sum up her brilliant vision. First, there’s the excellent title track, which was a shot at men treating women like trash after sex even though men did this to her and are just as “guilty” as women are. She was hardly the first female country singer to touch on this topic—Kitty Wells’ 1952 response to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life,” titled “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” was a direct answer song that took on men’s dismissive thinking about sexually active women—but Dolly built on the changes of the late 60s and discussed sex more directly than previous women. This was her own composition. She co-wrote “I’ll Oilwells Love You,” perhaps the best gold digging woman song ever written and one that gets at the power of a woman like herself. Then there’s another song of hers, “The Bridge,” about a pregnant woman about to throw herself off said bridge because her boyfriend got her pregnant and has now abandoned her. The whole album is quite good but these three songs do much to sum up Dolly’s amazing power as a songwriter and singer in a country music world that was fearful of political change in the late 60s.
Everyone who saw Dolly thought that a star was in the making. Porter Wagoner started bringing her onto his TV show as a guest in 1967. It wasn’t easy as she moved into being the co-star of the show. Now, the thing was that any guy needed to have a girl singer but the girl singers were never allowed to upstage the guy, no matter how good they were. Porter’s girl singer (and I use this term because that’s how they were so often called at the time) was Norma Jean, who was by no means any kind of slouch herself. She left after getting married and so Dolly replaced her. The fans weren’t happy, often chanting for Norma Jean while she sang. That stopped pretty fast after they heard her voice.
Wagoner became Dolly’s mentor and it was mostly a good relationship. It took awhile for her to really get big on the charts. “Just Because I’m a Woman” only reached #17 on the country charts, which frustrated both of them. It took until 1970 for her to really become a big chart topper. Oddly, it was a recording of “Mule Skinner Blues” that proved to be her first real hit. Country audiences wanted to hear an old chestnut once more (really, country music before the rise of douche country in the early 90s recycled old songs all the time) and Dolly hit #3 with it. That led to her first #1 hit, the excellent “Joshua,” in February 1971. She became a stone cold hitmaker right away. “Coat of Many Colors” went to #4. “My Tennessee Mountain Home” and “Travelin’ Man,” both great songs, did pretty well too. So did a few more duets with Porter. These are great songs.
But Porter was starting to hold her back. She didn’t need the mentorship of a very good if not great but most definitely patriarchal male country star anymore. He was older and he was stuck in his style and Dolly wasn’t going to fulfill her destiny if she stayed with him. So she broke up with him in the best way she knew how. She wrote him a song. “I Will Always Love You” is not in fact my favorite country song, but the audiences loved it and it was a heartfelt message to the man who had done more for her career than anyone else. Porter knew it was a great song, but he was also devastated by the end of his partnership with Dolly and it took him years to really get over it (there’s a great Drunk History bit on this).
Dolly made no errors in going solo. In fact, the first release off that album was her biggest hit yet—“Jolene” is one of the all-time great songs. “I Will Always Love You” kicked off the second side of the record. So really, she did what she needed to do. But…..Dolly’s ambitions also started getting in the way of the music’s quality only a couple of years after she went solo. The mid-70s saw some pretty solid albums still in Love is Like a Butterfly and The Bargain Store. But things started getting cheesy pretty quickly. Country music was moving into its urban cowboy phase and a girl from east Tennessee was going to have to change her approach a bit. The glitz and glam went very well with the Parton persona but the music because pretty synth heavy and just not very interesting. She relied on her great voice, but the quality of the songs declined. By the late 70s, very few people talked about the latest Dolly album and for all the well-deserved love she gets, even today no one really talks about these albums. Some singles, sure. But as a body of work? It gets to be a mixed bag very quickly.
Dolly made sure that what mattered most in her music was embracing the current popular sounds in a way that made sense for her country and crossover pop audiences. Dolly consistently changed her style to stay popular. I will argue that this had a negative impact on her overall art—so much of her music sounds dated. But Dolly wanted to bring pleasure to people while also making a lot of money. She was tremendously good at both. Parton started working with pop stars such as Olivia Newton-John, often making amiable but disposable albums. People liked it well enough to buy the singles, if not always the album. She stayed relevant when a lot of her peers did not.
By the 80s, Parton also did a lot of movies. She was such a huge personality that just by being herself, she could be an effective actor in the right role. She was one of the stars of 1980’s 9 to 5, which played on the 9to5 movement of women’s workers and made it a comedy about women reacting to their horrible misogynist boss. She had her biggest and most endearing hit in years with the title track to the soundtrack, which topped not only the country but the pop and adult contemporary charts. She starred with Burt Reynolds in the 1982 film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, running said whorehouse. Both of these films gained her a Golden Globe nomination and they are well-deserved. Unlike a lot of country stars trying to act (Johnny Cash is one notably bad example), she could pull it off. She acted consistently through the 80s. Rhinestone, from 1984, starring Sylvester Stallone, is not a good film, but hey, whatever. She also got some hits from recording the soundtrack. More useful was 1989’s Steel Magnolias, one of those films with a million stars that are all good.
Through this period, Dolly was getting a few top 10 hits on the country charts. But with the exception of her Kenny Rogers duet with “Islands in the Stream,” she wasn’t making much of a lasting impact musically in this period. RCA dropped her at the end of 1986. She did just fine. Columbia signed her right away. But getting dropped from her long-term label suggested that her moves toward pop-country were neither commercially nor artistically successful anymore. She had something of a comeback in 1987 with the release of Trio, her album with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. This was good for all three of them. The mid 80s were after all not great for 70s country and folk figures, no matter who.
Parton the capitalist became more interesting than Parton the singer in the 80s. She decided to use her fame to lift her hometown out of poverty. Now, whether the creation of Dollywood was good or not for the area around Pigeon Forge is open for debate. There’s no question that the region has much more money than it used to. On the other hand, it is the most crass place in the universe, a region of beautiful mountains surrounded by chain restaurants, putt putt courses, tacky tourist shops, and of course Dollywood itself. I’ve never cared for the type of country musician who created their own theaters in Pigeon Forge and once, when trying to show my visiting parents the region during my years in Knoxville, I ran into a ridiculous level traffic jam going through there because Alan Jackson was putting on an outdoor show and this just destroyed any semblance of the town being functional that day. I also never can forgive Jackson for that traffic. Or his music.
There’s no way to talk honestly about Dolly Parton without talking about her looks. The blonde hair and the huge breasts were central to her legend. She always claimed two things—first, the breasts were real and while of course like so many superstars, she had plenty of work done on her body over the years to stay “young,” this was true. Second, she was not a natural blonde but she was open about this and why it matters. She saw herself as a redneck’s ideal of glamour, what she saw growing up in east Tennessee as what beauty was, which was basically Marilyn Monroe. It worked for her, no question about that.
Dolly had one of the most interesting relationships in the history of celebrity. As everyone reading this knows, Dolly Parton would become a celebrity beyond celebrity, one of the most famous people in the world. On the day she arrived in Nashville, still just an 18 year old girl, she met a man named Carl Dean. As she rose in the country music industry, he would support her. But he found out almost immediately that he hated all of this. He didn’t mind if Dolly was a big star, but he wanted nothing to do with fame. So they made a deal—she would do her thing and he would stay completely and 100% in the background. For so many people, this would not work. The reality of fame makes stable relationships difficult. But it sure worked for them. They got married in 1966 and stayed that way until his death in 2025, which by all accounts absolutely devastated her. This worked in part because as absolutely famous as Dolly was and for as public as she remained, she was also an extremely private person and nothing could pierce her persona into the inner Dolly. That might be the reason for a 59 year marriage.
People have often debated Dolly’s politics. She often was portrayed liberal, but was she? What she really pushed was broad ideas of love and tolerance. That definitely makes her not a modern day Republican! She became an icon in the gay and trans communities because of her fashion and her broad-based tolerance. But here was the thing—she was never going to do a single thing that would risk a dollar. So when Tennessee started moving extreme right in the 2010s and passing all sorts of hideous legislation, Dolly was absolutely silent. Now, she’s such an icon that if any single individual in the state of Tennessee could speak out and it would matter, it was Dolly Parton. But she was also probably sure it would not have actually worked. In any case, she said nothing. Fundamentally, Dolly’s vision of the world is apolitical dreams of everyone getting along while they forked over their cash. I’m not really that critical of her here, but it’s hard for me to see as the icon of tolerance that a lot of people want to define her as here. There’s no just no sense of any strongly held belief at all except for love and America and money. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. But don’t ask her to be specific in any way that could cost her a dime, you would never get a response. She could have said that Tennessee attacking trans people was wrong. She didn’t.
Through the 90s and into the 2000s, Dolly released albums that fit whatever could make her some money in the larger world of country music. This is past her hit-making era, which is fine, no one makes hits forever. When the larger musical trends were good, she could reach back to her roots and release fantastic music. The Grass is Blue, released in 1999, is a great example. Dolly was not a bluegrass musician, not at any time in her career. But of course she grew up around that in east Tennessee and could certainly sing it. The late 90s was the era of the Americana revival, with alt-country bands become famous and the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack opening up album sales to a lot of people who didn’t usually move a lot of copies. It’s a fantastic album.
It’s possible though that the biggest impact Dolly made in the 90s was Whitney Houston covering “I Will Always Love You” for the soundtrack of The Bodyguard. That was an excellent combination of material and singer at the right time. It went gangbusters. Years later, someone asked Parton what she thought about the cover. She said that she loved it because it made her a whole lotta money. Which does describe how Dolly evaluated the world.
So she spent her later decades as a senior figure. She’d zig and zag to whatever popular at a given moment. Again, when Americana hit big, she did a great bluegrass album. 9/11 happened and here came the patriotic songs. Time for another Christmas album? Sure, she’d do that yet again. Someone has an idea to do some classic rock songs, she’s down. Whatever. No one is listening to these albums because they are great.
In the end, Dolly the Icon became far more important than Dolly the Country Singer. That was her choice. She was, in the end, a remarkable businesswoman. Put her up there as one of the best, smartest, and most savvy women in the history of American capitalism. Put up here there too as one of the best shapers of her image that has ever existed in this country and did so in a way that appealed to a lot of marginalized communities. Put her voice on the Mt. Rushmore of country music too. God bless her. But as a very intense fan of country music, I still wish she had the quantity of good albums that she could have made.
The Mac mini and Mac Studio occupy two distinct points in Apple's lineup of desktops, but lately, they've had something in common: They're popular for local AI inference and software development thanks to the advantages of their unified memory architecture and the fast CPUs and GPUs on their systems-on-a-chip.
Today, Apple announced new iterations of both desktops, along with two new chips: the M6, the first 2nm chip in Apple's M-series lineup for Macs, and the M5 Ultra, now the most powerful chip in the lineup for most things—especially AI workloads.
There aren't any major new features for either machine. This is just a specs bump. But based on how Apple is presenting these refreshes, they're leaning hard into those use cases, which weren't even a thought when earlier iterations were first engineered.
The devices' popularity for production inference took off after macOS 26.2 shipped last December. According to Apple's release notes, 26.2 enabled "low-latency communication between Thunderbolt 5 hosts for use cases including distributed AI inference using MLX." Thunderbolt 5 is a very fast wired data connection, and MLX is an open source array framework designed to help machine learning workflows take full advantage of the M-series chips' unified memory.
Since then, both hobbyists and professional developers and researchers have been essentially daisy-chaining Mac minis or Mac Studios to run inference on local large language models that are much bigger than anything that could run a single mass-market device—providing an alternative to ultra-beefy specialized hardware featuring specialized Nvidia GPUs.
The story here is the chips themselves. The M6 is, as expected, a next-generation SoC (system-on-a-chip) meant for a wide range of consumer applications. It has a 12-core CPU, which includes two of what Apple calls "super cores," alongside four performance cores and six efficiency cores. It's the first Apple SoC to use all three core types. There aren't any verifiable benchmarks to work from yet, but Apple claims it's up to 40 percent faster at multi-threaded CPU performance compared to the M4 two generations ago.
It also has a 12-core GPU, which is two cores more than its immediate predecessors, and faster unified memory with up to 160GB per second of bandwidth. Memory capacity is limited to 32GB, though.
That's where the new M6 Ultra—which will be available in the updated Mac Studio—comes in. Its maximum capacity is a whopping 512GB (for the fortunate few who can afford it). In many respects, it's literally two M6 Maxes running side by side on one SoC, for 36 CPU cores (12 super, 24 performance) and 80 GPU cores. Apple claims it can achieve up to 1.2TB per second in terms of unified memory bandwidth.
Most people would never, ever need that, but that's what we mean when we say that the AI inference use case is really what Apple is optimizing for here. That kind of memory and bandwidth is of course useful for other things, like gaming and other 3D graphics applications, but local inference is a growing use case, particularly for software developers.
Many developers have been changing their workflows to incorporate AI coding agents more heavily, thanks to powerful frontier large language models and increasingly sophisticated harnesses like Claude Code or Codex, but the cost of running those cloud models is steep, and many are questioning whether it will remain practical.
Open-weight models that can be run locally, like some of the latest Qwen and DeepSeek models, can accomplish many of the same tasks but without charging a fortune for tokens, as they're smaller and driven by the user's own local energy and compute.
Still, most standard consumer hardware, like an average-spec MacBook Pro, is just far behind enough in terms of the size of models they can run that we're not fully living in a "just run it all locally on your regular dev workstation" future just yet. That's why some are tapping these chains of Mac minis or Mac Studios.
As noted, that's the main story with these refreshes, but in other respects they're standard upgrades for consumers who aren't interested in all that. Both have Apple's N1 chip, which supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Apple claims the storage is up to twice as fast, at 15GB/s. And this Mac mini ships with 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard, with the option to upgrade to 10Gb.
The Mac mini with M6 starts at $899 with 16GB of memory, and configurations with M5 Pro start at $1,699, while the Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499, and the M5 Ultra configurations start at $5,499. They can, of course, get a lot more expensive than that, depending on how you configure them.
Preorders for both start today, and they're shipping on September 22 (though the 512GB memory config for the M5 Max won't ship until late October). Apple also says they'll ship with macOS 27 Golden Gate, suggesting that the annual OS update may arrive by then for other Mac users, too.
Nvidia has disclosed that it owns nearly 123 million shares in SpaceX, further highlighting the chipmaker’s entangled financial relationships with some of its biggest customers.
The $5.5 trillion company owned SpaceX stock worth nearly $21 billion at the end of June, according to an SEC filing on Friday. Elon Musk’s rocket conglomerate’s shares have fallen sharply since its June initial public offering, meaning Nvidia’s stake would now be worth $17 billion.
The disclosure marks a huge pay-off on Nvidia’s investment in xAI, completed in January, shortly before Musk combined the AI lab with SpaceX.
It underscores the scale of Nvidia chief Jensen Huang’s effort to use the financial power of the world’s most valuable company to forge complex and often circular financial links across the AI industry, including with some of his largest customers.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk, during SpaceX’s first public earnings call last week, said the company had an exclusive relationship with Nvidia to kit out its data centers.
“We’ve decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think [its] Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture,” he said. “We think it’s the best AI computer and we greatly value our close co-operation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia.”
Nvidia has committed more than $100 billion to AI companies in the past two years, with sizeable investments in cloud computing start-ups such as CoreWeave and AI labs including Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence.
It has also invested in Cursor, the code-editing start-up that SpaceX acquired for $60 billion this week.
This week, Nvidia disclosed plans to put together more than $500 billion from a consortium of investors, including Apollo Global, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to help finance its customers. Nvidia plans to partially guarantee loans from the Wall Street investors that are backed by the value of its chips.
Nvidia’s largesse has helped accelerate the building of AI infrastructure and binds parts of the industry more tightly to the chipmaker’s technology.
SpaceX is planning to increase its computing capacity from 2 gigawatts at the end of this year to “closer to 10GW [than 5GW]” by the end of 2027, Musk told investors last week.
The rocket maker’s IPO handed huge returns to its early backers. Google owns roughly 7 percent of the rocket maker, according to FactSet data, having originally invested $900 million in 2015. The search giant told investors in July that its stake was valued at about $94 billion.
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