On-device AI news

Apple’s new MacBook Pro is the first Mac with a touchscreen

The 14-inch and 16-inch models have an OLED screen, the Dynamic Island from the iPhone, and M5 Pro or M5 Max chips. They start at $2,899 and $3,399 and reach stores on November 6.

Apple announced a new MacBook Pro on October 28 with a touch display that it calls PROLED XDR. It is the first Mac that people can control by touching the screen. Orders opened the same day in 30 countries, Apple says. The new laptops sit above the cheaper M6 MacBook Pro that Apple announced a day earlier.

Apple puts its M6 chip in the MacBook Pro and iMac

The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 and the iMac at $1,499, and both go on sale on November 6. Apple says the M6 runs AI work up to 25% faster than the M5, but no outside test has checked its claims yet.

Apple announced a new 14-inch MacBook Pro and a new 24-inch iMac with its M6 chip on Tuesday, October 27. Both can be ordered from October 28 and go on sale on November 6, in 35 countries and regions, Reuters reports. Apple sells both as machines that run AI on the device. The speed claims are Apple’s own.

Apple’s new iPad mini gets OLED, an A20 Pro and a $699 price

Apple announced a thinner iPad mini with an 8.5-inch OLED screen, its A20 Pro chip and protection against water and dust. Orders open on Wednesday and it goes on sale on November 6. It costs $200 more than the 2024 model did at launch.

Apple’s new iPad mini, announced on Monday, October 26, starts at $699 for Wi-Fi and $849 with cellular. Apple says the A20 Pro chip runs AI tasks up to 4.5 times faster than before. No independent tests are out yet.

Meta releases Muse Spark Open, an 816B open-weight model

Meta calls it the most capable open-weight model from a US company. An independent test gives it 39 points, and in Meta’s own table two Chinese open models still lead on coding.

Meta released the weights of Muse Spark Open on October 15. The model has 816 billion parameters, of which about 42 billion work on each token, and it can read up to 1 million tokens at once. Meta worked with Apple so the model can run on two or four linked Mac Studio computers.

Apple’s $299 HomeView puts Siri AI on a home screen

Apple also showed a new Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini on October 13. Siri AI starts as a test version in English and in eight countries, and HomeView will not be sold in the EU.

Apple unveiled HomeView, a 7-inch screen for the home, at its “Welcome home” event in New York. It costs $299 and arrives on November 13, on the same day as a new $299 Apple TV 4K. A new $149 HomePod mini ships on October 30, but it gets Siri AI only in a later update.

MiniCPM5-2B packs long-context AI into a much smaller model

OpenBMB released a 2.5-billion-parameter model for local and on-device use. It also shared much of its training data, but the strongest test results come from the model maker.