Apple
21 posts
Apple A20: first 2nm Apple Silicon, DRAM moves off-stack for thermals, 96-bit LPDDR6
Leaks show Apple's A20 will be the first 2nm Apple Silicon, repackaging DRAM to the side of the SoC (WMCM) for thermals, and jumping to 96-bit LPDDR6.
iOS 27 Beta 2 firmware reveals «Baidu Visual Search» — Apple's first region-routed visual search backend
iOS 27 Beta 2 contains a SearchPartnerInferenceProvider component with localized strings naming «Baidu Visual Search» — Apple's first region-routed visual search backend, and Baidu is the only named partner so far.
Apple Silicon's first generation skip: M6 ships base-only, M6 Pro/Max cut to make room for M7
Bloomberg reports Apple will skip M6 Pro and M6 Max entirely, pushing pro-tier Mac chips to the M7 family in late 2027 — the first break in Apple Silicon's annual Pro/Max cadence since 2020.
Xbox's third price hike in two years: Series X hits $800 in August, 2TB SKU killed
Xbox prices rise globally August 1: +$100 on 512GB SKUs, +$150 on 1TB, and the 2TB model is discontinued. Series X has risen 60% from its launch price.
Samsung's $648B Korean AI bet — SK Hynix joins, 2040s expansion pulled into mid-2030s
Samsung will announce a ₩1,000T (~$648B) ten-year plan, with SK Hynix joining. Korean chip expansion planned for the 2040s is being pulled into the mid-2030s by AI memory demand.
Cook signals more Apple price hikes coming — memory chip costs up 4× in three quarters
24 hours after raising Mac/iPad prices, Tim Cook tells the Wall Street Journal more hikes are coming. Memory chip prices have risen 4× in three quarters; iPhone 18 (September) is next.
GPT-5.6 needs White House sign-off, customer by customer — first time a US administration vets a frontier model rollout
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 enters limited preview — but the first ~20 enterprise customers each need White House approval. OpenAI says publicly: «this shouldn't be the long-term default.»
IBM ships first sub-1nm chip: 0.7nm (7Å) at Albany, ~100B transistors on a nail-sized die
IBM unveils a 0.7nm (7-angstrom) chip — humanity's first sub-1nm node. Density 2× its own 2nm, ~100B transistors on a nail-sized die. Mass production in ~5 years.
Apple's first broad price hike in 40 years — Mac Studio Ultra +$1,300, iPhone untouched
Apple raises prices across Mac, iPad, Vision Pro on June 25, averaging +$246. Mac Studio Ultra alone gains $1,300. iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods stay unchanged. Cook calls it «a once-in-a-century flood».
Trump announces Apple–Intel US foundry deal — ends Apple's decade of TSMC exclusivity
Trump confirms an Apple–Intel US foundry deal on Truth Social. Intel stock jumped 9% pre-market. Apple's decade-long TSMC exclusivity gets its first crack.
US orders Anthropic to disable Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — flagship models pulled
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick orders Anthropic to block all foreign users from Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — including its own non-US employees. Anthropic pulls both flagship models globally.
MacBook Neo 2: 12GB isn't an upgrade — it's the A19 Pro's stock config
MacBook Neo 2 will reuse A19 Pro binned chips left over from iPhone 17 Pro — which means 12GB LPDDR5X is standard, since the A19 Pro doesn't ship with 8GB. This unlocks AFM 3 Core Advanced.
Google cuts its top security research team — same week it pitches AI security tools
Two weeks into Google Cloud layoffs, the Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) was cut on June 3 — the same week Google Cloud Next launched new AI security products. Mandiant is also affected.
Apple x OpenAI honeymoon over — OpenAI lawyers up, ChatGPT loses Siri exclusivity
OpenAI's lawyers are studying legal options against Apple — possibly a breach-of-contract notice, not necessarily a lawsuit. iOS 27 will end ChatGPT's exclusivity in Siri; users can pick Gemini or Claude.
macOS Tahoe 26.5 patches 69 holes — kernel-fix count a multi-year record
macOS Tahoe 26.5 patches 69 security issues — 9 in the kernel alone, a multi-year high. One kernel and one WebKit fix credit «Claude and Anthropic Research».
Google insists users love AI Search — DuckDuckGo's no-AI version sees 28% spike same week
Google's CEO claims «people love AI Mode». DuckDuckGo's no-AI search page noai.duckduckgo.com saw +22.7% weekly traffic the same week, with iOS App installs spiking 69.9% at peak.
iOS 27 Siri's new brain: a Gemini-distilled on-device model, with Google Cloud fallback
iOS 27 Siri will run a small model distilled from Google's full Gemini for on-device queries; some requests will go to a licensed Gemini in Google Cloud. Apple pays Google ~$1B/year for it.
Musk and Zuckerberg killed Trump's AI EO — even «voluntary review» was too much
Hours before signing, Trump shelved a voluntary 90-day federal AI safety review EO. Musk, Zuckerberg, and David Sacks called Trump directly — the accelerationist faction won even against voluntary review.
AI cybersecurity arms race — Anthropic Mythos vs OpenAI Daybreak
Within six weeks, both Anthropic (Project Glasswing + Claude Mythos) and OpenAI (Daybreak) entered enterprise cybersecurity. Mozilla used Mythos to fix 271 bugs in Firefox.
AMD pours $10B+ into Taiwan — Helios AI servers ship H2 2026
AMD commits over $10B to Taiwan's semiconductor ecosystem on May 21 — partnerships with ASE and SPIL for advanced packaging, and Helios rack-scale AI platform shipping H2 2026.
AMD Ryzen AI Max 400 — first x86 chip to run a 300B model locally
AMD's new Ryzen AI Max PRO 400 (Gorgon Halo) bumps unified memory from 128GB to 192GB, up to 160GB dynamically assignable as VRAM. First x86 chip to run 300B+ parameter LLMs locally.