Ronald Mannak

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to: Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund    alzresearch.org/giving/ Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources     alzfdn.org/donate/ Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia

Finally figured out why the 512GB M5 Ultra costs so much. The M5 Ultra has 64 RAM channels. The 256GB model stacks standard 4GB LPDDR5X chips on each channel. To hit 512GB, Apple needs custom, ultra-dense 8GB chips per channel. That special RAM is why the price is higher. Honestly, for regular buyers, getting two 256GB models makes way more sense and costs less. Linking them with Thunderbolt 5 gives you 120Gb/s (around 15GB/s). That connection is pretty slow on its own, but clustering two machines roughly doubles your total memory bandwidth. Plus, you can just run two smaller models separately whenever you want. I am probably just going to buy two 256GB units instead.

OLED, touchscreen MacBook Pro confirmed to have glowing Apple logo!

So one of our ambassadors @divagr1925 has been working on something cool He found a way to use Qwen's Gated DeltaNet state as memory, and built a 32-bit RISC-V CPU directly into the model's weights. So instead of relying on predicting the answer to a calculation, the model can execute instructions internally. It can also run C and MicroPython programs. He calls it Qwenputer, love the name btw. The results so far are pretty impressive. On one arithmetic benchmark, accuracy jumped from 48.6% to 100%. Pretty cool to see developers experimenting with Qwen's architecture. Great work, my friend!

Today we're coming out of stealth, introducing Neywa Labs 🚀 We built the infrastructure to build and deploy AI that runs on the devices people already own. Private, offline, unlimited. One mission: make AI available to everyone in the world. neywalabs.ai/

Big news today from Apple: Keynote is getting an open, JSON-based file format (.keyx), plus a Python library to create Keynote files on any platform. Pages, Numbers and Keynote files today are closed and hard to modify unless you use AppleScript (limited and old) or Shortcuts (a huge pain), so you can’t really use AI to make documents in those formats. This was a HUGE pain inside Apple as well as outside, and most tools worked around it by making a PowerPoint file and importing it into Keynote, which wasn’t perfect. Creator Studio subscribers on the Mac also get MCP support in Keynote, Pages and Numbers, so you can bring your own AI agent to read, edit and automate all three. Both the new format and MCP support arrive in November. Bringing an AI-friendly format to Keynote (and I assume Pages and Numbers soon after) is a big positive change.

Everyday tasks? No sweat. Faster graphics? Nailed it. On-device AI? You bet. It’s the new 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac, faster than ever and supercharged by M6.

Looks like this is going to be a week of Apple press releases, starting today with the new OLED iPad Mini - 8.5" OLED display - A20 Pro chip - "Acoustic display" instead of speaker grilles - IP67 rating - N1 and C2 chips - Starting at $699 (+$200 from last gen) My take: WAY better screen, WAY better chip, so a very welcome refresh. Very curious to try this audio system. but also I can't find any mention of 120Hz or ProMotion on the website, so.... 60Hz? apple.com/newsroom/2026/10/a…

Watch Episode 1 of our Odyssey series made with Grok Imagine. Let us know in the comments if you'd like a full breakdown of how it was done! Creative collaboration with @WonderStudiosX and director Dev Walker @glumlot_

They can't keep getting away with this! #JDVance

iPhone Duo is here! Excited to have worked on the design of our open/close transition. It’s designed to make the two displays feel like one seamless experience by perceptually bending the focal plane, not the content, so that it feels like opening a window onto a singular view.