Apple refreshes Mac mini and Mac Studio with new chips

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In today's Techpresso:

🖥️ Apple refreshes Mac mini and Mac Studio with new chips

🛂 Trump proposes $103K H-1B visa fee

💸 Anthropic's top AI struggles to win users

🌶️ OpenAI chip beats Nvidia's Blackwell

📺 Netflix may sell rival streaming plans

🍉 Meta's paid AI agent Hatch launches soon

Plus: 🎁 13 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

🖥️ Apple refreshes Mac mini and Mac Studio with new chips LINK

Apple has updated its desktop lineup, giving the Mac mini a new M6 chip while the Mac Studio moves up to the M5 Max and a new M5 Ultra chip, with prices rising across the board.

The M6 is Apple's first 2-nanometer design, a 12-core chip with 32 total Neural Engine cores that Apple says doubles the AI power of the M5, and buyers can step up to an M5 Pro version for $1,699.

The Mac mini now starts at $899 with just 256GB of storage, the Mac Studio at $2,499, and the M5 Ultra Studio, Apple's first quad-die chip, joining two M5 Max chips, costs at least $5,499.

🛂 Trump proposes $103K H-1B visa fee LINK

The Trump administration has proposed a new rule that would charge a $103,265 fee for H-1B visas covering foreign workers who fall under the program's yearly cap on applications.

The fee would help pay for running the immigration system, and unlike an earlier $100,000 version struck down by a judge in June, this one excludes universities, hospitals, and research institutions.

H-1B visas let U.S. companies hire skilled foreign workers, and computer jobs like software engineering make up nearly two-thirds of approvals; the public gets 30 days to comment once the rule is published.

💸 Anthropic's top AI struggles to win users LINK

Anthropic's most powerful AI model, Opus 5, is failing to draw many users since its late-July launch, with cheaper options from the company pulling far more spending, according to billing data.

The Ramp AI index, built from card data across 70,000 companies, shows Opus 5 captured just 3.5% of Anthropic model spend in July, while the older Opus 4.8 led with 28% and Fable 5 sat at 8%.

Anthropic's annualized revenue reached $65 billion in July, up from $47 billion in May, and the company told investors it now has 6,000 customers each paying $100,000 or more a year.

🌶️ OpenAI chip beats Nvidia's Blackwell LINK

OpenAI has revealed "Jalapeño," an inference chip built with Broadcom for running AI models, that beat Nvidia's Blackwell along with AMD and Google chips on power efficiency across several top open source models.

The chip went from team hiring to tape-out in about 16 months, and hit over 700 tokens per second per user on DeepSeek R1, without speculative decoding or splitting prefill and decode work across separate chips.

The current A0 version already leads on tokens per megawatt, while a newer B0 chip in the fab adds roughly 25% more efficiency, delivering 13.4 PFLOPs on TSMC's N3P at just 700W, and ships with HBM4 memory.

📺 Netflix may sell rival streaming plans LINK

Netflix is reportedly weighing whether to sell subscriptions to rival streaming services like Peacock and Fox One inside its own app, a shift for a company that long said it needed no such help.

The talks follow a June deal in France, where Netflix added broadcaster TF1 with live channels and on demand shows, results Co-CEO Greg Peters called promising during a July earnings call.

The discussions are early, with no deal planned yet, and it stays unclear whether Netflix would sell subscriptions like Amazon's Prime Video does or fold the content into its own library as YouTube did with Peacock.

🍉 Meta's paid AI agent Hatch launches soon LINK

Meta will soon roll out Hatch, a paid AI agent aimed at consumers, as part of Mark Zuckerberg's push to make money from the company's heavy AI spending and expand revenue beyond advertising.

Built as a consumer version of the OpenClaw agent, Hatch is expected to use tiered pricing, including a premium subscription costing as much as $199.99 a month, according to internal documents seen by The Information.

Hatch is designed to connect with sites like DoorDash, Etsy, Reddit, Yelp, and Outlook, and to offer a customizable dashboard with tools such as a fitness tracker or a trip planner.

Other news you might like

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• Apple Won't Change Hide My Email Domain After BacklashLINK

• Australias music industry bans AI-generated tracks from official chartsLINK

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• Intel’s Market Share Of The x86 CPU Market Falls To 1995-LevelsLINK

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• "We've all been too ambitious": Sam Altman says our old habits are delaying the great AI transitionLINK

• Not ‘Used to Losing’: Apparent Elon Musk Pep Talk to His Cursor Staff Paints Sad PictureLINK

• How the FTC’s last-minute settlement with Zillow and Redfin reshapes their $100M rentals dealLINK

• Data centers become "killer application" for new power transformer techLINK

• Alabama launches probe into OpenAI after Hugging Face breachLINK

🧰 Trending tools

HyNote for Mac: records meetings and transcribes on-device, then generates AI summaries so scattered notes become organized, searchable insights, with local or online processing options.LINK

Localdock: exposes local projects over real HTTPS links so you can share your dev environment across devices, no client-side install neededLINK

Bumply: a Mac app for updating npm, pnpm, Yarn, and Bun projects, previewing commands, backing up files, and rolling back on failure.LINK

MiniMax Design: multimodal AI platform for building agents and apps that generate text, audio, image, video, and music with long-context support.LINK

Ressearch AI: combines literature search, data analysis, coding, and scientific writing in one conversational workspace with reproducible workflows running in cloud sandboxes.LINK

Destiny Rings: a wearable that vibrates when a compatible person is nearby, letting you match by touch instead of endless app swipingLINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Pedestrian crossing prediction combines road behavior, environment, location, and vehicle motion into one model that anticipates whether someone will step into the street with up to 93% accuracy, helping self-driving cars avoid accidents.LINK

Factory task scheduling lets machines bid on jobs and decide locally who does what, completing more tasks on time and using less energy when they share limited reusable equipment under heavy workloads.LINK

Automated filter design lets software invent tiny microwave circuits from scratch instead of hand tuning, producing a working device that blocks unwanted signals past 9.5 GHz and revealing how these machine made layouts actually behave.LINK

Underwater photo cleanup uses a new image-generating model to sharpen and color-correct murky underwater shots, beating prior methods on quality while sampling faster, useful for marine engineering and underwater operations.LINK

Memory in document classifiers turns out to store example-specific information that barely affects actual accuracy, showing that a model can carry recoverable data about training samples without relying on it to make predictions.LINK

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