Apple adds a touchscreen to the MacBook Pro

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Apple adds a touchscreen to the MacBook Pro LINK

• Apple has put a touchscreen on the MacBook Pro for the first time, pairing the new PROLED XDR display with a return of the glowing logo on the laptop's lid.
• CEO John Ternus showed the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display being tapped, swiped, and pinched to edit photos and video, and it runs the M5 chip rather than the newer M6 in Apple's other refresh.
• Coming in 14- and 16-inch sizes on November 6, the laptop starts at $2,899 but can climb to about $14,000 once you max out every spec.

Chinese spies targeted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang LINK

• A New York Times report says a senior Singapore AI executive with close ties to Nvidia chief Jensen Huang has been acting as a Chinese intelligence asset, feeding information to Beijing.
• The suspect, Alice Huang, ran Megaspeed, an Nvidia cloud partner accused of smuggling $2 billion in Nvidia chips to China last year, with boxed-up equipment found at its Malaysia data center during a Commerce Department visit.
• U.S. intelligence has tracked her for over a year and briefed Trump, who reportedly declined to act to avoid hurting Nvidia sales, and Jensen Huang has not yet received a defensive warning.

Apple loses its grip on memory chip suppliers LINK

• Apple has lost the strong bargaining position it long held over memory chip suppliers, and vendors like Micron are now pushing back after years of aggressive price-squeezing tactics, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
• For two decades Apple forced NAND suppliers to name it "most favored customer," audited their books through Deloitte to find desperate sellers, refused deliveries when prices dropped, and held negotiations past midnight without dinner breaks to wear down representatives.
• Buyers like Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm now outbid Apple for LPDDR5X memory, weakening its leverage, while SanDisk signed long-term deals with floor prices that would need a roughly 70 percent crash to seriously drop.

DoorDash buys Instacart for $17 billion LINK

• DoorDash has agreed to buy grocery delivery rival Instacart for $17 billion, a deal that pushes the restaurant-delivery company deeper into grocery while expanding America's largest third-party delivery platform.
• Instacart, started in 2012, works with about 2,200 stores across nearly 100,000 locations, filling the one gap left in DoorDash's recent buying spree as it aims to own all kinds of local delivery.
• CEO Tony Xu called grocery the fastest-growing part of DoorDash's marketplace, but the firm's stock briefly fell this week when the pursuit surfaced, suggesting some investors worry about the tie-up.

Google's Gemini Carbon tops AI intelligence index LINK

• Google has released Gemini Carbon, a model built for cybersecurity and heavy agentic work that now tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, edging out rivals like Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra.
• Carbon scored 59 on the index versus 58 for Opus 5.5 and 57 for Astra, leading on software engineering, agentic tasks, and exploit finding, but trailing on the OSWorld and FrontierSWE benchmarks.
• Building on the Argon model from late September, Carbon cut unsupported claims by half, resisted every tested prompt injection attack, and launches this week to a limited group of cyber defenders at $2 per million input tokens.

Hackers leak 41,000 DHS workers including ICE agents LINK

• Hackers have leaked the records of more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security workers and contractors, exposing undercover ICE agents, surveillance operations, and internal systems at one of America's most sensitive federal agencies.
• The leaked files, published yesterday by the nonprofit DDoSecrets under the name "Icepick," include names, cellphone numbers, office locations, and group memberships tied to wiretap programs, Palantir software, and xAI's Grok chatbot.
• The hacking group, calling itself the Department of Peace, claims it pulled the records through the Okta login service DHS uses, but Okta says it found no evidence its own systems were broken into.

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• The Sane Asylum LINK

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Trending tools

Notch Metrics: tracks revenue, MRR, and subscribers from Stripe, Polar, Paddle, and more right in your MacBook notch, with provider keys encrypted server-side. LINK

Instant Search: local AI file search that uses embedding models to find the exact file and page matching your content query, no cloud needed. LINK

ChatInbox: groups email by contact into chat-style threads, auto-files newsletters and receipts, and works across Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, and IMAP on Apple devices. LINK

FLUX 3 Max: generates continuous AI video clips from detailed text prompts, letting developers create cinematic shots without cameras or production crews. LINK

Agent Handshake by Fini: self-improving AI support agent for regulated industries, resolving tickets across voice, chat, and email while detecting its own knowledge gaps. LINK

Byter: tracks internet data usage per network, so you can monitor Wi-Fi, hotspot, and wired connections separately with live speed, charts, and spike alerts. LINK

Trending papers & reports

Pushback on chatbots reveals that when users cite a source, five of seven tested AI assistants more readily abandon correct answers, yet most still refused to break account-security rules even while caving on facts. LINK

AI-written web pages have surged across more than 5 million pages studied, concentrated in English and on .com sites, while the most linked-to, prominent pages remain the least likely to contain machine-generated text. LINK

Human oversight demands dominate US healthcare attitudes, as a Pew survey of 3,488 adults finds people are open to AI for administrative tasks like scheduling and translation but want humans reviewing its work on higher-stakes decisions. LINK

News from social media now reaches 59% of US adults at least sometimes, with Facebook and YouTube leading at 40% and 34% respectively, a Pew survey of 5,166 adults finds. LINK

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