Apple's new desktop computers are designed specifically for local AI development

Folks have been daisy-chaining Macs for AI—this refresh keeps that in mind.

The short version

• Today, Apple announced new iterations of both desktops, along with two new chips: the M6, the first 2nm chip in Apple’s M-series lineup for Macs, and the M5 Ultra, now the most powerful chip in the lineup for most things—especially AI workloads.
• There aren’t any major new features for either machine.
• But based on how Apple is presenting these refreshes, they’re leaning hard into those use cases, which weren’t even a thought when earlier iterations were first engineered.

What happened

The devices’ popularity for production inference took off after macOS 26.2 shipped last December. It also has a 12-core GPU, which is two cores more than its immediate predecessors, and faster unified memory with up to 160GB per second of bandwidth.

Why it matters

Memory capacity is limited to 32GB, though.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.