CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple's new iPhone 18 Pro is an iterative update that—as usual—focuses heavily on both performance and new camera features. This time around, many of the new camera features are oriented around giving the user more direct control of the image, rather than depending entirely on Apple's computational photography assumptions.

As usual, the new iPhone has a new chip. It's called A20 Pro, and it's the first 2 nm chip for the iPhone. It has a 6-core CPU, with two super-cores that are up to 20 percent faster, and four efficiency cores. A 7-core GPU offers up to 40 percent improved performance and increased bandwidth.

The A20 Pro also has a new Neural Engine—the machine-learning processor on the system-on-chip—which the company says is basically two Neural Engines on one chip.

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Nvidia is reportedly moving forward to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The acquisition could help the hardware giant expand and fortify its deep integration with the wider AI industry.

Among other things, Hugging Face is a cloud repository for AI models, similar in some respects to what GitHub is for conventional computer software. Developers and researchers search for models that meet certain criteria, download and run them, and fine-tune them into different variants that then get uploaded back up to Hugging Face.

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IBM has rolled out the newest models in its family of open-weight large language models designed to be downloaded and self-hosted. The newly launched Granite 4.2 comes in 3B, 8B, and 30B parameter variants.

Like previous versions, IBM is taking a decoder-only approach here. These new releases offer a 128,000-token context window natively. The 8B and 30B variants (not the 3B one) also go through an agentic reinforcement-learning block; they were trained for expanded capabilities like using the terminal, searching the web, or using external tools. The 3B model supports tools too, but without the same level of specialized training.

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The Mac mini and Mac Studio occupy two distinct points in Apple's lineup of desktops, but lately, they've had something in common: They're popular for local AI inference and software development thanks to the advantages of their unified memory architecture and the fast CPUs and GPUs on their systems-on-a-chip.

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.

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