Despite the New Mac mini and Mac Studio apparently not including an option to add AppleCare where it has historically been during the order process, you just have to click through a few pages to get it done.

It’s not remotely clear why Apple would choose to hide AppleCare for the new Macs since the option is front and center with other Macs. With those, AppleCare is on the order page, right after processor, RAM, and storage options.

With the new Mac mini and Mac Studio, there is no such option on that page, but there is later in the process. Apple uses this extra step to promote the Studio Display and the way it’s done is simply confusing.

Unless you do want a Studio Display, you have to:

• Configure your Mac
• Click on Continue
• Ignore everything about the Studio Display
• Instead, click on Add to Bag at the top
• Choose your AppleCare plan from the next page

Click “Add to bag” to get past this page, and proceed to the AppleCare page.

To get to the AppleCare page, you hit “Add to bag” next to the name of the computer you’re buying. AppleCare options are on the next page.

Again, if you don’t want anything on the AppleCare page, click the “Review bag” next to the computer name.

If you continue on with your pre-order of a new Mac, you get this AppleCare screen later in the process.

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Then you review, and choose payment options.

AppleCare pricing

There are two flavors of AppleCare, with AppleCare+ covering one device and the AppleCare One bundle covering up to three devices for one $19.99 monthly price without additions.

There’s some math to do about how to get the most out of your AppleCare One bundle, and it is generally not in the Mac mini’s favor. We have more details here on that.

The Mac Studio on its own, AppleCare+ is $6.49/month or $64.99/year. For the Mac mini, it’s $3.99/month or $39.99/year.

“This would create a parallel federal eligibility infrastructure on top of existing state voter rolls,” Issue One, a nonprofit seeking to reduce the role of money in politics, wrote shortly after the order was issued.

The second provision targets election officials by demanding that the US attorney general “prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of State and local officials … who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election.”

The final provision in the order directs the USPS to create new rules for absentee and mail-in ballots. Under the rules, states would need to provide the USPS with a list of voters they intend to send ballots to. The order prevents the USPS from sending ballots to anyone not on the list. This rule would require the printing of millions of new ballot envelopes with trackable barcodes.

Last week, before the Supreme Court ruling was issued, the USPS issued a 95-page final rule explaining how it plans to enforce Trump’s proposed changes to mail-in voting in order to “reduce the risk of fraud, and help protect the integrity of federal elections.” The rule compares mail-in ballots to fake bombs or cremated animal remains. The New York Times reported on Monday that Trump is seeking to take control over the USPS board by stacking it with members who have questioned the outcome of the 2020 election.

The provisions of the executive order were mostly blocked by federal courts before the Trump administration appealed the rulings to the Supreme Court in July. Earlier this month, the administration pushed the court to issue a ruling quickly, claiming that failing to do so would cause “irreparable harm to the federal government, the public, and election integrity.”

While the states are likely to file another lawsuit once the USPS rule goes into effect on Wednesday, the Supreme Court decision will still likely cause disruption, given how close the general election is.

“The Court seemed to create complete chaos leading up to the midterm elections, waiting weeks after an administration filing, and just days before mail ballots go out, to completely rewrite the rules of the election,” David Becker, the head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department lawyer, wrote in an emailed statement.

That chaos will hit election officials the hardest.

“From a strictly practical perspective, there simply is just not enough time to implement the proposed requirements for the 2026 general election,” Stuart Holmes, director of elections in Washington state, tells WIRED.

Holmes said that county election offices already have ballot packet mailing materials printed and ready to mail, and that destroying and reprinting them is not realistic, financially or otherwise. The USPS rules would also require new envelope designs, which would in turn need to be reviewed and approved by the USPS to ensure compliance with their automation equipment.

“Even if new designs could be developed and approved in time, it is unrealistic to expect the limited number of printing vendors serving Washington’s counties to produce entirely new supplies of ballot envelopes for every county before the general election without significant disruption,” Holmes adds.

Finally, Holmes flagged that the demands of maintaining the USPS lists required under the order would be virtually impossible. “Voter registration data does not remain static. Voters continually update their registrations, ineligible voters are removed from the rolls, and newly eligible voters are added,” he says. “Meeting the proposed reporting requirements would require the Office of the Secretary of State to dedicate staff to provide updated information to USPS while those same staff are already responsible for other essential list maintenance and election preparation activities.”

Waymo said Tuesday it plans to launch a robotaxi service in Munich, months after the Alphabet-owned autonomous vehicle company set up an entity in Germany.

The company still must weave its way through mapping and testing, as well as clear regulatory hurdles before it can launch commercial operations.

Waymo will begin, as it has in other 11 cities where it has commercial robotaxi operations, by first manually driving its vehicles to map the streets of Munich. It will then test its autonomous vehicles with human safety drivers behind the wheel, before removing them. Waymo typically allows its employees, media, and other invited guests to ride in its driverless vehicles at this stage.

The company will eventually open its robotaxis to limited service, and eventually to all riders once it receives the regulatory approval required to operate commercially. Waymo said in a blog post on Tuesday that it is working with Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA), state authorities and local officials, and expects to open commercial ride-hailing to the public towards the end of 2027.

Waymo’s entry into Germany comes more than five years after the country’s lawmakers adopted legislation to allow driverless vehicles on public roads, and in that process making it the first country in the European Union to create a legal framework for Level 4 autonomous driving. Level 4 autonomy is a designation by the Society of Automobile Engineers (SAE) that means the self-driving system handles all the driving, with no expectation of a human taking over, in certain conditions or environments.

This legal framework has made Germany a hotspot for autonomous vehicle testing. Today, several companies, including Mobileye and Volkswagen, hold permits to test their autonomous vehicles in the country, according to the KBA’s latest data. Waymo does not currently have any permits.

However, the vast majority, including U.K. self-driving startup Wayve, and Israel-based Autobrains, hold Level 3 permits. Level 3, or conditional automated driving, is a system that can handle all the driving within specific operating conditions, such as low speeds on highways, but the driver must be able to take over when needed.

Germany isn’t the only overseas hotspot for AV developers. The U.K., especially London, is shaping up as another robotaxi battleground. Waymo has said it plans to launch a commercial service in London in 2026, which will pit it against Wayve and its partner Uber. Chinese tech giant Baidu has also started testing autonomous vehicles in the city as part of its partnership with Lyft and Freenow.

from the politics-is-all-about-the-lies dept

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Political action committees are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all federal election funding, with about US$6.3 billion raised and $4.8 billion spent since January 2025. But their outsized political influence does not just come from their wallets. It’s also generated from their names.

Political strategists are adopting PAC names that signal the opposite political goals from what those organizations truly intend. They hope to taint voter perception of the candidates or ballot initiatives to which they donate.

And, as our research shows, the strategy is working.

The history of deceptive PAC naming

Typically, PAC names borrow expressions from the party they wish to help, like ActBlue or WinRed, which raised the most money in the 2024 federal election cycle.

Many of those names have been ridiculed for their overreliance on throwaway clichés. In 2012, comedian Stephen Colbert created the PAC Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow to prove the point.

But a more sinister custom has emerged. Our research has shown that for the past decade or so, PACs have engaged in what we call “tactical naming,” the practice of giving laws and PACs names designed to manipulate voter perception.

One tactic is to choose a name derived from slogans of the opposing party, falsely signaling ideological kinship to gain the trust of voters from the other side. In 2014, for example, the PAC Americans for Progressive Action provided no support for Democratic candidates. Instead, it gave over $1.3 million to Republican Gabriel Gomez’s 2014 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts.

Examples can be found on both sides of the aisle. The PAC Patriot Majority USA, which sports a gun-toting minuteman logo and foregrounds the word “patriot,” a term that recent research indicates is a strong marker of conservative political identity, ran ads in support of Democratic candidates. It also opposed Republican candidates in multiple states for years.

The PAC Protect Women Ohio Action, Inc. contributed to conservative ads opposing a ballot initiative that limited Ohio’s authority to restrict abortion.

Deceptive PAC naming today

Tactical naming continues in current primaries.

Earlier in this primary cycle, the PACs Real Change and Lead Left ran television ads and mailers in competitive congressional districts attacking Democratic candidates, ostensibly from the left. The ads accused candidates of standing with President Donald Trump, opposing Medicare for all and “cashing in on Trump’s terror.”

To any casual observer, Real Change and Lead Left look like progressive groups holding Democrats accountable. But closer scrutiny reveals something else.

When people subscribed to Real Change’s email list, they received emails confirming their subscriptions that routed through cavalryllc.com. That’s the domain of Cavalry LLC, one of Washington’s premier Republican communications firms, founded by Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s former chief of staff.

Cavalry has received more than $10 million from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with House Republican leadership. And investigative reports revealed that Caleb Crosby, the treasurer of the Congressional Leadership Fund, founded a political compliance firm that supported personnel at two conservative PACs that used the same unusual address as Lead Left: a Staples store in Tallahassee, Florida.

The science behind the names

It’s tempting to think that this tactic won’t work on the politically savvy people who pay attention to PAC names. But our research shows otherwise.

To test the effects of deceptive PAC names, we conducted a controlled online experiment involving more than 650 participants recruited through Prolific, an online academic research studies platform. The sample was balanced by gender and diverse in age, though participants were somewhat more educated than the general U.S. population.

Participants evaluated four proposed laws before and after learning that each law was sponsored by a PAC. The PAC’s name was manipulated to be either congruent with the law’s ideological direction, incongruent with it or politically neutral. For example, a left-leaning environmental proposal might be sponsored by a PAC called Save the Earth, Americans for Oil or Smith. By comparing participants’ ratings before and after exposure to those names, we measured the extent to which naming alone could alter attitudes toward otherwise identical proposals.

We found that misleading PAC names significantly shifted voter opinion. We also found that PAC names were most effective when they were deceptive. When participants who supported a particular law were told that an incongruently named PAC was sponsoring it, their support for that law dropped sharply, even when the law’s text sat right in front of them.

For example, when people who identified as left-leaning already favored a law that expedited refugee worker rights, their favorability ratings dropped sharply when they learned that the sponsoring PAC had a right-signaling name, Building the Wall. By contrast, learning that an aptly named PAC, Humane Treatment of Migrants, had sponsored the same law did not significantly affect the ratings of left-leaning people and barely affected the ratings of right-leaning people.

Our research also found that stronger partisans are more susceptible to this tactic. The more firmly someone identified with a political party, the greater the swing in their opinion when an inapt PAC name was introduced.

Sophisticated voters are not automatically inoculated – if anything, their stronger priors make them more vulnerable to cues that appear to confirm or threaten their political identity.

What makes this especially troubling is where tactical names appear. Federal regulations require that PACs disclose their names “in a clear and conspicuous manner” in their political advertisements.

One might wonder whether tactical naming is just everyday politics. But weaponizing names introduces a hazard that goes far beyond ordinary negative campaigning.

A Republican group running ads against Democrats is unremarkable. A Republican group pretending to be a Democratic group to run those same ads is something different: It is a deliberate attempt to corrupt the informational environment in which voters decide whom to support.

Can anything be done?

Our research addressed this question, and our conclusions are sobering.

An outright ban on deceptive PAC names would face serious First Amendment obstacles. Naming a PAC is a form of expression that receives constitutional protection.

Courts have been reluctant to allow the government to dictate how political organizations present themselves. In Doctors for a Healthy Montana v. Fox in 2020, a federal district court struck down a Montana law requiring PACs to name themselves in a way that clearly identified the economic or special interest of a majority of their contributors. The court found that the statute did more than require disclosure of factual information; it unconstitutionally dictated “how that information must be packaged to the public.”

Required disclaimers, such as warnings to voters not to treat a PAC’s name as reliable evidence of its political identity, would probably be the most legally viable intervention. Even their constitutionality is uncertain, however.

That leaves two other remedies: transparency journalism and voter skepticism.

The reporting on Real Change PAC, which followed money through shell companies, traced email domains and mapped connections to the Congressional Leadership Fund, is the kind of investigative work that gives voters a fighting chance.

Voters can also follow a simple rule of thumb: When you see a PAC name, don’t treat it as gospel. Ask who is paying for it and who benefits.

Be mindful when the PAC is critical of a person or position that is supported by the very party that the PAC appears to serve. And remember that the most dangerous political actors don’t always attack your political allies.

Sometimes, they just steal their names.

Brian Sheppard is Professor of Law at Seton Hall University. Andrew Moshirnia is Associate Professor & Director of Education – Business Law & Taxation at Monash University.

Filed Under: campaign finance, campaigning, elections, misrepresentation, pacs, political funding, superpacs

When I got back into SLA resin printing recently, I knew that I’d inevitably have to deal with the agony of failed prints and of course resin spills. This moment eventually came, and I felt motivated to treat mistakes as teaching moments on aspects like how to properly prepare an SLA build plate in terms of angles and supports or how to deal with failed print aftermaths.

Before moving on to the disaster, I’d like to first start with a look at the resin print of the previous article, which contained a number of fairly small parts. These I had oriented and supported almost fully using the automatic methods provided by the ChituBox slicer software, and worked about 90% as I had hoped, while leaving plenty of room for improvement as well.

Overall, preparing an SLA build plate in the slicer isn’t quite the same as for an FDM printer, mostly due to one phrase that strikes fear in the heart of anyone who has ever done resin printing: “peeling forces”.

Not Bad, Not Great

For last article’s resin print, I had to put a number of models onto the build plate in the slicer, after which I mashed ‘auto arrange’, ‘auto orient’ and then ‘auto support’ in their respective tabs. I did change the orientation of the beam so that it wasn’t pointing straight upward any more, as I wasn’t going to wait a few extra hours for it to print just for that single object.

This then got me the following overview including a veritable forest of supporting structures:

By playing it safe, I managed to get everything printed without any glitches other than my previously mentioned fight with the resin auto-feed system of the printer. Of course, by leaning heavily on defaults, I also got backstabbed by the slicer’s overzealous use of supports, especially where it was highly undesirable, such as inside parts of the LEGO Technic-compatible parts:

By rotating the figurines to be printed upside-down relative to the build plate this also meant having lots of ugly marks left by the supports, both on the happy buddha and the female knight figurine.

Here the fix seems rather straightforward: angle figurines so that supports contact things like the bottom of a surface where it won’t be as noticeable. Also inspect the auto-generated supports to remove any that are in naughty places and perhaps do some manual supporting if you feel particularly confident.

I did look at a few “how to do supports right” videos and written tutorials, and the general advice seems to be to simply forget about auto-generated supports.

For me an amazing aspect was that both figurines were angled upside-down by the slicer, when everyone prints them with the base towards to the build plate. Exactly how ChituBox’s algorithm here works is a complete mystery to me, but I reckon that this slightly confusing experience may have contributed to the subsequent disaster that occurred with another print.

Simply Bad

Where things slid sideways and wrapped themselves at high velocity around a phone pole was when trying to print a 16-slot CD rack, specifically this rather nice model by [zenitar3d] from Thingiverse. On an FDM printer this is braindead simple to print: you slap it on the build plate in the slicer, do a sanity check that it physically fits, slice it and let ‘er rip. My only issue here was that OrcaSlicer deemed it necessary to add a brim, so that took some sanding to clean up a razor sharp edge.

On the resin side of things, you enter a torment nexus: you can slap the part on the build plate, but then you risk elephant foot — a thickening at the base where exposure time is longer than for subsequent layers. Even if that’s of no concern, you still need to violently remove the part from the solid metal build plate, which is highly likely to cause damage.

If I still had the LD-002R printer with its flex plate, an aftermarket modification that I had fitted. This would be of no concern with a mere flex-and-pop, but here I’d have to violently wield a metal scraper to convince the build plate and cured layers to part ways. Clearly I need to look into flexible build plates for current SLA printers.

I did try to use the same auto-angle and auto-rotate approach in the slicer, but ChituBox would just always put part of the model outside of the printing area. After a while I grew tired of this and just printed it with the part slightly lifted off the build plate with medium supports like this:

In my defense, I did this in the midst of yet another European heatwave with zero air conditioning, so maybe that had sufficiently fried my remaining brain cells. Regardless, the results were rather predictable.

Carnage

A little while later I had the good news in the sense that the supports were printing beautifully, but also bad news in that the actual model had been ripped off the supports by the aforementioned peeling forces.

In hindsight this was obvious: the quite solid surface of the model has significantly more surface area than the area contacted by the supports. At the first attempt to peel the newly cured model layer off the nFEP (PFA) film, the tug of war resulted in the supports winning out and the print being a total failure.

You could call this the ‘FDM spaghetti’ equivalent with resin printing, where the FDM’s extruder is printing in empty air, but unlike with FDM printing the subsequent clean-up is less of a sighing, brushing away bits of thermoplastic and trying again with the glue stick, and more of a chemical hazard situation.

Dealing with an SLA resin printing failure sees you draining and filtering the resin from the vat, carefully removing any solid resin from the vat’s film and curing the failed parts so that they can be safely disposed of. All while suited up with gloves, eye protection, and at least a half-face mask with A1P2 filters that still leave you plenty of opportunity to consider whether SLA resin or IPA smells worse when the copious amounts involved of both try to overwhelm the filters.

Clean-Up Detail

Where the whole kerfuffle got even worse was when the whole auto-feeding of the resin caught up with me. After ripping the bottle out of the machine I had noticed that the GK3 Ultra had for some reason pulled a vacuum inside the bottle, which could explain some of the issues that I had experienced. This did however also mean that its internal volume had decreased due to the bottle’s deformation.

This was a detail that didn’t quite register with me until resin that I was pouring through the filter into the bottle was overflowing onto the floor. Cue copious amounts of colorful cursing and a dash for the paper kitchen towels, followed by a rather illuminating UV exposure session using a handheld UV lamp. Fortunately cured resin doesn’t bond well to tile flooring, so it can be peeled off after curing and tossed into the regular household waste. The pro-tip here is to always use silicone underneath potential resin spills. If only I had done so.

With the floor clean once more, the next challenge was to get the vat cleaned up again. The provided silicone scraper was useful here, but you absolutely need that spray bottle with IPA to soften up the connection between the PFA film and the cured resin.

Using the built-in vat curing feature I could cure most of the remaining resin in the vat, but still had to use the handheld lamp to get to corners where it didn’t reach. This is the part that I’m still working on, making sure everything is clean and the PFA film undamaged before I throw myself again at another printing session.

Lessons Learned

I think the primary lesson that I have learned here is that I still do not comprehend why consumer resin printers insist on having that solid lump of metal that they dare to call a ‘build plate’ — an immovable surface that you have to violently assault with a scraper after printing to make it release printed parts.

After mostly printing with the magnetically attached flex plate on the LD-002R – of course after adjusting its Z-height correspondingly – it still feels like time hasn’t moved at all here.

As a friend of mine remarked when I reported the print failure described in this article, it’s also rather astounding that there’s no simulation of peel forces in slicers to get some idea of whether your supports game is overkill or weak sauce. There are some resin printers that even try to reduce the peel forces by tilting the vat – such as the Prusa SL1S and Form 3 – and there are various ‘tricks’ to reduce the peeling forces, such as lubricating with silicone and PTFE oil, many of which I too have tried with the LD-002R with unclear results, but ultimately you just want to ‘science’ it, as the kids say.

Overall, a resin printing failure isn’t the end of the world, as long as you are mindful of a potential mismatch between the air volume in the target bottle and the resin volume in the vat you’re pouring from. Resin is only nasty until you blast it with UV, when it turns into relatively harmless plastic.

All of that said, I’m still torn on that CD rack model. Theoretically the GK3 Ultra has the build volume for it, surpassing the Neptune 4 in two directions, but it’s not easy to prepare a plate in such a way that the model isn’t ripped off its supports, is not disgraced by a massive elephant’s foot, or worst case the build plate wins and the FEP/PFA film loses the tug of war and rips.

Did I mention rips in the vat’s film? That’s another thing I experienced with the LD-002R back in the day. I was lucky that the resin spill was fairly contained, but I was puzzled for a while why the prints kept failing until I actually drained the vat.

Anyway, after all this learning, it’s time to reorganize and see what I can improve when I next hurl myself at this whole SLA resin printing topic.

As if a new range of iPhones expected in the coming weeks wasn’t enough, Apple broke from its usual announcement timing to debut new chips and configurations of its Mac Mini and Mac Studio desktops.

In addition to launching a Mac Mini with a new M6 chip and Mac Studio with a new M5 Ultra, Apple brings its desktops into line with its MacBook Pro offerings, adding M5 Pro configurations for the Mini and M5 Max models for the Studio. Both the Mini and the Studio are identical to their predecessors physically: The performance and capabilities of the updated chips are the only changes. 

That and the prices. With the exception of the M5 Max Mac Studio, which starts at the same $2,499, the prices for the base models of both systems have gone up. Prices have increased by $100 for the Mac Mini, which now starts at $899 for the M6 and $1,699 for the M5 Pro. The M5 Ultra Mac Studio has gone up by $200 to $5,499. Those are on top of the already significant bumps announced in June. 

Not that the price increases come as a surprise. We’ve been going through a huge price shock, oversimplistically dubbed “RAMageddon,”  thanks to ongoing component shortages. Semiconductor fab resources have been increasingly reallocated toward whatever’s ultimately the most profitable. Right now, that means anything critical to AI, notably data centers. And that pressure carries all the way down the supply chain, resulting in volatile prices for all other electronics. 

Preorders start today with a long lead, at least for Apple. They’re not slated to ship until Sept. 22, with the 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio following about a month after that.

Apple/CNET

The Mini steps up with M6

The brand-new M6 brings some notable advances over the M5. It’s fabricated using a 2nm process — the first M series processor to downsize from the 3nm process. A smaller process allows for denser circuitry in the same size die, which lets you do things like increase the number of cores and clock speeds of an existing chip layout without requiring a significant design change to the system or (usually) the mainboard.

That means, for instance, it was possible to double the capacity of the Neural Engine, which goes from 16 cores to 32. The Neural Engine is potentially key to the company’s success with Apple Intelligence in MacOS 27 running on entry systems, since on-device agents and other basic AI inferencing generally relies on the integer math performed by the NE. 

And as far as I can tell from my testing, the NE’s performance increase from the M4 to the M5 was meh. I suspect the only way to improve it was by substantially increasing the cores. 

Agents rely on the CPU to manage and allocate resources, so a handful of extra CPU cores matters. The M6 also updates the CPU architecture to match the M5 Pro and Max, switching to the three Super-Performance-Efficiency core types (think fast-slower-slowest) from the two Super-Efficiency types in the M4. 

Apple says the two extra GPU cores plus accelerators will deliver about a 30% compute performance improvement. In theory, that sounds about right – I’m extrapolating based on my testing, plus the typical generation-over-generation increase in memory bandwidth.

Apple/CNET

A much-needed M5 Ultra boost for the Studio

Unlike the other versions of the chips, Apple’s top-end Ultra is on an every-other-generation upgrade cycle. So the last one was based on the M3 design, which has a GPU architecture that significantly lags the M5 for both graphics (especially ray tracing) and AI. 

The Ultra chips are more or less two Max versions linked by high-speed circuitry. In this case, the M5 Ultra is based off the M5 Max with 40 GPU and 18 CPU cores for a total of 80 GPU and 36 CPU (12 super and 24 performance) cores, plus a 32-core Neural Engine. That’s the same number of NE cores as the previous Ultra, but while they’re a more recent generation, they’re not the same as the newer M6. 

Like the other M5 chips, the Ultra incorporates the on-GPU neural accelerators. It still supports a maximum of 512GB memory, though you won’t be able to get it until late October. But Apple jacked up the memory bandwidth to a whopping 1.2TB per second, up from 813GB per second for the M3 Ultra and from 614GB per second for the M5 Max.

One of the potentially most important changes the new chip brings for pro graphics folks is support for four 5K 120Hz displays on the Ultra model, up from three.

Why now?

The timing of the announcements is atypical for Apple. Though there have obviously been exceptions, new Macs and their accompanying chips are usually announced in October and March. I can think of a host of possible reasons Apple might be changing its playbook, either temporarily or permanently. For one, an early upgrade announcement might provide a more digestible justification for the aforementioned price hike.

Shortages may have affected the timing as well. Given worsening problems obtaining components for computers in general, Apple may be extending its horizon either for reevaluating its needs in an uncertain market, or ramping up and maintaining inventory further in advance of the big shopping season. Or if the company’s already acquired the expensive new silicon, products incorporating it shouldn’t really wait around a couple months just for an event. 

While the Ultra versions of its chips have always been confined to the flagship desktops like the Mac Studio, the base versions are typically launched with entry models, not just in the Mini, but the iMac, MacBook Air and base MacBook Pro as well. Apple may be avoiding having to deal with component supplies for a lot of different products shipping simultaneously.

And upgrading the chips in a desktop is a lot simpler than in a laptop, where power consumption and heat dissipation are critical. So not tying the M6 release to potential MacBook announcements in October may have simply been a practical decision.

I’ve also been contemplating Apple’s need to compete in the AI dev machine market — the ultracompact desktop PCs used to ceaselessly run local agents like OpenClaw, for isolated coding environments, and so on. The Mini has been popular as a relatively cheap entry point, and the M6’s enhancements are likely to make it more attractive for that.

The Ultra chip in the Studio serves a similar purpose at the other end of the spectrum, and this is a case where Apple’s every-other-generation upgrades for the Ultra can’t wait for next March, when the Studio would typically get an update. The M3 Ultra was the last update, but it lacks the enhanced M5 GPU architecture with on-core neural accelerators to boost floating point performance, and my testing indicates that FP32 performance benefits from more GPU cores. The only way to get those here is with an 80-core Ultra, since the Max tops out at 40.

Lori Grunin

Senior Editor / Computers and Gaming Hardware

I’ve been reviewing hardware and software, devising testing methodology and handed out buying advice for what seems like forever; I’m currently absorbed by computers and gaming hardware, but previously spent many years concentrating on cameras. I’ve also volunteered with a cat rescue for over 15 years doing adoptions, designing marketing materials, managing volunteers and, of course, photographing cats.

See full bio

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Family location-sharing and safety app Life360 is expanding its pet-tracking capabilities on Tuesday with the launch of a new product line of $7.99 scannable pet tags and other pet care features that tap into its tracking network technology.

Life360 expanded into pet tech last year with the launch of GPS pet trackers that leverage the lost-item-finding capabilities that the company integrated into its platform after its 2021 acquisition of AirTag rival Tile. With Tile, the company now offers not just location-sharing features for families, but also the ability for members to track other things of importance — like keys, handbags, luggage, and pets.

Since then, families on the service have added more than 8 million pets to their accounts, the company says.

However, the team found that not everyone wants to attach a bulky tracker to their pet’s collar, and not everyone needs access to location-tracking features or other advanced options like geofences and escape alerts.

In many cases, pet owners just want to put their contact information on a pet’s tag, which is what the new scannable pet tags support.

But there’s a twist. Instead of just providing a pet owner’s phone number when someone scans the QR code printed on the new pet tags, the scan also alerts the family through the Life360 app installed on the family’s smartphones. (The person who found the pet does not need to have the app for this to work.)

This helps in multiple ways — not only does it provide peace of mind to families searching for a lost pet, but it also provides the pet’s location details. That can be useful if the lost pet escapes from the finder’s control and runs off again, as the family will at least have the last known location recorded.

Families can update their contact details through the Life360 pet profile in the app.

In addition, the company is rolling out several new pet care features for families, including tools that let families schedule “care logs” to manage and track whether the pet has been fed, walked, given medication, or had its litter cleaned. Everyone in the family can see these care routines, so they will know if the pet needs their attention.

Another fun feature is “Zoomies Alerts” for GPS trackers, which track the bursts of energy a pet has at particular points during the day or evening. A new Weekly Roundup will recap other routines, like the distance walked or information about who in the family provided the pet with the most care during the week.

With the new features, the company is also making its pet trackers more affordable. Before, the Pet GPS trackers were only available with the higher-tier Platinum and Gold subscriptions, but now they’re included with the $99-per-year Silver bundles, too.

The new pet tags and GPS trackers are sold on both the comapny’s website and Amazon in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K.

from the and-by-‘antitrust-reform’-we-mean-‘historically-corrupt’ dept

Last March it was revealed that the Trump DOJ stabbed its antitrust lawsuit state partners in the back and struck a terrible settlement with Ticketmaster, scuttling a generational opportunity to break up one of the more glaring examples of modern monopoly power. Quite a curious choice for a Trump-addled party that spent all last election season insisting it was now “serious about antitrust reform.”

The states would go on to amazingly win their own lawsuit against Ticketmaster and LiveNation, though we’re still waiting to see if the remedies actually accomplish anything.

A follow up Wall Street Journal report (paywalled) this week offers some additional insight into the process that let Ticketmaster of the hook. Not too surprisingly, the story details how Trump demanded the DOJ settle the investigation just days before it was set to go to trial, which seemingly surprised (however credible that is) DOJ people already use to such ham-fisted interventions:

“White House involvement in law-enforcement matters, once taboo, is a regular feature of Trump’s second term. But many DOJ officials regarded the political interference in the Live Nation case as extreme even for an administration in which the president has openly pressured law-enforcement officials to pursue perceived enemies and pardoned allies.”

The settlement comes despite oodles of Trump promises that he was going to meaningfully crack down on Ticketmaster. It was one of several 2024 election-season campaign promises designed to pretend that corrupt authoritarianism was a genuine populist movement interested in antitrust reform (I did my very best to warn people as frequently as I could how this was bullshit).

From the story, it appears that Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, leveraging a connection to former Sinclair Broadcasting weirdo Boris Epshteyn (you might recall him from Sinclair’s “must run” propaganda segments) simply asked for the favor, and received it shortly thereafter. In exchange for some help booking guests at the then-Trump-controlled Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts:

“On Friday, Feb. 27, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino met with Trump in the Oval Office. Trump had called the meeting to discuss how to improve bookings at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, according to people familiar with the conversation. He also wanted to know why the company hadn’t reached a deal over its lawsuit, the people said.”

Ticketmaster also simply had to hire Sullivan & Cromwell to take over settlement negotiations, because they knew the firm’s close ties to Trump would help.

So basically, the backstory is every bit as corrupt and stupid as one would imagine, though perhaps slightly dumber. It’s consistent in some ways, such as Trump’s promises being meaningless, and his policies once again being easily influenced by whoever was last whispering in his hear and promising him personal favors.

This was going on simultaneously alongside efforts to purge the folks in MAGA, like Gail Slater, that actually did occasionally seem semi-interested in antitrust reform. And even those folks weren’t really what you’d call consistent when it comes to standing up to consolidated corporate power.

In reality MAGA was always about one thing: Donald Trump’s power and wealth. These sorts of egomaniacal autocrats exploit existing corruption and institutional failure to ride into office on the back of fake populism pretending they alone can fix it, then, once entrenched, introduce something far worse. The administration’s “anti-war,” “anti-corporate,” “anti-corruption” rhetoric are all part of the same lie.

In the Ticketmaster case it’s worth repeating that the states were completely blindsided by this settlement, which involved a relatively tiny (compared to Ticketmaster revenues) $280 million payout, and some pinky swearing related to ending exclusive booking at around 13 amphitheaters.

The states still managed to win their lawsuit last April, and we’re now simply left waiting to see if the finalized remedies actually accomplish anything, or include an actual physical breakup of the monopoly (fairly necessary when it comes to actually policing consolidated corporate power).

Filed Under: antitrust, antitrust reform, boris epshteyn, breakup, competition, concert tickets, corruption, crony capitalism, donald trump, lawsuit, michael rapino

Companies: live nation, ticketmaster

Marshall has released three new products in its Hendrix 60th Anniversary Collection: the Major V, Emberton III, and JMH Studio.

The three products mark the final chapter in Marshall’s Hendrix 60th Anniversary Collection, a range that draws on the cosmic imagery, colour, and psychedelic visual language running through Hendrix’s music and art.

The Major V on-ear headphones carry a rugged, foldable design finished in black, with a purple oil-on-water pattern spread across the headband and ear cups alongside psychedelic graphics and an all-seeing eye motif.

Marshall rates the Major V for multiple days of playback on a single charge, and that runtime leaves enough space to work through Hendrix’s full studio catalogue more than once before it needs a recharge.

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The Emberton III speaker continues that purple oil-on-water treatment across its sleeve and grille, with the all-seeing eye rendered in silver on the media jog dial and framed by purple LEDs.

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Marshall hand-dips each silicone sleeve using a water transfer print, a process that leaves every unit with slightly different patterning, and the speaker holds more than a full day of playback on one charge.

Janie L. Hendrix, President and CEO of the Hendrix family companies, said Jimi “was always searching for a sound that did not yet exist, pushing beyond what anyone thought an electric guitar could do.” She added that Marshall gave him the freedom to turn those ideas into something the world had never heard.

The JMH Studio amplifier reimagines Marshall’s classic Studio Vintage amp in a portable format, built by hand at the company’s factory in Bletchley, UK, from quality plywood wrapped in black Tolex.

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A black and purple psychedelic pattern spans the fret and control panel, accented by a purple LED indicator, while silver beading modelled on Hendrix’s own jewellery style details the knobs, handle, logo, grille, and back panel, and an all-seeing eye badge, drawn from his fascination with the third eye, completes the design on the stack’s top and bottom.

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The Major V and Emberton III editions go on sale today on the Marshall site, priced at £129.99 and £149.99 respectively, before hitting select retailers from 9 September. The JMH Studio amplifier follows on 9 September at £1749.99, available through Marshall’s website and select retailers.

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