Apple is doubling down on 8GB of RAM for many of its entry-level Macs, claiming that it's "suitable for many tasks," including browsing, video streaming and even "light" video and image editing. As of this writing, all MacBook Air laptops, the Mac Mini, and the MacBook Pro 14 all start with a base configuration of 8GB RAM -- which can't be upgraded at a later date since the RAM is soldered onto the motherboard. "That might have been OK were it not for the fact that Apple charges a ridiculous $200 to upgrade any of those machines from 8GB to 16GB," notes PC Gamer's Jeremy Laird. Even if an 8GB Mac does some of the previously stated tasks tolerably well, Laird argues that "8GB still isn't acceptable." From the report: That's because a Mac with 8GB can easily run out of memory just browsing the web. That's particularly true with Chrome, which just so happens to be the most popular browser around. Regular Chrome users will know what a memory hog Chrome can be. Right now, I have about 15 tabs open, which is actually pretty low for me. Often, my tab count can blow well past 50 in multiple windows. Handily, Chrome shows you memory usage if you mouse-over a given tab. And three of my current tabs are chewing up over 500MB each. So, that's 1.5GB for just three Chrome tabs. Add a couple more, plus MacOS's underlying memory footprint for just being up and running and you're bang out of RAM.

Overall, I'm using 12.5GB of memory and the only application I have open is Chrome. Oh, and did I mention I'm typing this on a 16GB MacBook Air? I used to have an 8GB Apple silicon Air and to be frank it was a nightmare, constantly running out of memory just browsing the web. That's the point most observers miss. The usual narrative is that 8GB isn't good enough for serious workflows. It isn't but that completely misses the more important point. 8GB isn't even enough for browsing the web.

Apple, aiming to boost sluggish computer sales, is preparing to overhaul its entire Mac line with a new family of in-house processors designed to highlight AI. Bloomberg News: The company, which released its first Macs with M3 chips five months ago, is already nearing production of the next generation -- the M4 processor -- according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new chip will come in at least three main varieties, and Apple is looking to update every Mac model with it, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven't been announced.

The new Macs are underway at a critical time. After peaking in 2022, Mac sales fell 27% in the last fiscal year, which ended in September. In the holiday period, revenue from the computer line was flat. Apple attempted to breathe new life into the Mac business with an M3-focused launch event last October, but those chips didn't bring major performance improvements over the M2 from the prior year. Apple also is playing catch-up in AI, where it's seen as a laggard to Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and other tech peers. The new chips are part of a broader push to weave AI capabilities into all its products. Apple is aiming to release the updated computers beginning late this year and extending into early next year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for "AI PCs" next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple's M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks. After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft's latest consumer-focused Surface hardware.

Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it's planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI PCs will have "faster app emulation than Rosetta 2" -- the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel processors to Apple's own processors.

App emulation has been a big problem for Windows on Arm over the past decade, but Microsoft did deliver x64 app emulation for Windows 11 more than two years ago. This helps ensure apps can run on Windows on Arm devices when there isn't a native ARM64 version. Native Arm apps are key for improved performance on upcoming Windows on Arm laptops, and Google has just recently released its own ARM64 version of Chrome ready for these upcoming devices.

Walmart is teaming up with Apple to sell the Mac for the first time. From a report: In a press release today, the company said that it is now selling the base model M1 MacBook Air online and in select stores for $699. The move comes a week after Apple introduced the new M3 MacBook Air and stopped selling the M1 MacBook Air itself. While Walmart has historically sold Apple devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, it has never sold Macs directly. Instead, it's relied on third-party partners to sell the Mac through its online marketplace.

Apple has announced the launch of its new MacBook Air laptops powered by the company's latest M3 chip, offering up to 60% faster performance compared to the previous generation (M1-powered MacBook Air). The new 13-inch and 15-inch models feature a thin and light design, up to 18 hours of battery life, and a Liquid Retina display. The M3 chip, built using 3-nanometer technology, boasts an 8-core CPU, up to a 10-core GPU, and supports up to 24GB of unified memory.

The laptops also offer enhanced AI capabilities, with a faster 16-core Neural Engine and accelerators in the CPU and GPU for improved on-device machine learning performance. This enables features such as real-time speech-to-text, translation, and visual understanding. The 13-inch MacBook Air with M3 starts at $1,099, while the 15-inch model starts at $1,299. Both models are available for order starting Monday and will begin arriving to customers and be available in stores on Friday, March 8. Apple also reduced the starting price of the 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 chip to $999.

Andrew Cunningham reports via Ars Technica: For around three years now, the team of independent developers behind the Asahi Linux project has worked to support Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, despite Apple's total lack of involvement. Over the years, the project has gone from a "highly unstable experiment" to a "surprisingly functional and usable desktop operating system." Even Linus Torvalds has used it to run Linux on Apple's hardware. The team has been steadily improving its open source, standards-conformant GPU driver for the M1 and M2 since releasing them in December 2022, and today, the team crossed an important symbolic milestone: The Asahi driver's support for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES graphics have officially passed what Apple offers in macOS. The team's latest graphics driver fully conforms with OpenGL version 4.6 and OpenGL ES version 3.2, the most recent version of either API. Apple's support in macOS tops out at OpenGL 4.1, announced in July 2010.

Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig wrote a detailed blog post that announced the new driver, which had to pass "over 100,000 tests" to be deemed officially conformant. The team achieved this milestone despite the fact that Apple's GPUs don't support some features that would have made implementing these APIs more straightforward. "Regrettably, the M1 doesn't map well to any graphics standard newer than OpenGL ES 3.1," writes Rosenzweig. "While Vulkan makes some of these features optional, the missing features are required to layer DirectX and OpenGL on top. No existing solution on M1 gets past the OpenGL 4.1 feature set... Without hardware support, new features need new tricks. Geometry shaders, tessellation, and transform feedback become compute shaders. Cull distance becomes a transformed interpolated value. Clip control becomes a vertex shader epilogue. The list goes on."

Now that the Asahi GPU driver supports the latest OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards -- released in 2017 and 2015, respectively -- the work turns to supporting the low-overhead Vulkan API on Apple's hardware. Vulkan support in macOS is limited to translation layers like MoltenVK, which translates Vulkan API calls to Metal ones that the hardware and OS can understand. [...] Rosenzweig's blog post didn't give any specific updates on Vulkan except to say that the team was "well on the road" to supporting it. In addition to supporting native Linux apps, supporting more graphics APIs in Asahi will allow the operating system to take better advantage of software like Valve's Proton, which already has a few games written for x86-based Windows PCs running on Arm-based Apple hardware.

Apple has discontinued support for the mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro, the last model to include an optical drive. Products are considered obsolete when Apple ceased distribution over 7 years ago, making service and parts unavailable. The laptop was removed from Apple's lineup in 2016 but remained compatible with macOS until Big Sur in 2020. While optical drives had already fallen out of favor, the phase out marks the end of an era for pro users requiring discs for media production.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As more companies ramp up development of artificial intelligence systems, they are increasingly turning to graphics processing unit (GPU) chips for the computing power they need to run large language models (LLMs) and to crunch data quickly at massive scale. Between video game processing and AI, demand for GPUs has never been higher, and chipmakers are rushing to bolster supply. In new findings released today, though, researchers are highlighting a vulnerability in multiple brands and models of mainstream GPUs -- including Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD chips -- that could allow an attacker to steal large quantities of data from a GPU's memory. The silicon industry has spent years refining the security of central processing units, or CPUs, so they don't leak data in memory even when they are built to optimize for speed. However, since GPUs were designed for raw graphics processing power, they haven't been architected to the same degree with data privacy as a priority. As generative AI and other machine learning applications expand the uses of these chips, though, researchers from New York -- based security firm Trail of Bits say that vulnerabilities in GPUs are an increasingly urgent concern. "There is a broader security concern about these GPUs not being as secure as they should be and leaking a significant amount of data," Heidy Khlaaf, Trail of Bits' engineering director for AI and machine learning assurance, tells WIRED. "We're looking at anywhere from 5 megabytes to 180 megabytes. In the CPU world, even a bit is too much to reveal."

To exploit the vulnerability, which the researchers call LeftoverLocals, attackers would need to already have established some amount of operating system access on a target's device. Modern computers and servers are specifically designed to silo data so multiple users can share the same processing resources without being able to access each others' data. But a LeftoverLocals attack breaks down these walls. Exploiting the vulnerability would allow a hacker to exfiltrate data they shouldn't be able to access from the local memory of vulnerable GPUs, exposing whatever data happens to be there for the taking, which could include queries and responses generated by LLMs as well as the weights driving the response. In their proof of concept, as seen in the GIF below, the researchers demonstrate an attack where a target -- shown on the left -- asks the open source LLM Llama.cpp to provide details about WIRED magazine. Within seconds, the attacker's device -- shown on the right -- collects the majority of the response provided by the LLM by carrying out a LeftoverLocals attack on vulnerable GPU memory. The attack program the researchers created uses less than 10 lines of code. [...] Though exploiting the vulnerability would require some amount of existing access to targets' devices, the potential implications are significant given that it is common for highly motivated attackers to carry out hacks by chaining multiple vulnerabilities together. Furthermore, establishing "initial access" to a device is already necessary for many common types of digital attacks. The researchers did not find evidence that Nvidia, Intel, or Arm GPUs contain the LeftoverLocals vulnerability, but Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD all confirmed to WIRED that they are impacted. Here's what each of the affected companies had to say about the vulnerability, as reported by Wired:

Apple: An Apple spokesperson acknowledged LeftoverLocals and noted that the company shipped fixes with its latest M3 and A17 processors, which it unveiled at the end of 2023. This means that the vulnerability is seemingly still present in millions of existing iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks that depend on previous generations of Apple silicon. On January 10, the Trail of Bits researchers retested the vulnerability on a number of Apple devices. They found that Apple's M2 MacBook Air was still vulnerable, but the iPad Air 3rd generation A12 appeared to have been patched.
Qualcomm: A Qualcomm spokesperson told WIRED that the company is "in the process" of providing security updates to its customers, adding, "We encourage end users to apply security updates as they become available from their device makers." The Trail of Bits researchers say Qualcomm confirmed it has released firmware patches for the vulnerability.
AMD: AMD released a security advisory on Wednesday detailing its plans to offer fixes for LeftoverLocals. The protections will be "optional mitigations" released in March.
Google: For its part, Google says in a statement that it "is aware of this vulnerability impacting AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm GPUs. Google has released fixes for ChromeOS devices with impacted AMD and Qualcomm GPUs."

Apple is reinvesting in gaming with advanced Mac hardware, improvements to Apple silicon, and gaming-focused software, aiming not to repeat its past mistakes and capture a larger share of the gaming market. In an article for Inverse, Raymond Wong provides an in-depth overview of this endeavor, including commentary from Apple's marketing managers Gordon Keppel, Leland Martin, and Doug Brooks. Here's an excerpt from the report: Gaming on the Mac in the 1990s until 2020, when Apple made a big shift to its own custom silicon, could be boiled down to this: Apple was in a hardware arms race with the PC that it couldn't win. Mac gamers were hopeful that the switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs starting in 2005 would turn things around, but it didn't because by then, GPUs started becoming the more important hardware component for running 3D games, and the Mac's support for third-party GPUs could only be described as lackluster. Fast forward to 2023, and Apple has a renewed interest in gaming on the Mac, the likes of which it hasn't shown in the last 25 years. "Apple silicon has changed all that," Keppel tells Inverse. "Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3."

Ask any gadget reviewer (including myself) and they will tell you Keppel isn't just drinking the Kool-Aid because Apple pays him to. Macs with Apple silicon really are performant computers that can play some of the latest PC and console games. In three generations of desktop-class chip design, Apple has created a platform with "tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs," according to Keppel. That's tens of millions of Macs with monstrous CPU and GPU capabilities for running graphics-intensive games. Apple's upgrades to the GPUs on its silicon are especially impressive. The latest Apple silicon, the M3 family of chips, supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading, features that only a few years ago didn't seem like they would ever be a priority, let alone ones that are built into the entire spectrum of MacBook Pros.

The "magic" of Apple silicon isn't just performance, says Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager. Whereas Apple's fallout with game developers on the Mac previously came down to not supporting specific computer hardware, Martin says Apple silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games for, but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices. "If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs," Martin says. "That can add complexity when you're developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we've effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it's a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We're seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad."

"Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design,â Doug Brooks, also on the Mac product marketing team, tells Inverse. "Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory." [...] "One thing we're excited about with this most recent launch of the M3 family of chips is that we're able to bring these powerful new technologies, Dynamic Caching, as well as ray-tracing and mesh shading across our entire line of chips," Brook adds. "We didn't start at the high end and trickle them down over time. We really wanted to bring that to as many customers as possible."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: For the soundtracks to their 2023 holiday season ads, both Amazon and Apple turned to music by members of The Beatles. Amazon's Joy Ride, which stars three older women reliving their youthful joy at a sledding hill, is set to a cover of The Beatles' In My Life. Apple's Fuzzy Feelings, which tells the story of a young woman with a grumpy boss, is set to George Harrison's Isn't It a Pity.

Product placement is present in both ads — Amazon features padded seat cushions that protect the seniors' tushes and the Amazon app used to order them, while Apple showcases the iPhone 15 Pro Max used to capture the ad's stop-motion animation scenes and the MacBook Air used to edit them.

Amazon's 60-second ad has 542K views on YouTube, while Apple's 4-minute ad has 16+ million views.

Apple will expand its use of advanced OLED screens to iPads and MacBooks and is considering eventually introducing foldable tablets, a move set to further shake up the $150 billion display industry as it shifts away from traditional LCD screens, Asian news outlet Nikkei reported Friday. From the report: OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, displays are already used in most premium smartphones, including iPhones. Apple plans to deploy the tech in its high-end iPads next year, multiple tech industry executives told Nikkei Asia. An OLED MacBook model is also under development for production in the second half of 2025 at the earliest, the people said. The growing penetration of OLED is a significant win for Samsung Display and LG Display of South Korea and China's BOE Technology Holding, which have all bet heavily on this expensive display technology.

On the flip side, it could be a blow to display makers that do not have much presence in this segment, including JDI and Sharp of Japan, and AUO and Innolux of Taiwan. Apple has also started evaluating the possibility of making foldable iPads after it deploys the flexible OLED screens on the tablet, but it does not have a concrete timeline for doing so, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The iPhone maker is not the first company to adopt OLED displays for tablets. Huawei, for instance, has been a significant driver of this trend, which in turn has helped strengthen the Chinese display supply chain.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Zotac's ZBox PI430AJ mini PC is the first computer to use Frore System's fanless AirJet cooler, and as tested by HKEPC, it's not a gimmick. Two AirJet coolers were able to keep Intel's N300 CPU below 70 degrees Celsius under load, allowing for an incredibly thin mini PC with impressive performance. AirJet is the only active cooling solution for PCs that doesn't use fans; even so-called liquid coolers still use fans. Instead of using fans to push and pull air, AirJet uses ultrasonic waves, which have a variety of benefits: lower power consumption, near-silent operation, and a much thinner and smaller size. AirJet coolers can also do double duty as both intake and exhaust vents, whereas a fan can only do intake or exhaust, not both.

Equipped with two of the smaller AirJet Mini models, which are rated to cool 5.25 watts of heat each, the ZBox PI430AJ is just 23.7mm thick, or 0.93 inches. The mini PC's processor is Intel's low-end N300 Atom CPU with a TDP of 7 watts, and after HKEPC put the ZBox through a half-hour-long stress test, the N300 only peaked at 67 C. That's all thanks to AirJet being so thin and being able to both intake and exhaust air. For comparison, Beelink's Mini S12 Pro mini PC with the lower-power N100, which has a TDP of 6 watts, is 1.54 inches thick (66% thicker than the ZBox PI430AJ). Traditional fan-equipped coolers just can't match AirJet coolers in size, which is perhaps AirJet's biggest advantage. Last month, engineers from Frore Systems integrated the AirJet into an M2-based Apple MacBook Air. "With proper cooling, the relatively inexpensive laptop matched the performance of a more expensive MacBook Pro based on the same processor," reports Tom's Hardware.

Amazon sued what it called an international ring of thieves who swiped millions of dollars in merchandise from the company through a series of refund scams that included buying products on Amazon and seeking refunds without returning the goods. From a report: An organization called REKK advertised its refund services on social media sites, including Reddit and Discord, and communicated with perpetrators on the messaging app Telegram, Amazon said in a lawsuit filed Thursday in US District Court in the state of Washington.

The lawsuit names REKK and nearly 30 people from the US, Canada, UK, Greece, Lithuania and the Netherlands as defendants in the scheme, which involved hacking into Amazon's internal systems and bribing Amazon employees to approve reimbursements. REKK charged customers, who wanted to get pricey items like MacBook Pro laptops and car tires without paying for them, a commission based on the value of the purchase. "The defendants' scheme tricks Amazon into processing refunds for products that are never returned; instead of returning the products as promised, defendants keep the product and the refund," Amazon said in its lawsuit.

Apple, seeking to reverse a decline in Mac and iPad sales, is preparing several new models and upgrades for early next year, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the situation. From a report: The effort includes updating the iPad Air, iPad Pro and MacBook Air, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven't been announced. The new iPad Air will come in two sizes for the first time, and the Pro model will get OLED screens -- short for organic light-emitting diode. The MacBook Air, meanwhile, will feature the speedier M3 processor.

The Mac and iPad account for 15% of Apple's revenue combined, and they've been particularly hard hit by a decline in consumer tech spending. The iPad slump has been compounded by a lack of new models. In fact, 2023 will be the first calendar year in the product's history when no new versions were released. There have been Mac releases in the past year, but that market faces a broader pullback for computers following a boom in pandemic spending.

"As of this year, all new Mac computers are powered by Apple's own silicon, ending the company's 15-plus years of reliance on Intel," according to a new report from CNBC.

"Apple's silicon team has grown to thousands of engineers working across labs all over the world, including in Israel, Germany, Austria, the U.K. and Japan. Within the U.S., the company has facilities in Silicon Valley, San Diego and Austin, Texas..." The latest A17 Pro announced in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in September enables major leaps in features like computational photography and advanced rendering for gaming. "It was actually the biggest redesign in GPU architecture and Apple silicon history," said Kaiann Drance, who leads marketing for the iPhone. "We have hardware accelerated ray tracing for the first time. And we have mesh shading acceleration, which allows game developers to create some really stunning visual effects." That's led to the development of iPhone-native versions from Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage, The Division Resurgence and Capcom's Resident Evil 4.

Apple says the A17 Pro is the first 3-nanometer chip to ship at high volume. "The reason we use 3-nanometer is it gives us the ability to pack more transistors in a given dimension. That is important for the product and much better power efficiency," said the head of Apple silicon, Johny Srouji . "Even though we're not a chip company, we are leading the industry for a reason." Apple's leap to 3-nanometer continued with the M3 chips for Mac computers, announced in October. Apple says the M3 enables features like 22-hour battery life and, similar to the A17 Pro, boosted graphics performance...

In a major shift for the semiconductor industry, Apple turned away from using Intel's PC processors in 2020, switching to its own M1 chip inside the MacBook Air and other Macs. "It was almost like the laws of physics had changed," Ternus said. "All of a sudden we could build a MacBook Air that's incredibly thin and light, has no fan, 18 hours of battery life, and outperformed the MacBook Pro that we had just been shipping." He said the newest MacBook Pro with Apple's most advanced chip, the M3 Max, "is 11 times faster than the fastest Intel MacBook Pro we were making. And we were shipping that just two years ago." Intel processors are based on x86 architecture, the traditional choice for PC makers, with a lot of software developed for it. Apple bases its processors on rival Arm architecture, known for using less power and helping laptop batteries last longer.

Apple's M1 in 2020 was a proving point for Arm-based processors in high-end computers, with other big names like Qualcomm — and reportedly AMD and Nvidia — also developing Arm-based PC processors. In September, Apple extended its deal with Arm through at least 2040.
Since Apple first debuted its homegrown semiconductors in 2010 in the iPhone 4, other companies started pursuing their own custom semiconductor development, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.

CNBC reports that Apple is also reportedly working on its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip. Apple's Srouji wouldn't comment on "future technologies and products" but told CNBC "we care about cellular, and we have teams enabling that."

Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: Engineers from Frore Systems have integrated the company's innovative solid-state AirJet cooling system, which provides impressive cooling capabilities despite a lack of moving parts, into an M2-based Apple MacBook Air. With proper cooling, the relatively inexpensive laptop matched the performance of a more expensive MacBook Pro based on the same processor. The lack of a fan is probably one of the main advantages of Apple's MacBook Air over its more performant siblings, but it also puts the laptop at a disadvantage. Fanless cooling doesn't have moving parts (which is a plus), but it also cannot properly cool down Apple's M1 or M2 processor under high loads, which is why a 13-inch MacBook Air powered by M1 or M2 system-on-chip is slower than 13-inch MacBook Pro based on the same SoC. However, making a MacBook Air run as fast as a 13-inch MacBook Pro is now possible. A video posted to YouTube by PC World shows how the AirJet system works. They also released a recent demo showing off the strength of the AirJet technology.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple plans to ditch Qualcomm and build its own custom modem that could launch around 2026. MacRumors reports: Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that Apple's custom technology aspirations include integrating an in-house modem into its system-on-a-chip (SoC), which would eventually see the launch of MacBooks with built-in cellular connectivity. Gurman says Apple will "probably need two or three additional years to get that chip inside cellular versions of the Apple Watch and iPad -- and the Mac, once the part is integrated into the company's system-on-a-chip."

Apple has explored the possibility of developing MacBooks with cellular connectivity in the past. Indeed, the company reportedly considered launching a MacBook Air with 3G connectivity, but former CEO Steve Jobs said in 2008 that Apple decided against it, since it would take up too much room in the case. An integrated SoC would solve that problem. Gurman's latest newsletter also said some of Apple's other ongoing in-house chip projects include camera sensors, batteries, a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip that will eventually replace parts from Broadcom, Micro-LED displays for Apple devices, and a non-invasive glucose monitoring system.

Joe Rossignol reports via MacRumors: The first benchmark results for the standard M3 chip surfaced in the Geekbench 6 database today, providing a closer look at the chip's CPU performance improvements. Based on the results so far, the M3 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of around 3,000 and 11,700, respectively. The standard M2 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of around 2,600 and 9,700, respectively, so the M3 chip is up to 20% faster than the M2 chip, as Apple claimed during its "Scary Fast" event on Monday.

It's unclear if the results are for the new 14-inch MacBook Pro or iMac, both of which are available with the standard M3 chip, but performance should be similar for both machines. The results have a "Mac15,3" identifier, which Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported was for a laptop with the same display resolution as a 14-inch MacBook Pro. We have yet to see any Geekbench results for the higher-end M3 Pro and M3 Max chips available in most new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.

Richard Speed reports via The Register: Asahi Linux, a project to port Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, has reported a combination of bugs in Apple's macOS that could leave users with hardware in a difficult-to-recover state. The issues revolve around how recent versions of macOS handle refresh rates, and MacBook Pro models with ProMotion displays (the 14 and 16-inch versions) are affected. According to the Asahi team, the bugs lurk in the upgrade and boot process and, when combined, can create a condition where a machine always boots to a black screen, and a Device Firmware Update (DFU) recovery is needed.

Asahi Linux's techies have looked into the issue, having first suspected it had something to do with either having an Asahi Linux installation on a Mac and then upgrading to macOS Sonoma or installing Asahi Linux after a Sonoma upgrade. However, the issue appears to be unconnected to the project. The team said: "As far as we can tell, ALL users who upgraded to Sonoma the normal way have an out-of-date or even broken System RecoveryOS, and in particular MacBook Pro 14" and 16" owners are vulnerable to ending up with a completely unbootable system." While this might sound alarming, the team was at pains to assure users that data was not at risk and only certain versions of macOS were affected -- Sonoma 14.0+ and Ventura 13.6+.

The first bug is related to macOS Sonoma using the previously installed version as System Recovery, which can cause problems when an older RecoveryOS runs into newer firmware. The second occurs if a display is configured to a refresh rate other than ProMotion. According to the Asahi Linux team, the system will no longer be able to boot into old macOS installs or Asahi Linux. "This includes recovery mode when those systems are set as the default boot OS, and also System Recovery at least until the next subsequent OS upgrade." The team noted: "Even users with just 13.6 installed single-boot are affected by this issue (no Asahi Linux needed).

"We do not understand how Apple managed to release an OS update that, when upgraded to normally, leaves machines unbootable if their display refresh rate is not the default. This seems to have been a major QA oversight by Apple."

Apple's latest M3 Pro chip in the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro has 25% less memory bandwidth than the M1 Pro and M2 Pro chips used in equivalent models from the two previous generations. From a report: Based on the latest 3-nanometer technology and featuring all-new GPU architecture, the M3 series of chips is said to represent the fastest and most power-efficient evolution of Apple silicon thus far. For example, the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Pro chip is up to 40% faster than the 16-inch model with M1 Pro, according to Apple.

However, looking at Apple's own hardware specifications, the M3 Pro system on a chip (SoC) features 150GB/s memory bandwidth, compared to 200GB/s on the earlier M1 Pro and M2 Pro. As for the M3 Max, Apple says it is capable of "up to 400GB/s." This wording is because the less pricey scaled-down M3 Max with 14-core CPU and 30-core GPU has only 300GB/s of memory bandwidth, whereas the equivalent scaled-down M2 Max with 12-core CPU and 30-core GPU featured 400GB/s bandwidth, just like its more powerful 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU version.

Notably, Apple has also changed the core ratios of the higher-tier M3 Pro chip compared to its direct predecessor. The M3 Pro with 12-core CPU has 6 performance cores (versus 8 performance cores on the 12-core M2 Pro) and 6 efficiency cores (versus 4 efficiency cores on the 12-core M2 Pro), while the GPU has 18 cores (versus 19 on the equivalent M2 Pro chip).