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Apple has introduced its latest update to the MacBook Air, bringing the M4 chip to its lightweight laptops at long last. Even though the Air lineup is getting more powerful, it's also getting cheaper. The smaller base model of the M4 MacBook Air will retail at $999, down $100 from the previous starting price. Pre-orders begin today, and the machines will be available starting on March 12. Last year's Air models were quite good but didn't do anything revolutionary, and the same seems true for the 2025 versions. There are still two size choices, 13-inch and 15-inch. RAM for the M2 and M3 laptops is 16GB by default, and the M4 model matches that standard. Apple is promising up to 18 hours of battery life, and the Airs will have support for Apple Intelligence. There's also a new look in the lineup, with the addition of a sky blue color to the now-familiar choices of silver, midnight and starlight. The company's current chip has been available in MacBook Pros, the Mac mini and the iMac for awhile now, so the power levels of the M4 have been pretty well established. But the boost for Apple's ultralights is still welcome. Apple says the new chip can make the latest Airs up to twice as fast as the M1 versions. The M4 is kitted out with a 10-core CPU and a GPU with up to 10 cores. It supports up to 32GB of unified memory. The new prices might be the most exciting part of today's Air announcements. The 13-inch M4 Air starts at $999, or $899 for buyers in education, while the 15-inch model starts at $1,199, or $1,099 for education. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/apple-unveils-the-m4-macbook-air-with-a-price-drop-140012109.html?src=rss
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Apple just unveiled its latest Mac Studio desktop PC promising improved performance over the previous model thanks to the long awaited M3 Ultra, the company's highest performing processor to date. The new machine is primarily aimed at content creators, so on top of the faster chips, it offers the latest high-speed SSD storage, Thunderbolt 5 technology and an updated Neural Engine. It's been a bit of a wait for a new Mac Studio as the last one came out at WWDC 2023, nearly two years ago. As before, you can think of it as like a Mac mini Pro, a bigger and significantly more powerful version of Apples budget desktop. Like the last two models, it comes in two configurations with either the M3 Ultra or M4 Max chips and physically looks the same as the previous M2 model. Apple The M4 Max version is aimed at "video editors, colorists, developers, engineers, photographers and creative pros," according to Apple. To that end, it comes with up to a 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU, from 36GB to 128GB of RAM, four Thunderbolt 5 ports with 15 GB/s throughput (triple the previous model's speed) and over 500 GB/s of unified memory bandwidth. It also includes Two USB-A ports (up to 5Gb/s), an HDMI port, 10Gb ethernet and a 3.5mm headphone jack. All that makes it up to 3.5 times faster than the original Mac Studio M1 Max. Apple noted that with the M4 Max chip, the latest Mac Studio is the first with Apple's advanced graphics architecture that allows features like hardware-accelerated mesh rendering and a second-generation ray-tracing engine to boost content creation and gaming. For AI processing, it offers triple the speed of the M1 Max version. The M3 Ultra model ups the ante considerably with a 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores, "50 percent more than any previous Ultra chip and the most CPU cores ever in a Mac," Apple said. Meanwhile, the GPU packs up to 80 cores, another record for Apple silicon, along with a 32-core Neural Engine for on-device AI and machine learning. It also supports from 96GB to a record 512GB of unified memory, plus up to 16TB of SSD storage. Apple You may be wondering why Apple is just now releasing the M3 Ultra chip when every other Mac (including the all-new MacBook Air) has some kind of M4 processor. The answer is that it's apparently not easy to design and build the Ultra processors because they're effectively two chips mated together using Apple's "Ultrafusion" bridge technology. Despite not having "M4" in the name, though, the M3 Ultra is still approximately twice as fast as the best M4 Max processor under taxing workloads and 2.5 times quicker than the Mac Ultra M1, according to Apple. Considering its power, the Mac Studio with an M4 Max chip is reasonably priced starting at $1,999 with 32GB of memory and 512GB of storage. The Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is another story, though, doubling that to $3,999 base, with 96GB of unified memory (up from 64GB before) and 1TB of storage. Orders are now open with shipping set to start on March 12th. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/apples-new-mac-studio-comes-with-the-long-awaited-m3-ultra-chip-140005216.html?src=rss
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US federal judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has denied Elon Musk's request for an injunction that would have immediately stopped OpenAI's conversion into a for-profit entity. Musk filed for an injunction late last year after suing OpenAI and Microsoft and accusing them of telling investors not to fund rival AI companies, such as his own xAI. According to the Financial Times, the judge dismissed his request based on that claim of anticompetitive behavior. Gonzalez Rogers cited a previous statement by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, saying that the company only warned certain investors who were granted access to sensitive information that their rights would be terminated if they made a non-passive investment in rival companies. The judge also reportedly rejected the request based on Musk's claim that OpenAI and Altman broke their contract with him and violated the company's founding mission of building AI "for the benefit of humanity." Musk, who helped found OpenAI and funded it when it was just starting out, said Altman and his fellow OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman "took advantage of [his] altruism in order to lure him into funding the venture." In a statement sent to Bloomberg, OpenAI said that the lawsuit has "always been about the competition." The company added that "Elons own emails show that he wanted to merge a for-profit OpenAI into Tesla. That would have been great for his personal benefit, but not for [OpenAI's] mission or US interests." After Musk filed his original lawsuit against OpenAI last year, the company published old emails between Musk and other people in the company. OpenAI revealed that Musk was not only aware that it was taking the for-profit route, he wanted majority equity, control of the initial board of directors and the CEO position. Anoter email from Musk suggested making the organization a part of Tesla. In February this year, Musk launched a bid to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion, but the company gave him a firm "no thank you" in response. As Bloomberg noted, the judge's rejection of Musk's request is significant, because OpenAI is already in the process of talking with government officials about taking on a more typical corporate structure. While the judge has rejected Musk's request, she is fast-tracking his lawsuit and will hold an expedited trial later this year on the basis of public interest and on his claim that OpenAI's transformation has a "potential for harm if a conversion contrary to law occurred."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/court-denies-elon-musks-attempt-to-block-openais-for-profit-transformation-133025600.html?src=rss
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