The iPhone Fold could make concerts even worse

Apple announced new Macs this week, and the company’s marketing language made a sharp pivot: the Mac Studio is now “the ultimate desktop for on-device AI,” the Mac Mini delivers “a massive leap in AI performance” for “always-on agentic computing,” and the M6 and M5 Ultra chips offer “a big leap in performance and AI compute.” The hosts of The Vergecast found this shift revealing — not because Apple has suddenly become the leader in local AI inference, but because the company is selling an aspiration. The Mac Mini became a surprise hit during the open-source AI boom, with developers buying it in bulk to run local models like those from the OpenClaw ecosystem. The hosts note that the real compute for those agentic tasks still happens in the cloud, not on the device. The Mac Studio’s claim to be the ultimate desktop for on-device AI is even more dubious, given that a PC with an NVIDIA GPU remains the standard for serious inference work. Apple offered almost no AI-specific benchmarks for the M5 Ultra. The real story, the hosts argue, is that Apple is dipping a toe into a market of people who dream of cutting ties with OpenAI and Anthropic — whether or not the hardware can actually deliver on that dream yet.

The polishing cloth and the iPhone fold