#mac studio

Meta has released a new open-weight AI model, Muse Spark Open, and says Apple's Mac Studio is the best way to run it on a desktop. The company announced the model on October 15 and described it as the most capable U.S. open-weight model to date.

According to Meta, Muse Spark Open has 816 billion total parameters, with 42 billion active at any time, and a context window of 1 million tokens. The company positions it for coding and agentic work, saying it is strong at extended tasks, multi-step reasoning and software engineering.

Apple announced new Mac mini and Mac Studio models on August 25, an unusual time of year for Mac hardware. Pre-orders opened right away, with deliveries and in-store availability from September 22.

The Mac mini now comes with either the new M6 or an M5 Pro. TidBITS describes the M6 as Apple's first chip on a 2-nanometer process, with a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU that includes Neural Accelerators. Apple says multithreaded CPU performance is about 1.2 times that of the M5. Both Mac mini versions gain Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread support through the N1 chip, and 2.5Gb Ethernet is standard.