Apple AI Releases: Mac Studio (M5 Max / M5 Ultra), M5 chip & FastVLM-7B

apple.com ↗

ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 4 Apple releases since Sep 2025, most recently iPhone 18 Pro, Siri AI beta & AirPods live translation on Sep 10, 2026. Highlights include FastVLM-7B, M5 chip. 1 of them shipped with open weights. Every entry below has the episode segment where we covered it live, plus primary-source links and key numbers where we have them.

4 releases1 open weight4 episodesSep 2025 – Sep 2026

September 2026 1

Apple
Products & Apps

iPhone 18 Pro, Siri AI beta & AirPods live translation

Apple debuts iPhone 18 Pro with the A20 Pro chip, Siri AI beta and the iPhone Duo foldable

Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max on the 2 nm A20 Pro chip, whose dual 16-core Neural Engine doubles the AI compute of the A19 Pro, plus the $1,999 iPhone Duo foldable. Siri AI, the new on-device and Private Cloud Compute assistant, lands in English beta with iOS 27 on September 14. The AI bits that interested the panel: AirPods live translation and an Apple Watch that continuously transcribes on device with a 'what did they say' button. Alex has been using Siri AI and calls it fine, nowhere near the agents.

A20 Pro 2 nm chip, dual 16-core Neural Engine (2x A19 Pro AI compute)Sep 14 Siri AI English beta with iOS 27$1,999 iPhone Duo foldable
Event recap (testingcatalog) ↗Apple Newsroom ↗
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#consumer-ai#on-device

August 2026 1

Apple
Products & Apps

Mac Studio (M5 Max / M5 Ultra)

Apple announces Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra plus a new Mac Mini

Apple announced a new Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, plus a refreshed Mac Mini with higher-spec options. Starting at $2,499 but configurable to roughly $22K, the panel framed it as home AI infrastructure: Wolfram's 'central heating' theory — financed over two years it costs about the same as a Pro AI subscription, with unlimited local tokens.

$2,499 Mac Studio starting price (up to ~$22K configured)
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#on-device#infrastructure#consumer-ai

October 2025 1

Apple
Products & Apps

M5 chip

Apple announces M5 chip with double the AI performance

Apple unveiled the M5 chip, claiming roughly double the AI performance of the previous generation for Apple Silicon. For local-model enthusiasts on the show, it means more on-device headroom for running and fine-tuning models on Macs.

Apple Newsroom ↗
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#infrastructure#on-device

September 2025 1

Apple
New ModelsOpen weights

FastVLM-7B

Apple's FastVLM-7B lands with a speed-first vision encoder, 85x faster TTFT

Apple released FastVLM-7B, a vision-language model built around a speed-first vision encoder that delivers up to 85x faster time-to-first-token than peer VLMs. Quantized variants (7B-int4, 1.5B-int8) on Hugging Face make it practical for on-device and real-time vision use, anchoring the show's fast-VLM discussion.

X ↗HF ↗HF (1.5B int8) ↗
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#vision#on-device#open-source