Apple has predictable habits for releasing new hardware, so it was a surprise when the tech giant revealed new Macs with updated, more powerful chips last week. The refreshed hardware arrived before Apple’s traditional iPhone event,

John Ternus steps into the CEO role at Apple with the stock near a record high, but the hardware event eight days away demands something far harder than a good quarter: a convincing answer to why the iPhone stays at the center of computing when AI agents start replacing the apps on it.

John Ternus takes with a balance sheet that looks nothing like Big Tech's, and that may turn out to be the whole point.

Apple WWDC This story is part of our complete Apple WWDC coverage Updated less than 50 minutes ago Apple is giving its Mac lineup a split personality: one chip built to make everyday computing and on-device AI faster,

AI infrastructure is expanding beyond the giant GPU clusters that have defined the boom. The next phase of artificial intelligence is increasingly about agents that can use computers, write and test code,

Apple's iOS 27 will be available for iPhone 11 and later, as well as iPhone SE (2nd generation and later). Also, Apple's upcoming iPhones, which are reportedly iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max, and the foldable iPhone Ultra, will almost certainly run iOS 27 out of the box.

"With these frameworks and new chips, developers can run and fine-tune large AI models locally on their Mac," Apple said.

The Mac mini and Mac Studio occupy two distinct points in Apple’s lineup of desktops, but lately, they’ve had something in common: They’re popular for local AI inference and software development thanks to the advantages of their unified memory architecture and the fast CPUs and GPUs on their systems-on-a-chip.

The AI model was developed specifically for the Chinese market in partnership with the Alibaba Group, a departure from the iPhone maker's strategy of relying on third-party models to power AI features ‌in the country.

Apple's returning to a familiar playbook in the AI age: leveraging a massive consumer reach to become Silicon Valley’s top rent collector.