Apple

The Apple-OpenAI trade secrets lawsuit just flipped sides. In a federal court filing in San Jose this week, OpenAI alleged that an employee who quit for Apple first sent more than 100 files about an unreleased product to a personal account, then turned around and presented that product to senior Apple leadership. It is the most serious accusation yet in a legal fight that began when Apple said its own secrets were walking out the door in the opposite direction. ...

Meta’s new open-weight Muse Spark Open model — which Meta calls its most capable US open-weight model yet — was built to run locally on Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios via Apple’s MLX framework. Meta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang said the two companies have been collaborating for months. Full story in slides above — sources: The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, October 15-16, 2026.

Mark Zuckerberg and Apple just became collaborators. Let that sink in for a second. On Thursday, Oct. 15, Meta released Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter open-weight AI model, and announced that Apple had worked with it for months to make the model run locally on Mac Studio computers. It’s the first public technical partnership between the two companies in years, and it hands developers a way to run frontier-scale AI on hardware sitting on their desks instead of in someone else’s data center. ...

Apple is a $5 trillion company now. Not for a few minutes in the middle of a trading day, but at the closing bell. The iPhone maker’s shares hit a record on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026, and finished just far enough above the line to push its market capitalization to $5.005 trillion, according to Dow Jones Market Data. That makes Apple only the second company in history to close above $5 trillion, after Nvidia. Apple’s market value had crossed the threshold six times before during intraday trading, but it had never once closed there. Wednesday it squeaked past. ...

Apple has unveiled HomeView, a $299 smart home hub with a 7-inch display, a domed speaker base, and Siri AI — the new conversational assistant powered by Apple Intelligence. Pre-orders are open now, with shipments starting November 13, per Apple. Sources: TechRepublic, TechNewsWorld, MacRumors, Bharat Express.

OpenAI alleges in a new court filing that an employee who left the company for Apple sent more than 100 files about an unreleased product to a personal account — and later presented about the unreleased product to senior Apple leadership. The claim lands inside the trade-secrets lawsuit Apple filed against OpenAI in July, with a federal judge granting Apple early access to device evidence on Tuesday and both sides facing off in a hearing on Wednesday. Full story in slides above — Sources: Reuters, Bloomberg Law, AppleInsider, Economic Times. ...

TSMC is about to make it six. The world’s biggest maker of advanced AI chips is expected to post a sixth consecutive quarter of record profit when it reports third-quarter earnings this Thursday, October 15 — and analysts say the AI chip boom has made the outcome close to a formality. The numbers are already most of the way there. TSMC told investors on October 8 that Q3 revenue reached NT$1.494 trillion (about $46.7 billion), a 50% jump from a year earlier that beat analyst forecasts and even topped the upper end of the company’s own guidance. September alone pulled in NT$511.86 billion, up 54.6% year over year, while sales across the first nine months of 2026 hit NT$3.90 trillion, up 41.1%. ...

Apple will hold its “Welcome Home” product event on Tuesday, October 13 in New York, where it is expected to unveil its first smart home hub along with refreshed HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K models — all powered by Siri AI. Full story in slides above. Sources: MacRumors, Gadgets360, GadgetsNow, MacDailyNews — reporting on Apple’s October 8 announcement, October 10–11, 2026.

Apple is about to do the thing Steve Jobs said it would never do. On or around Tuesday, October 27, the company is expected to introduce its first-ever touchscreen Mac, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who reported the plans on October 8 citing people familiar with the matter. The timing makes this the second hardware push in a single month. Apple’s “Welcome Home” smart home event lands Tuesday, October 13. Two weeks later, Gurman says, the focus shifts back to computers with an online video presentation and an in-person component for the press. Apple declined to comment on the plans. ...

Apple finally put a date on its smart home plans. The company announced Thursday that it will hold a “Welcome Home” product launch on Tuesday, October 13, 2026. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, posted a 17-second teaser on X showing hands stitching the company’s retro rainbow logo into fabric before the tagline appears: “Welcome home. October 13.” Media invitations went out at the same time, pointing to an “Apple Experience” in Tribeca, New York, at 9:00 a.m. ET. ...

Seven companies now carry an economy-sized footprint. The Magnificent Seven (Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla) pushed past $25 trillion in combined market capitalization during Tuesday’s trading session, according to Barron’s, citing Dow Jones Market Data. That makes the group larger than the nominal GDP of every country in the world except the United States. It clears the European Union’s entire $21.2 trillion economy, too. Only the U.S., at roughly $30 trillion, stands above it. China sits at about $19.6 trillion, per the IMF’s World Economic Outlook figures cited by MarketWatch. ...

Apple will tighten macOS Full Disk Access, saying that as AI agents grow more capable and autonomous, “the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially.” The permission was designed for backup apps but can expose files, mail, messages, and browsing history — and in communication apps, the privacy of the people you talk to as well. Apple named no apps, set no date, and described only forward-looking controls requiring “very explicit user action.” Full story in slides above — sources: Apple Developer News (Oct 2, 2026) via PCMag, TechCrunch, Bloomberg/Business Standard, MacRumors, October 2-6, 2026. ...

Apple has had enough of apps asking for the keys to the entire Mac. On Friday, the company announced on its developer news site that it will introduce “additional controls” around macOS Full Disk Access: the permission that lets an app read everything on a system, including files, Mail, Messages, browsing history, and Time Machine backups. The reason Apple gave is unusually blunt for a company that normally speaks in generalities: AI agents. ...

A federal jury in San Diego ordered Apple to pay more than $5.7 billion to Taction Technology, finding the Taptic Engine in iPhones and Apple Watches infringed two haptics patents — one of the largest US intellectual-property verdicts on record. Apple disputes the findings and says it will appeal. Full story in slides above — Sources: CNBC, Reuters, MacRumors, TechRepublic, NotebookCheck, October 2026.

Apple plans to unveil its long-awaited smart home hub — code-named J490 and dubbed the HomePad — on October 13, alongside the first HomePod mini update since 2020 and the first new Apple TV since 2022, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. All three devices are built around Apple’s overhauled Siri AI. Sources: Bloomberg via Reuters, 9to5Mac, September 30, 2026.

Apple launched the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max on Sept. 18, 2026, starting at $1,199 and $1,299. Key upgrades: the first 2-nanometer A20 Pro chip, a 48MP camera with variable aperture, up to 45 hours of battery life on the Pro Max, and the first-ever 2TB iPhone storage option. Sources: The Mac Observer, MacRumors, Hypebeast, Digital Trends — September 2026.

A federal jury in San Diego ordered Apple to pay $5,721,961,750 to Taction Technology on Friday, ruling that the Taptic Engine in iPhones and Apple Watches infringes two of the small company’s haptic patents. Reuters describes it as the country’s largest such verdict to date. Seven jurors heard the case after a trial that opened September 14. They deliberated two days and returned the verdict Friday afternoon. The Apple $5.7 billion patent verdict lands as one of the biggest patent damage awards in American legal history, period. ...

Apple is breaking up with Qualcomm’s modem chips. It is not breaking up with Qualcomm. Qualcomm announced Thursday that the two companies renewed their global patent licensing agreement, with the new deal taking effect April 1, 2027. That’s the day after the current agreement, signed as part of the landmark 2019 settlement, expires. The announcement was almost comically short. One sentence to state the renewal. One quote to celebrate it. No details on how long the new deal runs or what Apple pays. ...