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The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has unveiled a 1:1 scale visual replica of the famous Cray-1 supercomputer from 1976. Instead of sourcing expensive, cutting-edge tech to run the system, the creative team powered the project with 30 2012-era Mac Minis. Developed over 18 months, the project serves as a 50th-anniversary tribute to the Cray-1 and Apple's founding.
Mac Minis from over a decade ago might not seem like the obvious first choice for building a cluster supercomputer, but when networked together, the developers can orchestrate the 64 active processing cores into a combined 1.3 teraflops of performance in their most recent tests. The museum reportedly achieved 1.5 teraflops previously using all 70 available cores, prior to one node going offline. Benchmarks were obtained using a custom matrix-multiplication Python script. Five PCs are quad-core i7s, and the remaining 25 are dual-core i5 models. Except for two units from 2014, the rest of the array dates to 2012.
The replica is a valuable tool for museum-goers to understand the shifts in computer architecture since 1976. The original Cray-1 used vector processing, applying a single instruction to multiple data elements simultaneously, whereas the replica distributes work across independent processors in a parallel cluster. The peak theoretical performance of the original Cray-1 was approximately 160 megaflops. What was originally a purpose-built research machine has been re-created with consumer hardware that's vastly more capable than the machine that inspired it.
A new tool is allowing Mac users the ability again to easily turn off Apple Intelligence with one click and free up to 12GB of storage.
Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for running Apple Intelligence will take up space on your disk, even if you don’t use them or if you go through your settings to individually find and disable AI capabilities.
In response, a developer known as Om Lahore on GitHub last week created RemoveMacAI, a command-line tool that allows macOS 27 users to “turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27" in a way that is “fully reversible,” per the GitHub page. They said that Apple's Intelligence models take up "about 12GB," but the models can actually take up over 30GB, The Verge noted.
Apple Intelligence is back, baby! That's right: Two years after its initial launch, Apple is giving its generative AI features their first significant upgrade, along with a new version of Siri that the company has been strongly insinuating would be a part of each of the last two macOS releases, without ever actually announcing a release date.
Generative AI is unavoidable if you install macOS 27 Golden Gate. I'm being very literal: There used to be a toggle you could hit if you wanted to turn off Apple Intelligence and delete the gigabytes' worth of AI models it would download to your disk, and now there isn't. Apple Intelligence defines the Golden Gate release, in everything from its marketing to its features to the chips it runs on to the amount of space it takes on your disk. Ready or not, here it is.
But if you can manage to look past that fanfare somehow, the operating system underneath Apple Intelligence is getting the kind of update that macOS users usually proclaim to like. Golden Gate addresses the most irritating of macOS 26 Tahoe's design sins, adds a big pile of incremental improvements, and promises a bunch of under-the-hood fit-and-finish optimizations to make common tasks feel just a little faster and more reliable than before.
It wasn’t that long ago that ClickFix attacks were exotic. Now the technique has become mainstream as attackers reap its simplicity and effectiveness in infecting users of PCs and Macs alike. All that’s required is a compromised website—a painless enough task—a fake CAPTCHA overlay, and the inclusion of a single terminal command. So many visitors get suckered into pasting and running the command that just about every malware pusher has adopted the technique. Even Kremlin-backed hacking groups are joining in.
“Reddit is becoming post after post after post of people getting their computer infected via ClickFix,” independent researcher Kevin Beaumont observed Thursday. “Legit websites everywhere [are] getting hacked to serve the fake captcha prompts.”
More seasoned Internet users—a fair number who read this site—are quick to dismiss the attack. They typically blame the people who fall for the scams and marvel at their gullibility and lack of attention. The reality is that for more casual users, using computers and the Internet has become so difficult—think impossible-to-close interstitials, CAPTCHAs with an endless series of pictures to analyze, and constantly changing interfaces that bury the features they’re looking for—that they have grown desensitized to instructions that seem ridiculous and burdensome.
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.
Today, Apple announced new iterations of both desktops, along with two new chips: the M6, the first 2nm chip in Apple's M-series lineup for Macs, and the M5 Ultra, now the most powerful chip in the lineup for most things—especially AI workloads.
Dutch officials have warned that a high-severity macOS vulnerability that allows attackers to execute malicious code is under active exploitation.
“The NCSC has received a notification indicating that active abuse of this vulnerability has been observed on multiple systems on which port 5900 was accessible from the Internet,” the Netherlands National Cyber Security Centrum warned earlier this week. “In all these cases, root had been accessed on the affected system and a Monero crypto miner had been placed.”
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-65400, received a patch from Apple last week for macOS Tahoe, Sequoia, and Sonoma. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 7.1 out of 10, stems from a bug in the macOS screen sharing capability, which allows a remote party to view the screen and control the keyboard and mouse while a machine is turned on. A flaw in the “state management,” which keeps track of preceding events, user interactions, variables, and other system states, is the underlying cause.
Researchers have found a never-before-seen piece of macOS malware that combines a series of clever tradecraft to infect Macs with stealthy, custom-developed credential-stealing code.
The malware is delivered in two stages. The first is distributed in a disk image that masquerades as Maccy, a clipboard manager for Macs. It’s compiled as AppleScript that is notable for the way it delivers the second stage. The malware is named PamStealer because the Rust-written infostealer uses the Pluggable Authentication Modules interface built into macOS to validate the target’s login password before sending it to an attacker-controlled server.
The use of both disk image and AppleScript is common in malware for Macs. More unusual is the way PamStealer combines them to gain stealth. When the AppleScript is double-clicked, it’s opened in the macOS Script Editor, where the malicious functionality is buried deep within the file.
Apple Intelligence and Siri AI have sucked most of the oxygen out of the room at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this year—understandable, maybe, given that the AI-powered Siri delays are all anyone has wanted to ask any Apple executive about for the last two years.
But Apple Intelligence is just one of the three big focus areas Apple outlined during its keynote this week. The second is new parental controls—overdue, but promising-looking, as the parent of a 6-year-old with an iPad that I only begrudgingly connect to the Internet. And the third is "platform improvements," a catch-all for a wide range of fit-and-finish changes aimed at boosting responsiveness and addressing common user complaints.
I have the first beta of macOS 27 Golden Gate running on an M1 MacBook Air—the oldest, slowest hardware Apple supports now that Intel compatibility is out the window. With some help from Apple's densely packed wall-of-features slide, here are a few things from the "platform improvements" column I like the most, plus one item I'd still like to see.
As Apple announced last year, this year's macOS release will end support for Intel Macs. The macOS 27 Golden Gate release will require a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip inside, including the original M1 that launched in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini back in late 2020.
Intel Macs running macOS 26 Tahoe can expect security and Safari patches for about two more years after the release of macOS 27 Golden Gate. Macs running macOS 15 Sequoia will receive one more year of updates. Apple Silicon Macs will still be able to run Intel Mac apps via the Rosetta 2 compatibility layer in macOS 27, but future releases will begin to limit the technology (Apple has said it will mainly be used to support older games that still use Intel code).
This change has been a long time coming, and every new macOS release has left a longer and longer list of Intel Macs behind. But many Mac owners who purchased late-model Intel machines in 2019 and 2020 could still run the latest version of the operating system, and third-party utilities like the OpenCore Legacy Patcher helped more adventurous Mac owners use their unsupported hardware a bit longer.
Apple has taken the wraps off of its next-generation operating system updates at its Worldwide Developers Conference today, including iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 Golden Gate. And while the long-awaited Siri AI update is the headliner, Apple also emphasized its efforts to optimize its software, improving its performance and reliability.
For starters, the company is continuing to refine the Liquid Glass design language that it introduced last year. A slider in the Settings will allow users fine-grained control over the translucency of the Liquid Glass effect, ranging from maximally transparent and glassy to fully tinted. Last year's redesigned icons are also being re-redesigned with more glass layers, which Apple says will make them sharper and more distinctive.
On macOS, Apple has also changed the way app toolbars and sidebars work, making toolbars more distinct, making the contents of sidebars extend all the way to the edge of the window, and reintroducing color to sidebar icons. Mac windows are also getting a "tighter corner radius," to address complaints about the way window resizing works in macOS 26 Tahoe.
Despite all the graphics capabilities of modern Macs, being a Mac gamer is generally a thankless existence. Every once in a while, though, Mac gamers get a bone thrown to them that is substantial enough that they think, for a brief moment, everything might be OK. One such bone has been thrown to us today—Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition just came out on macOS.
The game is available on Steam (those who own the Windows version on Steam automatically get the Mac version) and is planned for a later Mac App Store release.
Apple has released version 26.5 of all of its operating systems today: iOS 26.5, iPadOS 26.5, macOS 26.5, watchOS 26.5, tvOS 26.5, visionOS 26.5, and version 26.5 of the HomePod software (whew).
None of these are particularly momentous updates, which is pretty normal this late in their lifecycle, but they add a small batch of new features alongside the pile of patches outlined on Apple’s security vulnerabilities page. This is Apple’s first release to support end-to-end encryption for the RCS messaging standard, for example, which, when enabled, can give green-bubble messages some of the same security and privacy advantages that iMessage users have long enjoyed.
Encrypted RCS messaging has a “beta” label in this release, and Apple says it’s limited to a subset of supported cellular carriers. Expanded support “will roll out over time.” Encrypted chats will show up with a padlock icon in the Messages app; if you don’t see a padlock, the message isn’t encrypted, even if you’re using RCS.
As its name implies, the venerable Notepad++ text editor began as a more capable version of the classic Windows Notepad, with features such as line numbering and syntax highlighting. It was created in 2003 by Don Ho, who continues to be its primary author and maintainer, and it has been a Windows-exclusive app throughout its existence (older Notepad++ versions support OSes as old as Windows 95; the current version officially supports everything going back to Windows 7).
I'm not a devoted user of the app, but I was aware of its history, which is why I was surprised to see news of a "Notepad++ for Mac" port making the rounds last week, as though it were a port of the original available from the Notepad++ website.
Apparently, this news surprised Ho as well, who claims that the Mac version and its author, Andrey Letov, are "using the Notepad++ trademark (the name) without permission."
Most people access Google's search and AI products through a browser, but you've got some new options today. Google has been testing a Windows search app for some months, and it's now officially available. Over on the Apple side of the fence, Google has focused its efforts on designing a native Gemini app. That one is also available widely today with the same features you get in the Gemini web interface.
The "Google app for desktop" first arrived on Windows in a beta form last September. It was pretty rough at first, and Google couldn't even update the app's early versions, forcing users to uninstall and reinstall new builds. That won't be a concern with the official release, which brings assorted search capabilities to your Windows PC.
The Google app can search the web or your PC.
Credit:
Google
You can open the Google app by pressing Alt + Space at any time. The compact search UI floats on top of whatever you're doing, allowing you to instantly search the web and (with authorization) your local files and apps. Web results look like what you'd get in a browser, right down to the inclusion of AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Apple has released the 26.4 updates to all of its major software platforms today, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS Tahoe, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, and the HomePod. The most important reason to install each update is the big pile of included security fixes—you can see the ones Apple is disclosing for iOS/iPadOS and macOS on its security website—but the updates also include a few significant new features, a change from the mostly quiet 26.3 release last month.
We covered many of the most notable features when the first versions of these updates were released through Apple's beta testing channels. Those include charging limits for MacBooks, for those who don't want to allow their batteries to charge to their full capacities; the return of the "compact" tab view for Safari running on macOS Tahoe and iPadOS 26; and enabled-by-default Stolen Device Protection.
Other features include the handful of new emoji from the Unicode 17.0 release (see Emojipedia for more); AI-generated Apple Music playlists; new Creator Studio features for the built-in Freeform app; and the ability for adults in a Family Sharing group to use different payment methods from one another when making purchases.
Apple announced today that it would be holding its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) from June 8 to 12 this year, giving both developers and the general public a first look at "incredible updates for Apple platforms, including AI advancements and exciting new software and developer tools." The conference will start with an in-person "special event" at the company's Apple Park headquarters that will also be streamed online via YouTube and Apple's Developer app, among other places.
Apple occasionally introduces new hardware at WWDC, but the presentation is usually dedicated mostly to the major software releases that Apple will test all summer and release alongside new iPhones and other products in the fall. We don't know much for sure about what's coming in the new releases, but we can probably expect iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and the other new updates to refine the Liquid Glass design language, introduce the promised "AI advancements," and end support for the last remaining Intel Macs.
Like the past few years, Apple will primarily host the developer-centric parts of the conference online. The keynote and the more technical Platforms State of the Union presentation will be live, in-person presentations on the 8th, and Apple says that day will also include opportunities to "meet with Apple engineers and designers, and connect with the worldwide developer community." In-person passes will be handed out via lottery to those who request them.
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