Claude Opus 5.5 can't generate an image or a video directly. It can write code that draws, animates and edits one, and this week people have been finding out how far that goes. A few that stood out to me, with credit to the people who made them:

When Microsoft announced the Copilot+ PC and related “AI PC” branding it was a “holy crap, circle the wagons!” moment in marketing. I led a cross-functional team and we came up with “Mac is the best AI PC” as a sub-campaign of “Mac does that.” It was good marketing work! We changed the tone of the conversation from “only intel and Qualcomm are shipping AI capable chips” to “Apple is a leader in AI silicon.” It really felt like Microsoft was leaning hard into on-device AI but in the end shipped really lame features like live captions and some image generation stuff. Apple did much the same with Apple Intelligence, only now shipping modest AI features for AI prompting just in time for those features to be obsolete in the agentic era. The saving grace for Apple is Unified Memory, which was made for saving resources on low-memory iPhones, and almost accidentally came to Mac. Although Apple’s first party AI software isn’t exciting, it turned out to be the perfect architecture for AI developers and AI enthusiasts. I’m still surprised the 128GB M5 Max MacBook Pro doesn’t get as much love from Apple or the press. It’s an amazing machine for developers of all kinds AND can run all sorts of on-device AI AND it’s generally available. Even at the new price of $7,000+ it’s a bargain for what it delivers. Anyway, RIP Copilot+ PC.

As my old Apple sales VP, John Brandon, said when he retired "old rich white guys aren't the people to lead you into battle." Most Apple SVP's, VP's, and directors are rich and coasting. Most Apple managers have 1 or 2 or 3 reports and spend most of their days meeting with other managers of 1 or 2 or 3 people. And why change anything when the iPhone and Mac are doing well? (Cue the Blackberry-at-the-iPhone-unveiling scene, only it's Apple in Blackberry's place.) The hardware is AMAZING, some of that is that "winners keep winning" in a game where access to components and capital is key, and some of it is genuinely good engineering. But agree with you on software. Apple just shipped the two-year-old PRD for Siri and only Apple zealots would say it's amazing. It's a prompt-oriented-girl in an agentic world. Apple needs a NeXT-acquisition, burning-platform moment and a good 25% reduction and real re-org. I hope Ternus is the guy to do it.

As my old Apple sales VP, John Brandon, said when he retired "old rich white guys aren't the people to lead you into battle." Most Apple SVP's, VP's, and directors are rich and coasting. Most Apple managers have 1 or 2 or 3 reports and spend most of their days meeting with other managers of 1 or 2 or 3 people. And why change anything when the iPhone and Mac are doing well? (Cue the Blackberry-at-the-iPhone-unveiling scene, only it's Apple in Blackberry's place.) The hardware is AMAZING, some of that is that "winners keep winning" in a game where access to components and capital is key, and some of it is genuinely good engineering. But agree with you on software. Apple just shipped the two-year-old PRD for Siri and only Apple zealots would say it's amazing. It's a prompt-oriented-girl in an agentic world. Apple needs a NeXT-acquisition, burning-platform moment and a good 25% reduction and real re-org. I hope Ternus is the guy to do it.

True story, I was in this room as a seat filler for Woz, who never showed. My coworker @abraun and I were about 10 rows back in Town Hall. We started in row 3, and were right behind all of Apple leadership. It was awkward! Finally someone from PR told us to move back a few rows, which we were grateful for. It was common back then to have a supply of employees ready to fill all empty seats at events. We were told to applaud and be supportive. Also one guy internally had a huge file share of every event, ad, and wwdc session that could be found, I imagine this came from there.

This is big, in a post-truth world where audio, video and news can be faked, having an authoritative library of information is important. I was discussing with friends a while ago about how verified knowledge sets prior to 2021 will become an interesting source of truth. Anyway, cool idea, will try it out!

100 seconds TTFT with 256K cold cache will feel slooooooow to anyone used to OpenAI or Anthropic or Deepseek hosted speeds. That said, for personal AI your cache hit rate should be high. Is it worth $10,000+? Depends on your use case. You get privacy, security, offline access, and no guardrails. You also get a crazy fast personal desktop computer for AI development. How deep are your pockets? 💸💸💸

I'm happy to announce that I've joined Hugging Face. What started as a personal project back in February is now something I get to work on full time. Local AI has grown explosively this year. I've said this since the early oMLX releases: I want my friend who bought a MacBook yesterday to be able to run AI on it today. I believe MLX has that potential. Apple Silicon is the easiest entry point for a regular person to get started with AI, with no complicated hardware to assemble. And the open source community, including Hugging Face, has been growing that potential. That support has already made a huge difference. Hugging Face is the best place for me to support oMLX and the MLX community with everything I have. For anyone getting into local AI, the first step usually starts at Hugging Face. Mine did too. I'm proud that I get to work at that entry point, where new ideas can be tried out. oMLX stays exactly where it is, under the same Apache 2.0 license in the same repository, and I'll keep leading the project, same as before. What changes is that I can now spend far more time on it, move faster, and build something sustainable for the long term together with all the contributors who have put so much into it. I also want to do more for MLX as a whole. oMLX is built on top of transformers, mlx-lm, mlx-vlm and the rest of the ecosystem, and I'm grateful to the people behind them. Rather than keeping everything inside oMLX, over time I want to push work upstream where it makes sense. And where the community needs something that doesn't exist yet, oMLX is a good place to try it first. Thank you to the 264 contributors who have built oMLX with me, and to everyone who filed issues with detailed logs and reproductions so we could fix things. oMLX would not be what it is without you. oMLX continues in the same place, in the same way. Just much faster. HF's announcement:

Next on Hack The Minds is @annespalter. Anne Spalter has spent decades at the intersection of art, mathematics, technology, and education. From early computer art to generative systems and AI, she has watched the tools change completely while many of the questions remain the same. What makes something art? Where does the artist end and the machine begin? And what happens when everyone can create? This Wednesday the 16th at 5pm CET / 11am EST