Acorn 8.6 Is Out, and Some Geeky Info on the New Brush Tool:

Acorn 8.6 is out!

The big new things are:

• A new brushing engine that has been rewritten using Metal shaders. It includes an option for “velocity thinning”, where the faster you draw your brush strokes, the thinner the lines.
• A new acorn shell tool that you can use to send JavaScript to Acorn, as well as start an MCP server. So if you’ve got a favorite LLM you like to use, you can now use it to drive Acorn. The JavaScript section of the release notes are a good read if you’re interested in that. In addition:
  • The JS API has also been updated with examples for most calls.
  • The shell tool has a -jsio argument which lets you do things like:
    echo "acorn.takeLayeredScreenshot();" | acorn -jsio
• Big ML models (used for Select Subject and Super Resolution Scaling) are now downloaded on demand. If AI isn’t your thing, they won’t take up any space on your Mac. If you do use those features, the models are downloaded once and cached, and future Acorn updates are faster because those models no longer ship with the app.

There’s more of course, including bug fixes and QOL things, which are covered in the release notes.

Source: News from Flying Meat

★ Memory and Storage Configurations and Pricing for the New Mac Minis (M6/M5 Pro) and Mac Studios (M5 Max/M5 Ultra):

Apple today announced an all new lineup of Mac Mini (M6 and M5 Pro) and Mac Studio (M5 Max and M5 Ultra) desktops. The Apple Newsroom announcements for Mac Mini and Mac Studio only note base model prices. Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into condensed tables, so you can see which storage and memory options are available for each chip, and how much they cost.

Notes

• Ethernet: Across all Mac Mini models, upgrading from 2.5 gigabit to 10 gigabit is $100. On Mac Studio, 10 gigabit is standard on all models.

• If you configure an M6 Mac Mini with 2 TB of storage, the SSD upgrade ($1,000) costs more than the entire base model computer ($900). So too with the 4 TB SSD upgrade for the M5 Pro Mini ($1,800 upgrade for a $1,700 computer).

• Both Mac Mini and Mac Studio are available in a wide array of cool color choices, including silver.

• It kind of stinks that there are no RAM options for the M5 Ultra Studio between the 96 GB base and the $4,000 256 GB upgrade. There “should be” a 128 GB tier, but if you squint you can see why they did it this way.

• The best currently-available-to-order Mac Studio (36/80 cores, 256 GB RAM, 16 TB SSD) costs $18,300. But if you’re OK with the base 30/64-core chip and just 8 TB storage, you can cut the price to a smooth $13,000.

• “Coming late October” = “Bend over”.

Source: Daring Fireball

Apple TV Adds ‘Classic’ Films:

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

Apple has again added a collection of classic movies to Apple TV that subscribers can now stream at no extra cost.

The films are located in a new “Great Movies Available Now on Apple TV ” carousel inside the Apple TV app. So far, free titles are showing up for subscribers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, with the exact selection differing by country. In the U.S., 19 movies are available.

I saw a bunch of these in theatres; there’s no way they can be classics, as Charlton’s headline claims.

…right?

Source: 512 Pixels