Amazon has Apple's brand new Mac mini for up to $149 off this weekend, with deals focused on the M6 Mac mini this time around. You'll also find $200 off the M5 Max Mac Studio below.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

One of the best deals is on the M5 Max Mac Studio with 36GB RAM and a 512GB SSD, on sale for $2,299.00, down from $2,499.00. Regarding the Mac mini, you can get the 16GB RAM/256GB SSD Mac mini for $779.99 ($119 off), and the 16GB RAM/512GB SSD model for $949.99 ($149 off).





If you're on the hunt for more discounts, be sure to visit our Apple Deals roundup where we recap the best Apple-related bargains of the past week.

---

This article, "Amazon Discounts New Mac Mini by Up to $149, Mac Studio by $200" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Another new and exciting version of our still-new package myman reached CRAN this morning, and has been built for r2u and on r-universe. The matching Python package has also been updated. The package offers twenty one hundred eighty four “My man …” posts by Kevin Kruse made on bsky during the summer of 2026. Each wave picked at one particular public persona. This package wrapse these up in the style of packages like fortunes or gaussfacts.

This release regroups two new waves of posts mocking, respectively, Peter Thiel and Michael Tracy, and make a small update to continuous integration. The short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.12.0 (2026-10-18)

• New waves eleven (100 posts) and twelve (100 posts) made last week; total is now 2184 posts

• Small update to continuous integration

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is available at the repository or the package page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

Apple likely plans to release MacBook Pro models with OLED displays, 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac models with M6 chips, and/or an iPad mini 8 with an OLED display on Friday, November 6, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.


The devices are expected to be announced on Tuesday, October 27 or Wednesday, October 28.

If this timeframe proves to be accurate, then Apple will be releasing new products for the next four Fridays, with the other dates already announced.

• Friday, October 23: iPhone Duo


• Friday, October 30: HomePod mini 2


• Friday, November 6: MacBook Pro models with OLED displays, 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac models with M6 chips, and/or an iPad mini 8


• Friday, November 13: HomeView and Apple TV 4K (4th generation)

This article, "Apple Expected to Release New Products on Next Four Fridays" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple on Friday published an EU energy label for the iPhone Duo that reveals the device has a total battery capacity of 4,883 mAh.


The document appears to confirm a previous leak that showed the iPhone Duo has 2,962 mAh and 1,921 mAh battery cells totaling 4,883 mAh. iPhone Duo is an eSIM-only device, so this battery capacity figure should apply worldwide, as there is no version of the device with a physical SIM card tray that would have a slightly smaller battery.

For comparison, iFixit found the eSIM-only iPhone 18 Pro has a 4,288 mAh battery capacity, and the eSIM-only iPhone 18 Pro Max has a 5,567 mAh battery.
This article, "Apple Reveals iPhone Duo's Battery Capacity" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple plans to release a higher-end version of its new HomeView smart home hub with a larger 9-inch screen that can swivel a full 360 degrees on a robotic arm, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. He expects the device to launch in 2027 or 2028.

Gurman floated the names HomeView Max, HomeView Ultra, or HomeView 360 for the device, but these are just speculative names for now. The current tabletop version of the HomeView has a fixed 7-inch screen.
This article, "Apple Planning 'HomeView Max' With 9-Inch, 360-Degree Screen" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Despite knowing that the iPhone Duo would face "severe supply constraints" due to manufacturing challenges, Apple chose to begin iPhone Duo pre-orders on Friday instead of waiting until it had more inventory ready, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. In his Power On newsletter today, he called this decision a "major mistake."


"Let me cut to the chase: Apple made a major mistake here," he said. "The company knew there would be severe supply constraints but went ahead with the launch anyway, apparently prioritizing a desire to get the device on the market early in its fiscal first quarter over satisfying demand. That will disappoint many of the early adopters most eager to buy it."

Apple originally planned to launch the iPhone Duo in the U.S. and China only before expanding the device to other countries later, according to Gurman, but the company ultimately decided to start pre-orders in more than 70 countries simultaneously.

Less than 30 minutes after pre-orders began, Apple's estimated shipping dates for the iPhone Duo slipped to around January 25 in most countries. Apple typically underpromises and overdelivers with its delivery dates, though, so hopefully some customers will end up having their shipping estimates bumped up at least slightly.
This article, "Mark Gurman: Apple Made 'Major Mistake' With iPhone Duo Pre-Orders" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

I have just released a new version of pcsc-lite 2.5.3.

pcsc-lite is a Free Software implementation of the PC/SC (also known as WinSCard) API for Unix systems. It provides an API for using smart cards and smart card readers.

Changes:

2.5.3: Ludovic Rousseau

18 October 2026

• pcscd.service: preserve card sessions across polkit restarts

• correctly decode all ATRs (fix the fix suggested by AI)

• Fix authorization for uid > 65536

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Anton Batishchev has announced the release of CobaltX 0.3, an updated build of the project's gaming-focused Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, with KDE Plasma 6, the Linux Zen kernel and a pre-installed gaming stack: "What's new in 0.3 'Fullscreened'? X Mode — a full-screen, controller-first game launcher....

Yet another way of writing for loops:

    var_a2_4 = ...
    if (var_a2_4 < 0x78) {
        ...
        do {
            ...
            var_a2_4 += 1;
        } while (var_a2_4 < 0x78);
    }

This extra if is merely there because the compiler wasn't able to prove that the variable didn't start below the bound, so it can't rewrite the while-do to a do-while without that extra check. So the rewrite still reads:

for (var_a2_4 = ...; var_a2_4 < 0x78; ++var_a2_4) {
    ...
}

possibly with the initializer skipped, if it comes from something complex earlier.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1370 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 49.4 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 735 times according to Google Scholar.

This versions updates to the 15.6.2 upstream Armadillo release made yesterday. It, along with 15.6.1 release we incorporated earlier, addresses only minor issues and should not present any user-facing changes. As usual, we did run full reverse-depdency checks against the over 1300 ackages, and did not find anything. As usual, we aim to accommodate the desired CRAN cadences for uploads and try not to exceed six in six months—so we did not ship 15.6.1-1 there. The package has also already been updated for Debian, built for r2u and r-universe, and will build shortly at CRAN for the different binary releases.

All changes since the last CRAN release follow.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.6.2-1 (2026-10-16)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.6.2 (Medium Roast Cortado)

  • Faster inplace addition of eye() expressions

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.6.1-1 [github-only] (2026-10-02)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.6.1 (Medium Roast Cortado)

  • Fix for failures in pinv() when using the (non-default) "std" method

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.