Apple is planning a “week of announcements” starting next Monday, October 28, which is almost certain to include the reveal of new Macs. Greg Joswiak, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, told “Mac up your calendars!” in a post on X that revealed the secret.
“We have an exciting week of announcements lined up, starting Monday morning,” Joswiak wrote.
It was widely expected that Apple would reveal desktop Macs and MacBooks running on the M4 chipset next week, a year after the company unveiled its first M3-powered laptop.
The M4 was introduced in the iPad Pro earlier this year, but Apple has yet to refresh its Macs with the chipset. It’s long been rumored that Apple will release M4-powered iMacs, 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, and a redesigned Mac mini by early 2025, and now it looks like it’s doing so ahead of the holiday shopping season.
Apple isn’t just introducing new hardware next week. On Monday, the company is scheduled to release iPhone, iPad, and Mac software updates that will give people their first taste of Apple intelligence features. Meanwhile, Apple recently released its latest iPad Mini.
While the use of generative AI in games seems almost inevitable, as the medium has always toyed with new ways to make enemies and NPCs smarter and more realistic, watching multiple NVIDIA ACE demos one after another literally made me sick to my stomach.
This wasn’t just slightly smarter enemy AI — ACE could create entire conversations out of thin air, simulate voices, and try to give NPCs a sense of personality. It’s also doing this locally on your PC, powered by NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs. But while all of this might sound great on paper, I hated nearly every second of watching the AI NPC in action.
TiGames’ ZooPunk is a great example of this: it relies on NVIDIA ACE to generate dialogue, a virtual voice, and lip syncing for an NPC named Buck. But as you can see in the video above, Buck sounds like a robot with a slightly rustic accent. If he’s supposed to have some kind of relationship with the main character, you can’t tell from his performance.
I think my deep dislike of NVIDIA’s ACE-powered AI comes down to this: there’s just nothing charming about it. No joy, no warmth, no humanity. Every ACE AI character sounds like a developer cutting corners in the worst way possible, as if you can see their contempt for the audience in the form of a boring NPC. As much as I would prefer to scroll through some on-screen text, at least I don’t have to interact with weird robot voices.