In a rare alignment, Apple and Meta said they will enable developers to run Meta’s new open‑weight Muse Spark Open model directly on Apple’s high‑end Mac Studio desktops. The 816‑billion‑parameter mixture‑of‑experts system can be split across two to four Macs and run locally, a shift that promises lower operating costs and tighter data control versus cloud inference.
The tie-up underscores how the AI race is redrawing lines in Silicon Valley after years of acrimony over privacy and platform control. Under new Apple CEO John Ternus, the company is emphasizing on‑device performance and published MLX documentation and benchmarks tuned for Apple silicon. The move bolsters Meta’s retooled AI strategy while pressuring OpenAI and Anthropic, and it highlights Apple’s ambitions in AI hardware as Nvidia continues to dominate data centers.
There are trade-offs. The required M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB of memory starts around $10,799, with higher‑RAM versions and multiple machines pushing costs further. Muse Spark Open carries a limited commercial license and isn’t as advanced as Meta’s latest proprietary Muse Wonder model, but Meta says it’s performant enough to attract developers to build and scale agentic workloads on Macs.
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