For years, Apple and Meta treated each other less like partners than unavoidable adversaries. Apple’s 2021 privacy changes curtailed ad targeting and, by Meta’s estimate, threatened $10 billion in annual revenue; their leaders traded public barbs over privacy, innovation and control of the internet’s next platform.¹

That history made Thursday’s announcement striking: the companies said developers will be able to run Meta’s Muse Spark Open on Apple’s top-end Mac Studio desktops. The 816-billion-parameter, open-weight model is aimed at coding, video analysis and other agentic tasks, with users linking two to four machines to run it locally rather than in the cloud.¹

Meta cast the partnership as proof that its AI push is regaining momentum. Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the model “runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple.”Mark Zuckerberg (finkd)² Yann LeCun amplified Meta’s claim that Muse Spark Open is the “most capable US open-weight model to date,” built for coding and long-horizon agent work.Yann LeCun (ylecun)³

Apple’s case is equally strategic. Local operation promises tighter control over data and a high-profile demonstration of what its M5 Ultra hardware can do outside the data centres dominated by Nvidia. Apple says its MLX framework can split open-source models across machines, turning the Mac Studio into a workstation for developers who want powerful AI at their desks.¹

But the détente has a price tag. A Mac Studio configured with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory starts at $10,799, and Muse Spark Open may require several units. The deal therefore opens a new on-device AI option—but, for now, one aimed more at well-funded developers than ordinary Mac owners.¹