A18 MacBook rumors, more

Welcome to 9to5MacDaily for Thursday, February 26th, 2026. I'm your host, Chance Miller. We're sponsored this week by BenQ. Leading off today, according to a new filing with the European Union, Apple has acquired the assets of a company called Inverse.io and hired its founder, who is also the only employee. Apple informed the European Union last October that it would acquire certain assets and hire the sole equity holder and employee of Inverse.io, saying that the company develops open-source frameworks for photonics research, providing standardized simulation challenges, and a public leaderboard for benchmarking and comparing design results. The company's founder, Martin Schubert, worked as a research scientist at Meta before leaving to found Inverse.io and has spent more than a decade working on advanced display, chip, and optical technologies at Google and Micron. Inverse.io's GitHub page says that it aims to advanced AI-guided design focusing initially on optics, a space for critical components in AR, VR, data centers, autonomous vehicles, and beyond. The page also says that the company is developing an ecosystem accessible to everyone, from AI scientists to optimization researchers and optics designers. It lists multiple open-source projects, including standardized design challenges, optimization tools, and a public leaderboard. It's not immediately clear what Apple plans to do with these tools or how Schubert will be deployed internally. Photonics is the science of designing components that manipulate light and is obviously relevant to a wide range of products, including cameras, displays, sensors, and LiDAR scanners. It pretty easy to see how these tools from Inverse which seemingly use AI to simulate and optimize how light behaves in complex structures could help Apple across the board with iPhones iPads Apple Vision Pro and more Next up today, in a new SEC disclosure this month, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway revealed that it has once again trimmed its stake in Apple. The transactions were made in the final quarter of 2025, which also marked the end of Buffett's leadership at Berkshire. Berkshire sold 4% of its stake in Apple during Q4 2025. The company, however, is still Berkshire's largest holding, valued at around $62 billion. Berkshire began buying Apple stock in 2016, and at its peak, the firm owned over 915 million shares of the company. accounting for over 50% of its holdings and worth around $174 billion. Buffett has trimmed the firm's holdings multiple times over the last several years as part of a broader effort to stockpile cash. But the quarter also marked the end of Buffett's leadership at Berkshire. He announced his retirement last year, and as of January 1st, Greg Abel has assumed the role as Berkshire's CEO. When Buffett announced his plans to retire, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, quote, There's never been someone like Warren, and countless people, myself included, have been inspired by his wisdom. It's been one of the greatest privileges of my life to know him, and there's no question that Warren is leaving Berkshire in great hands with Greg, end quote. In an interview last year, Buffett joked that, quote, Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more money than I've ever made, end quote. We are sponsored this week by BenQ, the makers of Mac-ready monitors designed to look just like your Mac. BenQ Mac Colors technology makes the MA Series look identical to your Mac built display with the same vibrancy the same color accuracy and no fiddling required You also get USB 1 cable connectivity so your Mac charges and connects with a single cord, plus BenQ's DisplayPilot 2 software for quick control of brightness, volume, resolution. The stand is fully adjustable with height, swivel, tilt, and even a full 90-degree pivot, and the Nano Gloss panel delivers that premium glossy look that Mac users love. You can check out the full lineup, including the gorgeous MA27OUP, by hitting the link in the show notes. BenQ is also running a giveaway with no purchase necessary. You must be 18 or older and a resident of the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii, or Canada, excluding Quebec. Full details are in the show notes. My thanks to BenQ for sponsoring the show. Rounding out today, we've talked a lot about Apple's upcoming low-cost MacBook. and one of the biggest questions is what compromises Apple will make to bring the cost of the machine down. A new rumor posted on Weibo this week is based on code leak from an unreleased build of macOS Tahoe that allegedly reveals most of the limitations of this upcoming MacBook. The code leak suggests that the MacBook will not have a true tone display and it also won't have a P3 wide color gamut. As a reminder, True Tone is Apple's technology that adjusts the color temperature of a display depending on your environment. That display will also reportedly have a lower max brightness than the MacBook Air's 500-nit display. It will reportedly not support fast charging of any sort. It could use a MediaTek Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, the same chip used in the base iPad model, rather than Apple's newest N1 chip. It might not have a backlit keyboard a notable limitation considering Apple laptops have had backlit keyboards for so long at this point and it might not support the highest quality high wired headphones Storage options reportedly include 256GB and 512GB, so if you need 1TB or even higher, this machine won't be for you. There also might be a special 128GB tier reserved for education buyers. The SSD speeds will also be slower than what we can get from the MacBook Air or the MacBook Pro. And finally, the Weibo post indicates that it will have 8GB of RAM, but it's unclear if there will be upgrade options beyond that or not. So with those limitations in mind, combined with what we already know about the laptop, such as that it will use an iPhone chip in the A18 Pro rather than a dedicated M-Series Mac chip, and that the display will be 12.9 inches instead of 13 inches, the big remaining question is price. And as we talked about yesterday, the current expectation is a starting price between $699 and $749. For context, the MacBook Air currently starts at $999. Apple typically offers a $100 discount for students and educators. If Apple also exclusively offers a lower 128GB storage for education buyers, then perhaps the quote-unquote starting price for education buyers could be $200 less than the starting price for everyone else. Apple is expected to announce its new base model MacBook next week as part of a series of announcements culminating in a special experience for the press in New York City, Shanghai, and London on Wednesday. That wraps up another episode of 9to5Mac Daily. As always, you can find all of the latest Apple news on 9to5Mac.com. Follow along with me on threads at Chance H. Miller. And we'll be back tomorrow for a new episode of 9to5Mac Daily.