The Lab Report for January 23, 2026

In this week’s episode: A few quick Apple updates, AirTag is a great addition to your luggage, some headlines from the rumor mill (iPhone and MacBook Pro stuff), and I share my handy Apple Mail “Send From” Labs video. Plus, a Joshua Redman track to take you into the weekend.
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The M5 Pro and Max Are Going to Be Monsters for Local AI

Back in November, Apple quietly published a research article about the Neural Accelerators in the M5 chip. The numbers are wild.

The base M5 MacBook Pro already delivers up to 4x faster time-to-first-token compared to the M4 when running large language models through MLX. Image generation with FLUX is 3.8x faster. This is on the base chip with 24GB of unified memory.

Think about what happens when the M5 Pro and M5 Max show up with more memory bandwidth and more Neural Accelerators. And eventually the M5 Ultra in the Mac Studio.

Right now, people serious about running local AI often look at expensive PC builds with dedicated GPUs. The M5 generation might change that math entirely. A well-configured M5 Max MacBook Pro or Mac Studio could become the machine for people who want to run models locally, privately, on their own hardware.

Apple’s unified memory architecture was always a theoretical advantage for AI workloads. With the M5’s Neural Accelerators, that advantage is becoming very real. If you’re interested in local AI and you’re on an M3 or earlier, I’d wait for these announcements before buying anything.

File Renaming with Claude Cowork

Anthropic has recently released a Claude update that lets it do actual work for you in the background. In this example I have it take a folder full of scans and rename them with the internal date and document description based on Claude’s review of the file content.
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Three Weeks with Apple Wallet Car Key

Three weeks ago, Rivian started supporting Apple Wallet car keys. I set it up immediately. (I made a video on it in the MacSparky Labs)

Before this, unlocking my car required pulling out my phone and waiting for a Bluetooth connection. It worked, but it wasn’t great. Sometimes I’d be standing at the door like an idiot while my phone figured things out.

One out of fifteen times, it just didn’t work, and I had to pull out the credit-card style key from my wallet and tap it against the door.

The Wallet car key is different. I walk up, and when I’m about five feet away, the car unlocks. Every damn time. Three weeks in, it hasn’t failed once.

I still carry the credit card backup key in my wallet. Old habits. But if this streak continues for another few weeks, that backup is coming out. One less thing to carry.

I hope this goes wide. Every car manufacturer should be on board with this.

OmniOutliner 6 Is Here

I think I first bought OmniOutliner at version 2. I remember it came in shrink wrap at a computer store.

Regardless, I’ve been using the application for a long time. I’ve used it to outline countless contracts, depositions, trial examinations, MacSparky videos, books, and podcasts ever since. In my opinion, it is the best-in-class outliner for the Mac.

And now version 6 just dropped.

OmniOutliner 6 brings some welcome changes. The interface got a modernization pass, with Liquid Glass design elements that look great on current Apple hardware. There are also new Dynamic Themes that adjust automatically based on your system settings.

The big news for me is Omni Links. These let you create connections between documents and specific rows within outlines. If you’re the kind of person who builds complex, interconnected projects (and if you’re using OmniOutliner seriously, you probably are), this is going to matter.

The Omni Group also added support for querying Apple Intelligence through their Omni Automation system. I’m still exploring what this means in practice, but the ability to bring AI queries into your outlining workflow has potential.

For the first time, OmniOutliner is now truly universal across Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Vision Pro. Same features everywhere. That’s been a long time coming.

If you’ve been on the fence about OmniOutliner, or if you’ve let your outlining practice slip, version 6 is a good reason to take another look. The Omni Group continues to make serious software for people who want to think clearly and organize their ideas.

You can learn more at omnigroup.com/OmniOutliner.