Reuters:
Senior Trump officials say SMIC has been sending chipmaking tools to Iran for about a year; the US has sanctioned the company over alleged Chinese military ties  —  SMIC, China's largest chipmaker, has sent chipmaking tools to Iran's military, two senior Trump administration officials said on Thursday …

Lily Mae Lazarus / Fortune:
NY-based Blossom Health, which makes an “AI copilot” to augment psychiatrists' clinical decisions and automate office tasks, raised $20M in seed and Series A  —  Blossom Health has raised $20 million in seed and Series A funding to bring an AI “copilot” for psychiatry to patients nationwide, Fortune has exclusively learned.

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: SpaceX's IPO plans include investor visits to its sites, unusual lockup periods, and preferential treatment for investors in Musk's other companies  —  From the investor meetings to how shares are doled out, the billionaire is navigating his own path

Reuters:
Source: Elon Musk is discussing allocating as much as 30% of SpaceX's IPO to individual investors, at least three times the usual retail slice  —  Elon Musk is discussing allocating as much as 30% of SpaceX's initial public offering to individual investors — at least three times the usual retail slice …

Chance Miller with a big scoop at 9to5Mac:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac Studio last year.

In the PowerPC era, the high-end Mac desktops were called Power Macs and the pro laptops were PowerBooks. With the transition to Intel CPUs in 2006, Apple changed the names to Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. But unlike the MacBook Pro — which has seen major revisions every few years and satisfying speed bumps on a regular basis, and which has thrived in the Apple Silicon era — the Mac Pro petered out after a few years.

After its 2006 introduction, there were speed bumps in 2008, 2009, 2010, and lastly — sort of — in 2012. So far so good. (The “sort of” two sentences back refers to the fact that the 2012 “update” was very minor, arguably closer to a price cut than a speed bump.) But then came the cylindrical “trash can” Mac Pro in 2013. Perhaps the fact that Apple pre-announced it at WWDC in June before releasing it in October put a curse on the name. The cylindrical Mac Pro was never updated, and Apple being Apple, where the price is part of the product’s brand, they never dropped the price either. This culminated in a small “roundtable” discussion I was invited to in 2017, where Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi laid out Apple’s plans for the future of pro Mac desktops. Step one was the iMac Pro, a remarkable machine but a one-off, that arrived in December 2017. Then came the rejuvenated Mac Pro in 2019, the last Intel-based model and the first with the fancy drilled-hole aluminum tower enclosure. After that, there was only one revision: the M2 Ultra model in June 2023.

So after 2012 — and arguably after 2010 — there was one trash can Mac Pro in 2013, one Intel “new tower” Mac Pro in 2019, and one Apple Silicon Mac Pro in 2023. No speed bumps in between any of them. Three revisions in the last 14 years. So, yeah, not a big shock that they’re just pulling the plug officially.