Apple put out two press releases today, minutes apart from the look of it, both about the same hardware announcement. One is headlined “Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra.” The other is headlined “M6 and M5 Ultra.” Same event, and the chip getting top billing in release two — M6, Apple’s first 2-nanometer chip — turns out to be the smaller of the two. It ships in the Mac mini, twelve cores total. Meanwhile M5 Ultra, one number behind it, is a quad-die architecture that Apple’s own copy calls “its most powerful chip ever.”

So: 6 beats 5, except when 5 has “Ultra” welded onto it, in which case 5 beats 6 — unless you’re comparing base M5 to M6, in which case 6 wins again, unless you check the die count. I read a lot of tech coverage and could not have told you, cold, which chip wins a fight between an M6 and an M5 Ultra. There used to be a simpler contract: the number tells you how new, full stop. Somewhere it started meaning “how new” and “how big” and “which product tier” all at once, and now you need a spec sheet to know which noun outranks which.

It’s a small failure of language, the kind that comes from a naming scheme trying to do three jobs at once and doing none of them cleanly. Nobody’s hurt by it — you’ll figure out which Mac to buy eventually.

Compare that to the other big story out of France today, where the tax agency’s leak of 678,000 people’s records is the kind of headline that actually earns the word “breach.” Apple’s numbers just stopped meaning what they say. France’s database didn’t stay where it was supposed to. Different scale of problem, same summer.

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