An Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtualization engineer has shown what Windows 10 on Arm could be like if Microsoft licensed its Arm-based OS to the public rather than just to Windows 10 manufacturers. From a report: With Apple's new M1 Arm-based system on chip, Mac users who need to use Windows 10 can't run Microsoft's Arm-based version of Windows using Apple's Bootcamp. The key obstacle is that Microsoft doesn't license Windows 10 on Arm to any entities other than its own Surface group and Windows 10 on Arm OEMs like HP, Asus and Lenovo. Technically, there's nothing stopping owners of the M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13-inch or Mac mini from running Windows 10 on Arm, as Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi recently pointed out. [...]

But Microsoft's reluctance to create a license for Windows 10 on Arm for end users hasn't stopped creative engineers from putting together a working example of what things could be like if it did. AWS principal engineer Alexander Graf did just that, using the open-source QEMU virtualization software for Windows on Arm. QEMU emulates access to hardware such as the CPU and GPU. [...] "Who said Windows wouldn't run well on #AppleSilicon? It's pretty snappy here," Graf wrote in a tweet. Graf previously worked on the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) for Linux distribution SUSE for over a decade. Now he's a KVM developer at AWS, which this week announced new Mac instances for AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) based on Nitro System, an AWS hypervisor for EC2 instances. [...] A developer using the handle @imbushuo on Twitter has posted Geekbench versions 4 and 5 scores that compare Windows 10 on Arm on an M1 computer with the Microsoft-made Surface Pro X. Windows on an M1 got a single-core score of 1,288 and multi-core score of 5,685 whereas the Surface Pro X's scores were roughly 800 and 3,000 in those respective benchmarks.

Developer Alexander Graf has successfully virtualized the Arm version of Windows on an M1 Mac, proving that the M1 chip is capable of running Microsoft's operating system. From a report: Currently, Macs with the M1 chip do not support Windows and there is no Boot Camp feature as there is on Intel Macs, but support for Windows is a feature that many users would like to see. Using the open-source QEMU virtualizer, Graf was able to virtualize the Arm version of Windows on Apple's M1 chip, with no emulation. Since the M1 chip is a custom Arm SoC, it is no longer possible to install the x86 version of Windows or x86 Windows apps using Boot Camp, as was the case with previous Intel-based Macs. However, he said in a Tweet that when virtualized on an M1 Mac, "Windows ARM64 can run x86 applications really well. It's not as fast as Rosetta 2, but close."

According to Chrome product manager Mark Chang, Google's version of Chrome that support ARM Macs is now available to download. The Verge reports: In theory, a native version of the notoriously resource-hungry browser might run more efficiently on Apple's Arm-based computers. In our reviews of the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini equipped with the new M1 chip, though, we found that the version of Chrome built for Intel chips already runs well on Apple's new Macs, so hopefully this native version runs even better. You'll be able to pick which version of Chrome to download from the browser's website.

Google began rolling out a new version of Chrome on Tuesday, touting the "the largest gain in Chrome performance in years" thanks to some under-the-hood changes. The company's blog about the new release didn't mention anything about a version optimized for Apple's Arm-based Macs.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Marissa Mayer shoves her iPhone toward her MacBook's webcam until it overwhelms the screen on the Google Meet video call we are sharing. "I admire Apple," she declares. "They are the best at what they do. But the fact that the biggest and most successful company on Earth by some measures -- and certainly the best at design, bar none -- thinks that when you meet someone new, that this is an ideal interface is mind-blowing. It's like bad nerd humor." What Mayer is critiquing is the New Contact feature in iOS's Contacts app -- an exceedingly generic screen with fields for you to type first and last names, phone numbers, and other information. It's not uniquely uninspired. Actually, it's comparable to Google's equivalent on an Android phone -- and reminiscent of nearly every other piece of software for managing contacts we've seen throughout the history of smartphones and PCs.

[...] Now Mayer is back in the product business -- and as you may have already guessed, she thinks she has a better way to wrangle contacts. That would be Sunshine Contacts, the new iPhone app (Android is in the works) from her latest company, Sunshine. If you've previously heard of the largely stealthy startup, it was under the name Lumi Labs, which Mayer, its CEO, says was a placeholder all along. The app is launching as an invite-only closed beta; you can download it from the App Store and sign up for an alert when it's ready to let you in. Joining Mayer as cofounder and president is Enrique Munoz Torres, whose entire career has been intertwined with hers. An MIT senior when Mayer hired him as a Google associate product manager in 2004, he left that company in 2013 to join her at Yahoo, where he eventually led the advertising and search businesses. Though both Mayer and Munoz Torres have copious experience creating and ramping up successful products, they are first-time founders. Their company currently has about 20 employees, making it the same size as Google was when Mayer joined it.

Reviews are starting to pour in of Apple's MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini featuring the new M1 ARM-based processor -- and they're overwhelmingly positive. "As with the Air, the Pro's performance exceeds expectations," writes Nilay Patel via The Verge.

"Apple's next chapter offers strong performance gains, great battery and starts at $999," says Brian Heater via TechCrunch.

"When Apple said it would start producing Macs with its own system-on-chip processors, custom CPU and GPU silicon (and a bunch of other stuff) to replace parts from Intel and AMD, we figured it would be good. I never expected it would be this good," says Jason Cross in his review of the MacBook Air M1.

"The M1 is a serious, serious contender for one of the all-time most efficient and highest-performing architectures we've ever seen deploy," says ExtremeTech's Joel Hruska.

"Spending a few days with the 2020 Mac mini has shown me that it's a barnburner of a miniature desktop PC," writes Chris Welch via The Verge. "It outperforms most Intel Macs in several benchmarks, runs apps reliably, and offers a fantastic day-to-day experience whether you're using it for web browsing and email or for creative editing and professional work. That potential will only grow when Apple inevitably raises the RAM ceiling and (hopefully) brings back those missing USB ports..."

"Quibbling about massively parallel workloads -- which the M1 wasn't designed for -- aside, Apple has clearly broken the ice on high-performance ARM desktop and laptop designs," writes Jim Salter via Ars Technica. "Yes, you can build an ARM system that competes strongly with x86, even at very high performance levels."

"The M1-equipped MacBook Air now packs far better performance than its predecessors, rivaling at times the M1-based MacBook Pro. At $999, it's the best value among macOS laptops," concludes PCMag.

"For developers, the Apple Silicon Macs also represent the very first full-fledged Arm machines on the market that have few-to-no compromises. This is a massive boost not just for Apple, but for the larger Arm ecosystem and the growing Arm cloud-computing business," writes Andrei Frumusanu via AnandTech. "Overall, Apple hit it out of the park with the M1."

Engadget writes: According to MacRumors, users on Apple's forums and Reddit are stuck with a black screen when trying to update their late 2013 or mid 2014 13-inch MacBook Pro models to Big Sur... An engineer investigating one customer's problems appeared to have resolved the issue after removing an IC chip for the HDMI port, but it's not certain that's the cause.
Citing user reports, MacRumors writes ominously that "Key reset combinations, including NVRAM, SMC, safe mode, and internet recovery, are all reportedly inaccessible after attempting to install the update, leaving no way to bypass the static black screen."

"Earlier this week Apple announced their new, ARM-based 'Apple Silicon' machines to the world in a slick marketing event that had many of us reaching for our credit cards," writes Mike Croucher, technical evangelist at The Numerical Algorithms Group.

"Simultaneously, The Numerical Algorithms Group announced that they had ported their Fortran Compiler to the new platform. At the time of writing this is the only Fortran compiler publicly available for Apple Silicon although that will likely change soon as open source Fortran compilers get updated."

An anonymous Slashdot reader offers this analysis: Apple Silicon currently has no open source Fortran compiler and Apple themselves are one of the few silicon manufacturers who don't have their own Fortran compiler. You could be forgiven for thinking that this doesn't matter to most users... if it wasn't for the fact that sizeable percentages of foundational data science platforms such as R and SciPy are written in Fortran.
Croucher argues that "More modern systems, such as R, make direct use of a lot of this code because it is highly performant and, perhaps more importantly, has been battle tested in production for decades. Numerical computing is hard (even when all of your instincts suggest otherwise) and when someone demonstrably does it right, it makes good sense to reuse rather than reinvent..."

"The community needs and will demand open source (or at least free) Fortran compilers if data scientists are ever going to realise the full potential of Apple's new hardware and I have no doubt that these are on the way. Other major silicon providers (e.g. Intel, AMD, NEC and NVIDIA/PGI) have their own Fortran compiler that co-exist with the open ones. Perhaps Apple should join the club..."

Yesterday, Apple released the latest version of macOS: macOS Big Sur (also known as macOS 11.0) and the rollout was anything but smooth. Many users have complained about Apple services such as iMessage, or even Apple Pay, not working for them. Personally, my 5K iMac (2013), which isn't even compatible with Big Sur, ground to a halt yesterday, as I was unable to open up Google Chrome or any of my Adobe Creative Cloud apps. Even navigating my system preferences was painfully slow.

According to developer Jeff Johnson, the reason apps were failing to launch was because a process called "trustd" failed to attempt to connect to Apple's Online Certificate Status Protocol website (oscp.apple.com). "[D]enying the connection between "trustd" and oscp.apple.com fixes the issue, as does disabling a Mac's connection to the internet," notes Apple Insider. Slashdot reader shanen shares their experience: The story is about different problems, so I'll just start with my own anecdote. The 12GB download was amazingly slow. I'm being charitable and willing to attribute that to high demand. Eventually it did finish. The installation process didn't seem to be too bad. Then I did something with the Mac and it immediately wanted another upgrade. Turned out to be a double upgrade of two slightly different versions of some tools, but another (slow) GB bites the dust. Meanwhile, it decided to do that double-upgrade again? One of those two must have succeeded, because the third attempt failed with the appropriate notice that it had succeeded.

Bottom line? Not reassuring, but it seems to be okay now. I should have made a note about what triggered the extra GB, but I don't think I did anything unusual that should have required an OS-level extension of the system. Ergo, whatever was going on, I think it belonged in the original 12 GB download... Disclaimer needed: I just had an extremely negative interaction with Apple about the battery swelling problem in the course of attempting to consider whether or not I should upgrade my old MacBook Pro. It started on the Apple website, which was amazingly unhelpful even after it dangled a trade-in offer of some kind. Then it continued with a long phone call to a very kind and friendly person who seemed to know not so much, though he eventually led me to the search that revealed "Optimized Battery Charging" as an option that my old Mac cannot use. By the way, new iPhones apparently have it, too. So right now I think Apple finally figured out how to stop the battery swelling, but I am still screwed. I regard the Mac as a sunk cost, and the second rule of sunk cost is to NOT throw good money after bad. The first rule is that no one wants to talk about their mistakes, eh?

So did your upgrade to Big Sur go better than mine? I really hope so. Why share the misery? We have plenty of that with "He whose name need not be mentioned" anymore.

The first benchmark of Apple's M1 chip shows that the multi-core performance of the new MacBook Air with 8GB RAM beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model. "That high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1096 and a multi-core score of 6870," reports MacRumors. The MacBook Air with M1 chip and 8GB RAM features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. From the report: Though the M1 chip is outperforming the 16-inch MacBook Pro models when it comes to raw CPU benchmarks, the 16-inch MacBook Pro likely offers better performance in other areas such as the GPU as those models have high-power discrete GPUs. It's worth noting that there are likely to be some performance differences between the MacBook Pro and the "MacBook Air" even though they're using the same M1 chip because the "MacBook Air" has a fanless design and the MacBook Pro has an new Apple-designed cooling system. There's also a benchmark for the Mac mini, though, and it has about the same scores. The "Mac mini" with M1 chip that was benchmarked earned a single-core score of 1682 and a multi-core score of 7067.

There's also a benchmark for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip and 16GB RAM that has a single-core score of 1714 and a multi-core score of 6802. Like the "MacBook Air," it has a 3.2GHz base frequency. A few other "MacBook Air" benchmarks have surfaced too with similar scores, and the full list is available on Geekbench. [...] When compared to existing devices, the M1 chip in the "MacBook Air" outperforms all iOS devices. For comparison's sake, the iPhone 12 Pro earned a single-core score of 1584 and a multi-core score of 3898, while the highest ranked iOS device on Geekbench's charts, the A14 iPad Air, earned a single-core score of 1585 and a multi-core score of 4647.

Gordon Mah Ung, writing at PC World: Let me just say it outloud, OK? Apple is full of it. I'm referring to Apple's claim that its fanless, Arm-based MacBook Air is "faster than 98 percent of PC laptops." Yes, you read that correctly: Apple officials literally claimed that the new MacBook Air using Apple's custom M1 chip is faster than 98 percent of all PC laptops sold this year. Typically, when a company makes such a claim, it publishes a benchmark, a performance test or actual details on what it's basing that marketing claim on. This to prevent lawyers from launching out of missile silos across the world. Apple's website restates the claim by stating: "M1 is faster than the chips in 98 percent of PC laptops sold in the past year." The site also includes a detail note that states: "Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip and 16GB of RAM. Performance measured using select industry-standard benchmarks. PC configurations from publicly available sales data over the last 12 months. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect approximate performance of MacBook Pro."

So, not only does Apple not say what tests it's basing its claims on, it doesn't even say where it sources the comparable laptops. Does that mean the new fanless MacBook Air is faster than, say, Asus' stupidly fast Ryzen 4000 based, GeForce RTX 2060-based Zephyrus G14? Does it mean the MacBook Air is faster than Alienware's updated Area 51M? The answer, I'm going to guess is "no." Not at all. Is it faster than the miniLED-based MSI Creator 17? Probably not, either. And what is that "performance" claim hinged on? CPU performance? GPU performance? Performance running Windows? Is it using the same application running on both platforms? Is it experiential? Is this running Red Dead Redemption II or Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War? Is it running CyberLink's PowerDirector? Is it running Fortnite? While I have absolutely no idea what Apple is basing its claims on, I can tell you that I am 98 percent sure that any of the above laptops listed will wreck the MacBook Air doing any of the tasks I just named.

When Apple makes its claims, my guess is they are comparing the new M1 to Intel-based processors ranging from Atom to Celeron N to Core i3 and up, all with integrated graphics. But by not defining the word "performance," all this becomes just pure marketing spin. And is it really fair to compare a $999 MacBook to one that costs $150? Because $150 PCs are included in the 98 percent of laptops sold. Maybe Apple should compare its own $150 MacBook Air against a $150 Chromebook or Windows-based laptop. Of course, that would mean Apple would have to sell a product that most people can afford. I have no doubt the M1 will be impressive, but do I think it's going to compare to 8-cores of Ryzen 4000 performance or a GeForce RTX 2060? No.

Today, Apple showed off the first Macs powered by its new M1 CPU, delivering impressive performance and excellent battery life, however they won't come without any compromises. According to Engadget, citing Paul Gerhardt's tweet, "tech spec pages for the new machines reveal that none of them are compatible with external GPUs that connect via Thunderbolt." From the report: Only some people would require add-on oomph in any case, but Apple's support for external graphics cards gave it some extra gaming cachet and informed creative professionals their needs would continue to be met. Now, they'll have to wait and see if things change for higher-end models as Apple Silicon spreads throughout the company's PC lineup.

There's also been some focus on the fact that the 13-inch MacBook Pro M1 models only include two USB-C ports onboard instead of four, but whether or not you think that's enough ports, it's consistent with the cheaper Intel models it replaces. A more striking limitation is the one we've already noted, that the MBP is limited to 16GB of RAM -- if you think you'll need 32GB then you'll have to opt for an Intel-powered model.

At the end of Apple's big event today, where it launched three new Macs powered by the company's new M1 chip, the company had a surprise guest star: actor John Hodgman reprising his role as the PC guy from Apple's "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" commercials that ran in the mid-2000s. The Verge reports: In the short video, Hodgman's put-upon PC reacts to the announcement of Apple's new M1-powered Macs, complaining about the improved performance and battery life that the new chip purportedly offers on the updated Macs, compared to what PCs can do. (Absent is Justin Long's Mac character, who made up the other half of the ad spots.)

The original ads -- launched in 2006, just after Apple began its last major architecture transition to Intel chips -- echoed a similar style, with Long's character extolling the virtues of the Mac while the hapless PC character would argue that the Windows side of things was just as good. It's not clear whether Apple will be resurrecting the ad campaign for the new line of M1 Macs, but it was a cute way to end the announcement as the company sets off on its next era of laptops and desktops. You can watch the clip featuring PC guy here.

Apple announced three Macs today that are powered by the company's new M1 chip. They are: MacBook Air: The first Mac that will be powered by the M1 chip is the MacBook Air. According to Apple, the new Air is 3.5x faster with up to 5x graphics performance than the previous generation thanks to the M1 processor. The new MacBook Air doesn't have a fan, so it'll be completely quiet at all times. It has up to 18 hours of total battery life when watching videos or 15 hours when browsing the web. You can get it with up to 2TB of storage and 16GB of memory, with the price still starting at $999.

Mac Mini: Additionally, Apple will release an Apple Silicon-powered Mac Mini. It's the same design Apple used for the DTK, but with the M1 processor. The new Mac Mini starts at $699, a drop in the price of $100, and supports up to a 6K display via USB-C Thunderbolt ports with USB-4 support.

MacBook Pro: Lastly, Apple is updating the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. Again, Apple touted performance gains in the MacBook Pro with 2.8x CPU gains and 5x GPU gains thanks to the M1 in the MacBook Pro. It keeps its cooling system but now gets 17 hours of battery life when browsing the web, or 20 hours when watching video. Apple kept the price of the MacBook Pro at $1,299 starting price.

The chip expected to be at the core of the first Apple Silicon Mac -- the "A14X" -- may have been benchmarked just days before the next Apple event. From a report: The alleged CPU benchmarks for the "A14X" show a 1.80GHz processor capable of turbo-boosting to 3.10GHz marking this the first custom Apple Silicon to ever clock above 3GHz. It is an 8-core processor with big-little arrangement. The GPU results show 8GB of RAM will be included with the processor. The single-core benchmark for the "A14X" scored 1634 vs the A12Z at 1118. The A14 scored 1,583 points for single-core tests, which is expected as single-core results shouldn't change much between the regular and "X" models. The multi-core benchmark for the "A14X" scored 7220 vs the A12Z at 4657. The A14 scored 4198 for multi-core, which means the "A14X" delivers a marked increase in performance in the sorts of environments that the GeekBench test suite focuses on. The additional RAM and graphics capabilities boost this result much higher than the standard iPhone processor. For comparison, a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the Intel Core-i9 processor scores 1096 for single and 6869 for multi-core tests. This means the alleged "A14X" outperforms the existing MacBook Pro lineup by a notable margin.

A recently released tool is letting anyone exploit an unusual Mac vulnerability to bypass Apple's trusted T2 security chip and gain deep system access. The flaw is one researchers have also been using for more than a year to jailbreak older models of iPhones. But the fact that the T2 chip is vulnerable in the same way creates a new host of potential threats. Worst of all, while Apple may be able to slow down potential hackers, the flaw is ultimately unfixable in every Mac that has a T2 inside. From a report: In general, the jailbreak community haven't paid as much attention to macOS and OS X as it has iOS, because they don't have the same restrictions and walled gardens that are built into Apple's mobile ecosystem. But the T2 chip, launched in 2017, created some limitations and mysteries. Apple added the chip as a trusted mechanism for securing high-value features like encrypted data storage, Touch ID, and Activation Lock, which works with Apple's "Find My" services. But the T2 also contains a vulnerability, known as Checkm8, that jailbreakers have already been exploiting in Apple's A5 through A11 (2011 to 2017) mobile chipsets. Now Checkra1n, the same group that developed the tool for iOS, has released support for T2 bypass.

On Macs, the jailbreak allows researchers to probe the T2 chip and explore its security features. It can even be used to run Linux on the T2 or play Doom on a MacBook Pro's Touch Bar. The jailbreak could also be weaponized by malicious hackers, though, to disable macOS security features like System Integrity Protection and Secure Boot and install malware. Combined with another T2 vulnerability that was publicly disclosed in July by the Chinese security research and jailbreaking group Pangu Team, the jailbreak could also potentially be used to obtain FileVault encryption keys and to decrypt user data. The vulnerability is unpatchable, because the flaw is in low-level, unchangeable code for hardware. "The T2 is meant to be this little secure black box in Macs -- a computer inside your computer, handling things like Lost Mode enforcement, integrity checking, and other privileged duties," says Will Strafach, a longtime iOS researcher and creator of the Guardian Firewall app for iOS. "So the significance is that this chip was supposed to be harder to compromise -- but now it's been done."

According to a Netflix support document, an Apple T2 Security chip is required to stream Netflix in 4K HDR on a Mac. "What that hardware requirement means is that only recent Macs have the ability to play UHD content from Netflix," reports Engadget. From the report: Here's the full list of T2-equipped Macs: 2018 or later MacBook Pro, 2018 or later MacBook Air, 2018 Mac mini, 2019 Mac Pro, iMac Pro and 2020 iMac. If you're not sure whether your Mac has the necessary hardware, you can find out by following the steps Apple details on its website. The Verge suggests the requirement could have something to do with the T2 chip's ability to process HEVC encoded videos. On its webpage for the iMac, Apple says the coprocessor can transcode HEVC video up to twice as fast as its previous generation T1 chip. If Netflix is encoding streams using HEVC, that could explain the requirement. Whatever the case, we've reached out to both Apple and Netflix for more information, and we'll update this article when we hear back from them. There are some other requirements too. In addition to having a T2-equipped Mac, you'll need macOS Big Sur, a Premium Netflix subscription, and the Safari browser -- other browsers will limit you to 720p on a Mac.

USB-C is near-ubiquitous: Almost every modern laptop and smartphone has at least one USB-C port, with the exception of the iPhone, which still uses Apple's proprietary Lightning port. For all its improvements, USB-C has become a mess of tangled standards -- a nightmare for consumers to navigate despite the initial promise of simplicity. From a report: Anyone going all-in on USB-C will run into problems with an optional standard called Power Delivery. The standard allows devices to charge at a much higher wattage relative to older connectors, therefore allowing them to charge faster. But it requires the right combination of charger, cables, and device to actually achieve this. If you buy a USB-C charger that doesn't support Power Delivery and try to use it with a Microsoft Surface, for example, the laptop will complain that it's "not charging" despite receiving some power. Fixing this requires figuring out whether or not it's the cable or wall charger that doesn't support Power Delivery, and replacing it with something that does support it. There would be no way for a layperson to hold two USB-C chargers and know the difference between one that supports Power Delivery and one that doesn't.

Furthering the confusion, some devices actually can't be charged with chargers supporting Power Delivery, despite sporting a USB-C port -- because they weren't designed to negotiate the higher wattage being delivered by the Power Delivery standard. A pair of cheap Anker headphones I own, for example, refuse to charge when plugged into a MacBook charger. Other devices, like the Nintendo Switch, only partially support the standard, and some unsupported chargers have bricked devices, reportedly due to the Switch's maximum voltage being exceeded. Then there's DisplayPort and Thunderbolt, another set of standards supported by some USB-C devices. DisplayPort allows the use of an external display, such as a 4K monitor, but only supports one at a time at full resolution. Thunderbolt, yet another optional standard, is a much faster layer on top of USB-C that allows additional possibilities, like the use of multiple displays daisy-chained from a single port, or the use of an external graphics card. It uses the exact same connector, but can be identified with an additional "lightning" symbol when supported.

On Tuesday, Apple will hold its annual September event called "Time Flies." Unlike in previous years, the company is not expected to announce new iPhones as they have reportedly been delayed "a few weeks" due to the pandemic. Macworld reports on what we can expect to see announced instead: Apple's invitation was light on details, as always, but it's hard to look at its "Time Flies" tagline and think that this won't mean showing off new models of the Apple Watch. Presumably that means a Series 6, but rumors have also circulated around an additional lower cost model to replace the aging Series 3. [...] While the iPad Pro received a minor update this past spring, the midrange iPad Air has remained unchanged since March 2019. Eighteen months is about the refresh cycle for iPads these days, so a revamped Air seems like a pretty good bet for this week's event. [...] There also remains the question of the iPad mini, last updated at the same time as the Air. It could very well see a similar update to stay in step with the Air, but given that Apple has often let the smaller tablet lie unchanged for years at a time -- which it seems to do with many products with the "mini" moniker -- it's hardly a sure thing.

With new hardware naturally comes new software. The release of a new Apple Watch will certainly require watchOS 7, which in turn will need iOS 14. Likewise, new iPads are unlikely to ship without iPadOS 14. That gibes with a recent Bloomberg report that iOS 14 would be released in mid-September, following the usual schedule for Apple's mobile operating system updates. And given our brave new world where Apple events are not subject to the typical restrictions of time and scheduling, that might be all we have to look forward to this time around. That said, there are plenty of other things that Apple could talk about at this event, assuming they're ready to go -- everything from over-the-head AirPods to Apple silicon-powered Macs.

Apple has designed a 12-inch MacBook powered by Apple Silicon that weighs less than one kilogram (2.2 pounds) and the company intends to launch it by the end of the year, according to a new report. MacRumors: Apple's first ARM-based Mac will use an A14X processor, which is codenamed "Tonga" and manufactured by TSMC, and the MacBook will have a battery life of between 15 and 20 hours, according to the Chinese-language newspaper The China Times. The report adds: According to Apple's supply chain, Apple is expected to launch a Macbook with a 12-inch Retina Display at the end of this year, using its self-developed and designed A14X processor, with the development code of Tonga, supporting a USB Type-C interface and weighing less than 1 kilogram, because of the low-power advantage of the Arm-based processor. The Macbook battery lasts 15 to 20 hours. The A14X processor will also be used in the new generation iPad Pro tablet."

The Register reports that Toshiba has transferred its remaining shares of Dynabook to Sharp, thus ending the company's time as a PC vendor. From the report: [...] As the 2000s rolled along Toshiba devices became bland in comparison to the always-impressive ThinkPad and the MacBook Air, while Dell and HP also improved. Toshiba also never really tried to capture consumers' imaginations, which didn't help growth. As the PC market contracted and Lenovo, Dell and HP came to dominate PC sales in the 2010s, Toshiba just became a less likely brand to put on a laptop shopping list.

By 2018 the company saw the writing on the wall and sold its PC business unit to Sharp for a pittance -- just $36 million changed hands - but retained a 19.9 percent share of the company with an option in Sharp's favor to buy that stock. Sharp quickly renamed the business to "Dynabook," a product name Toshiba had used in Japan, and set about releasing new models and reviving the brand. Which brings us to June 30th, 2020, when Sharp exercised its option to acquire the 19.9 percent of Dynabook shares it did not already own. On Tuesday, Toshiba transferred those shares and announced the transaction on Thursday.