So Macs are going to be arm-based now. Seems like that would make it less popular for developers, but I don't know how big a market that is. For other people, there's better battery life and perhaps more cores at a given price point. I'm sure it's a good move for them supply-chain-wise.

They're going to blow Intel systems out of the water, performance-wise. iPad Pros with Apple's CPU are already much faster than laptops. And they look even better when you look at performance/watt.

It looks like Intel is starting to circle the drain. They keep having difficulties trying to shrink their fabs, and other chip foundries can now make smaller chips than Intel can. And AMD seems to have caught up to Intel, performance-wise. Never mind that mobile chips are now a much bigger market segment than the ones that Intel once controlled, and they repeatedly botched their attempts to enter that segment.

I believe AWS has already started to make ARM-based servers available. The time does seem pretty ripe for ARM-based laptops. AMD is making some really great x86 CPUs now. I have a Ryzen 3900X and the performance is amazing.

ARM is slowly moving toward first class citizenship in terms of Linux support. Once there's a really good ARM JVM you don't have to license from Oracle and ARM-based toolchains mature I think server development will move that way. The weakness has always been single thread performance and that doesn't usually matter as much on the server side.

So are the new ARM Macs going to have touchscreens or not? Because I love touchscreens in a laptop form factor. LOVE them. It is one of the three main reasons I am currently sticking with Windows laptops (the other two are the awful butterfly keyboard and gaming, which PS4 pro + GeForce now is making a less big deal). And the new Macs will support iPad apps natively which seem like they would want a touchscreen?

I can't tell you the number of times I have leaned over a student's shoulder during a lesson in math or CS and tried to touch their dang Mac's screen to click a link for them or whatever.

Sure seems like they should have them with iOS apps being supported. Really hard to imagine they wouldn't.

I switched my NVIDIA card for an AMD card in my desktop computer running Ubuntu. I think maybe that wasn't a great move, the NVIDIA drivers may be proprietary, but they also seem more stable. An update to a 5.7 Linux kernel took care of the worst of my problems though.

I have to work on my touchscreen issue again. When I purchased this HP All-in-one Windows machine it was touch screen and I got used to it very quickly. Then a while back it stopped working. Completely, as in it doesn't even show it was ever an option in the device manager. I worked on it hard months ago and got nowhere. I miss it. Oh well, summer project. It's out of warranty at this point but I may get frustrated enough to pay for support!

eta: I fixed it! I hadn't messed with it in months, but this time it actually works again. My screen is going to be filled with finger prints now. Whee!

OK, possibly a dumb question, but when I'm on Tumblr, I find a lot of the pictures get really narrow, to the point I can't see what they are. Not a big deal, but it's annoying.

Also - why is it that when I go on my office's database to export information, it defaults to PDF ... which for my purposes is useless. I always have to change the information - mailing lists of email addresses - to something usable in Excel. Again, not that big a deal, but it's annoying.

Does anyone know why yahoo won't open excel attachments anymore? Is NoScript acting like an overprotective parent again? (Not urgent, as I do have another mailbox, but it opened them before, and by "before", I mean last week, so that's kind of freaking me out, and I couldn't do a work assignment over it.

Sometimes I hate CSS