“The impressive performance and battery life gains of the new M1 MacBooks have created a historic discontinuity in the normally placid resale market,” reports ZDNet: Should you spend $800 for a one year old MacBook Air when for $200 more you could get a MacBook Air with several times the performance and 50 percent better battery life? That’s a question savvy…
Tag: M1
Kali Linux 2021.1 Released: Tweaked DEs and Terminals, New Tools, Silicon Macs
Slashdot reader Finuz writes: Offensive Security has released Kali Linux 2021.1, the latest version of its popular open source penetration testing platform. You can download it or upgrade to it. Kali NetHunter, the distro’s mobile pentesting platform, now has an upgraded BusyBox engine and tools updated to the latest version (or, in some cases, completely rewritten). There are two new Kali…
Apple M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear
Over the past week, some M1 Mac users have been reporting alarming SSD health readings, suggesting that these devices are writing extraordinary amounts of data to their drives. From a report: Across Twitter and the MacRumors forums, users are reporting that M1 Macs are experiencing extremely high drive writes over a short space of time. In what appear to be the…
Sophisticated New Malware Found on 30,000 Macs Stumps Security Pros
Long-time Slashdot reader b0s0z0ku quotes Ars Technica:
A previously undetected piece of malware found on almost 30,000 Macs worldwide is generating intrigue in security circles, which are still trying to understand precisely what it does and what purpose its self-destruct capability serves. Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should…
Image: Hubble takes portrait of nebula
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features an impressive portrait of M1-63, a beautifully captured example of a bipolar planetary nebula located in the constellation of Scutum (the Shield). Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-image-hubble-portrait-nebula.html…
Qualcomm To Acquire NUVIA: A CPU Magnitude Shift
Today, Qualcomm has announced they will be acquiring NUVIA for $1.4 billion — acquiring the start-up company consisting of industry veterans which originally were behind the creation of Apple’s high-performance CPU cores. AnandTech reports: NUVIA was originally founded in February 2019 and coming out of stealth-mode in November of that year. The start-up was founded by industry veterans Gerard Williams III,…
Rediscovering RISC-V: Apple M1 Sparks Renewed Interest in Non-x86 Architecture
“With the runaway success of the new ARM-based M1 Macs, non-x86 architectures are getting their closeup,” explains a new article at ZDNet. “RISC-V is getting the most attention from system designers looking to horn-in on Apple’s recipe for high performance. Here’s why…” RISC-V is, like x86 and ARM, an instruction set architecture (ISA). Unlike x86 and ARM, it is a free…
Firefox 84 Claims Speed Boost from Apple Silicon, Vows to End Flash Support
The Verge reports: Firefox’s latest update brings native support for Macs that run on Apple’s Arm-based silicon, Mozilla announced on Tuesday. Mozilla claims that native Apple silicon support brings significant performance improvements: the browser apparently launches 2.5 times faster and web apps are twice as responsive than they were on the previous version of Firefox, which wasn’t native to Apple’s chips……
Should Qualcomm Feel Threatened By Apple’s M1 Macs?
PCMag.com’s lead mobile analyst calls Qualcomm “a little too unbothered by Apple’s M1 Macs” Qualcomm executives brushed off a question about Apple’s new M1-based Macs during a question-and-answer session at the company’s Snapdragon Summit today, where Qualcomm announced a new flagship smartphone chipset but no upgrades to its year-old chips for PCs… In general, reviews of Qualcomm-powered laptops such as the…
AWS Engineer Puts Windows 10 on Arm on Apple Mac M1 — and It Thrashes Surface Pro X
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…