I don’t just use books as monitor stands for my Linux setup, but for my macOS setup as well — and it’s an equally geeky set of books!
Here’s that previous article about my Linux monitor stand setup:
Yesterday, I posted an article positing that WeWork’s CEO might just be indirectly and accidentally responsible for drastically changing the processor industry:
What if WeWork’s jamoke CEO accidentally changed the processor industry?
The article got a record number of pageviews, and I got a number of emails and direct messages asking all sorts of questions about Arm chips, from “What makes Arm processors so different?” to “Has anyone seen an Arm-based Mac in action yet?”
Here are some videos that should provide lots of background material to better help you understand Arm chips and Apple’s move to their own custom silicon.
Let’s start with this CNET supercut of the parts of the WWDC keynote where Tim Cook and company talk about Apple’s transition from Intel chips to their own Arm-based ones:
This is Max Tech’s best guess as to what the Arm-based Mac release timeline will look like:
Many people have a take on what Apple’s move to Arm means. Here are CNET’s top 5 guesses:
Here’s a video from a year ago that asks “Is Intel in trouble? Is ARM the future?”. It’s worth watching for its history lesson about Arm:
Here’s a really quick (under 6 minutes) look at Arm CPUs:
Here’s a more hardcore explanation of how CPUs (in general) work:
CPUs used to be stand-alone things, but we’ve been migrating to SOCs (systems on a chip) for some time. Here’s an explainer:
This Gary Explains video explains the differences between Arm’s and Intel’s architectures:
Here’s a reminder from Computerphile that Arm design chips — they don’t make them. There’s a difference:
Here’s a treat: an unboxing of Apple’s “developer transition kit”, which registered Apple developers can apply to try out to test their apps on Apple silicon. It’s a Mac Mini powered by an Apple A12z chip, which is the same processor that drives the iPad Pro.
In order to understand this story, you need to be aware of this news item: Softbank is considering the options of selling outright, selling part of, or making a public offering of Arm, the British chip design firm behind the chips that power just about every smartphone, a whole lot of IoT devices (including the Raspberry Pi), a fair share of Chromebooks, and soon, Apple’s computers.
Softbank is considering this move because it needs the money. It has an activist investor that wants to see some changes, because it’s made some embarrassing investments leasing to considerable losses of both money ($16.5 billion for the financial year ending March 2020) and face.
One of those embarrassing losses is the fault of Adam Neumann, cofounder and CEO of WeWork, and the jamoke pictured at the top of this article. You may remember the story from last year, where the company — effectively a Regus pretending to be a Netflix — had to delay its IPO due to concerns about its pretend profitability and flaky, cult-of-personality non-leadership.
These concerns led investors to take a closer look at their numbers and Neumann’s aberrant behavior and business dealings. This in turn led to Neumann stepping down as CEO in September, SoftBank taking control of their investment, and paying Neumann $1.7 billion to leave the board.
Simply put, Neumann’s hijinks cost Softbank a lot of money, and they now have an investor putting serious pressure on them to sell off assets to raise cash. Arm could be one of those assets.
At the same time, there are a number of interesting developments where Arm chips are concerned…
At WWDC 2020, Apple announced that they were moving their computers off Intel x86 chips, whose notoriously bad design is really showing its age these days, and to their own custom Arm-based chips. (Arm has “standard” chips, but if you’re a big player, you can work with them to have them design custom chips for you.) The Arm-based processors in the current line of iPhones run circles around not just the processors in Samsung’s flagship phones, but also most laptops as well.
Any talk about what Arm chips will mean for Apple is all speculation right now, but if you want to hear some really good speculation, as well as a decent Arm vs. Intel discussion, check out episode 777 of This Week in Tech:
In that episode of This Week in Tech, host Leo Laporte and his panel agree that Windows PC OEMs will probably end up switching to Arm processors, and they’re not the only ones saying it.
Arm also had a moment in the sun on the mainframe front: The new holder of the title of “world’s fastest supercomputer”, the Fugaku, is powered by Arm chips.
There’s a pretty good chance that Arm will end up being the de facto chip design to rule them all in the 2020s — and their maker is up for sale. In fact, there’s an unnamed interested buyer. I have a guess, and I’m not the only person to have the same idea:
If only there were a tech company making a move to ARM silicon with a huge pile of cash laying around… https://t.co/lGqnDfG9SI
— Zak Kukoff (@zck) July 13, 2020
(In case you’re wondering: Apple had $245 billion in their cash reserves last year, and Softbank bought Arm for $32 billion a few years ago.)
What do you think?
The online Intro to Python Coding course that I’m teaching on behalf of Tampa Bay’s own Computer Coach Training Center starts tonight at 6:00 p.m.. For the next five weeks, on Monday and Wednesday evenings from 6:00 to 10:00, I’ll be leading a class of Python learners through “code along with me” exercises in the Python programming language.
The format of the course will be pretty much the same as the one I use at Tampa iOS Meetup, where I lead the group through a “code along with me” exercise. I project what’s on my computer on the big screen, and everyone follows along, entering the code as I explain what’s happening.
Since Python has a REPL (Read-Evaluate-Print Loop), I can also have the class go through some exercises and try little coding challenges. It will be a “learn by doing” kind of class.
The main textbooks for the course (which will be provided to students) are Python Crash Course, 2nd Edition…
…and Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd edition (which is free to read online):
In order to minimize confusion, we’ll all use the same tools in the course, namely the Anaconda Individual Edition distribution of Python 3.7 and associated tools…
…and Visual Studio Code:
Both are available free of charge, and run on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
It’ll be fun! Watch this space; I’ll post some snippets from the course as it progresses.
Interested in signing up? Visit Computer Coach’s site and speak to them. Don’t dawdle — it starts tonight!
Hello, Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds! Welcome to the weekly list of online-only events for techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds based in an around the Tampa Bay area.
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In the spirit of “Show, don’t tell,” I’ll explain with the three charts below.
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I decided to see if LinkedIn Premium will help with the job search and activated the one month free trial. I’ll keep you posted by writing about the features I find and my experiences with it.
I saw these two posts about printers this morning — one on Twitter, the other on Facebook, in a neighborhood forum where someone was asking for office equipment and furniture that people were no longer using:
I find that I use our home printer about once a year, typically for printing a letter that I need to enclose with a paper form that I’m sending via snail mail.
How often do you use your printer at home (if you have one) these days?