The list of companies jumping on the Apple Silicon bandwagon is growing. Google just released a version of Chrome for Apple’s new computers with M1 processors, and Mozilla is developing a version of Firefox that will support the new chips as well.
Meanwhile, Adobe’s recent move to release a beta version of Photoshop for both macOS Big Sur devices with Apple M1 chips and Windows on ARM has had an unintended side effect – at least one developer who has loaded Windows 10 onto an old Microsoft Lumia smartphone can now run Photoshop on a phone.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
- Google releases Apple Silicon-optimized version of Chrome for Mac
Google releases a new version of Chrome for macOS that’s optimized for the Apple Silicon chips in the new MacBook Air, MacBook pro, and Mac Mini. - Pre-release Firefox for Apple Silicon [Mozilla]
And Mozilla is working on a version of Firefox that will do the same. - Tab throttling and more performance improvements in Chrome 87 [Chromium Blog]
Chrome 87 will actively manage your browser tab resource usage to balance performance and power usage – extending battery life while maintaining responsiveness. Back/forward cache will also improve page load speeds when you hit the back or forward button. - Google Pay reimagined: pay, save, manage expenses and more [Google]
Google unveils new Google Pay for Android and iOS (US-only at first), with money management/insights features, support for person-to-person, group, and business payments and collections, and more. Plex mobile-first bank accounts are coming next year. - Meet the Microsoft Pluton processor – The security chip designed for the future of Windows PCs [Microsoft]
Microsoft introduces Pluton security processor. It will eventually replace TPM in upcoming PCs with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm chips, offers protection from speculative execution attacks, and can receive updates through Windows Update. - Huawei to sell Honor brand to consortium of agents and dealers in bid to save its supply chain [Reuters]
Huawei’s been under pressure due to US trade sanctions that have limited the company’s ability to acquire components for its devices. It’s unclear whether this new ownership structure will help the Honor sub-brand at all - Purism’s Librem 5 Linux smartphone is now shipping [Linux Smartphones]
Three years after announcing plans to build a Linux smartphone with an emphasis on free and open source software, privacy, and security, Purism is now starting to ship the mass production version of the Librem 5 to customers. - Photoshop on a Lumia phone running Windows on ARM [@imbushuo]
Not only does Photoshop now run on Mac and Windows computers with ARM-based processors… but folks who have shoehorned Windows on ARM onto phones for some reason or other can try using it on those too. - Also, screen rotation is now working on that Lumia phone with Windows on ARM [@imbushuo]
Speaking of running Windows 10 on phones, now it looks like you can do that and easily switch between portrait and landscape.
It’s very nice to see arm64 Photoshop to be here pic.twitter.com/nk1iV98syH
— Sunshine Biscuit at scale 🍪 (@imbushuo) November 18, 2020
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Well known companies recompiling binaries of popular programs to work on a popular brand of computers, regardless of how differently that brand happens to be thinking at the moment (not actually very much), isn’t exactly surprising. In fact it would have been surprising if that didn’t happen.
Also,
People suspect that the Pluton chip will be a lot like the Apples T2 chip.
That is, they suspect it doesn’t help anything, lets microsoft spy on you (WHY DOES MY MOTHERBOARD NEED CHIP TO CLOUD SECURITY), and more importantly keeps you from booting anything but windows until someone jailbreaks it a couple years later. What was wrong with the TPM?