It has been ages since I’ve updated my blog but a lot of stuff has been in my life. For starters I went to the optometrists last week to get my eyes tested and choose my new glasses:

Although my insurance will pay for one pair, they have a special at Specsavers where you ‘buy one, get one free’ which only covers the frames meaning you will need to pay for the second pair of lenses. I thought it would be best to have a backup pair so incase something bad were to happen with one pair that I would have a backup pair. The only saving grace out of all this is the fact that my eye sight isn’t as bad as I expected although my left eye is noticeably weaker than my right eye.

It appears that sometime this week, assuming there is no show stopper bugs, Apple will release iOS 13.6, macOS 10.15.6 plus updates for all the other platforms. Although everyone is justifiably excited about the next version of macOS, iOS and all the other platforms I think what has generated the biggest buzz has been the move to Silicon Apple. Although it is a big step for Apple there is another angle one needs to consider – the fact that although Apple is a smaller player in the traditional computer market they do have a big influence over the market over all. If Apple demonstrate that it is possible to move beyond Intel, move beyond x86 (something even Intel filed to achieve with Itanium) then it opens up an opportunity for other players to enter the market either shipping ARM based CPUs in Chromebooks (think Exynos SoC with AMD GPU in a Samsung laptop) or maybe Microsoft taking it seriously with the much rumoured Windows 10X which scoops up[ the backwards compatibility into a container with a modernised operating system. That being said, not only would a SoC vendor have to have an interest in wanting to invest into a desktop, laptop and/or workstation class SoC it would also require a big customer like Dell, HP or Lenovo to step forward to given the said SoC vendor confidence that the investment is worse the time and resources. For example, if Dell said, “we need 4 million units of n ARM processor that can bet Intel on price/performance-per-watt then it would given the likes of Qualcomm something to strive towards knowing that the investment at the worst it will break even and at best it’ll be a run away success that’ll open up opportunities for the computer companies to take an interest in Qualcomm ARM SoCs.