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The Mac is getting a major update in Apple’s own processors. But, what about changes to future Macs that aren’t just about ditching Intel chips? From touch to speed to Thunderbolt, Macworld’s Michael Simon and Computerworld’s Ken Mingis join Juliet to discuss their predictions about the future of the Mac.  To read this article in full, please click here

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Disclosure:  Most of the vendors mentioned are clients of the author.When the laptop was conceived, the tech industry was attempting to address the needs of a mobile workforce.  These workers often had to travel to remote locations and needed to use familiar hardware at job sites, in hotels, in conference rooms, and other places like coffee shops. The new normal we now live in has people mostly working from home, travel has been massively curtailed, and interactions are virtual or communications-based. The priority now is less about mobility and more about staying connected – not only to work but to what is going on around them. Attention is often split between work and meetings and watching their kids, and unreliable networks sometimes gate interactions. Their primary communications device, the smartphone, wasn't designed for this new normal. To read this article in full, please click here

Apple sold a lot of notebooks as enterprises kitted out newly remote workers with new Macs during the second quarter, the latest data reveals – indeed, notebook sales across the board raised all the boats in the PC industry.Notebooks “singlehandedly” saved the PC market “Notebooks have singlehandedly pulled the PC market out of depression,” said Rushabh Doshi, Research Director at Canalys in a release.To read this article in full, please click here

I’m inundated with emails, so I use mail rules to maintain some semblance of order, coupled with a zero-inbox strategy. For example, automated reports are sent to a specific folder so I can read them later at my own leisure — and, most important, keep them out of my inbox.How to set up mail rules in Outlook for macOSTo read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

This pilot fish works at an IT services outfit that’s trying to get a contract with a very large public transportation company.“They wanted to offload some schedule simulation programs to free up their mainframes for other work,” fish says. “But before they would sign the contract, they wanted us to run the software on our machines to see if they would get valid results.”Fish and his cohorts port the Fortran code to the new machine and make a test run so the results can be compared with what they’re supposed to be.But before sending the results to the potential customer, fish and his team check everything against the expected output that the customer has sent to them.To read this article in full, please click here

Did you know that Microsoft has a rich collection of best-practice guidance and advice for intranet planning? Just this week, it released a new “intelligent intranet” site with videos, templates, customer interviews, and more to help users find inspiration and planning support for their intelligent intranet journey.There’s a lot of great content linked in the new site – and even more on two platforms: support.office.com and docs.microsoft.com. Though I’m not sure this is consistently the case, the content on support.office.com is largely focused on end users and forms the backbone of the training content delivered with Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways. The content on docs.microsoft.com tends to be aimed more at administrators and covers advanced topics. Both collections provide a wealth of helpful information, with  articles written by a stellar team of technical writers who often reach out to practitioners to help add to the content.To read this article in full, please click here

Apple is migrating Macs from Intel to Apple Silicon. What does this mean when it comes to support for Intel’s all-new Thunderbolt 4 standard? Here’s what we think, know and imagine:What is Thunderbolt 4? Intel has introduced what it says is its “truly universal” Thunderbolt 4 I/O specification. At 40Gbps it’s no faster than the existing Thunderbolt technology as used by Apple, but it offers more capabilities and USB-4 spec compliance.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft Teams on Wednesday unveiled a slew of new updates to its video conferencing software, including a "Together mode" that puts participants in a virtual meeting hall. That and other changes will be rolled out to users next month.The most significant update is the new Together mode, which, as the name suggests, aims to make video conferences more informal and bring participants together. Instead of 49 individual participant rectangles appearing in gallery mode, switching to Together mode removes the barriers between participants and uses “AI segmentation technology” to place the head and shoulders of participants side by side in a virtual auditorium.To read this article in full, please click here

Mozilla last week upgraded Firefox to version 78, patching a baker's dozen of security flaws and starting the annual process of retiring last year's Extended Support Release (ESR) and offering customers the latest enterprise-designed build.Company engineers patched 13 vulnerabilities, seven labeled "High," Firefox's second-most-serious label. Unlike most Firefox refreshes, version 78 did not fix any bugs marked "Critical."Firefox 78 can be downloaded for Windows, macOS and Linux from Mozilla's site. Because Firefox updates in the background, most users can simply relaunch the browser to get the latest version. To manually update on Windows, pull up the menu under the three horizontal bars at the upper right, then click the help icon (the question mark within a circle). Choose "About Firefox." (On macOS, "About Firefox" can be found under the "Firefox" menu.) The resulting page shows that the browser is either up to date or describes the refresh process.To read this article in full, please click here

The most obvious problem with June patches was a conflict between Microsoft’s latest version of Windows and Microsoft’s latest version of Office (er, Microsoft 365) Click-to-Run: If you installed patches as soon as they came out, Outlook wouldn’t run. That bug got cleared up when Microsoft fixed Office a week later, even though Windows was to blame.We also saw a bunch of belated patches for printers that didn’t work after installing the June Windows updates.To read this article in full, please click here

It seems fair to say that Apple has never had an easy relationship with third party iPhone repair services, so it’s good news that it has expanded provision of repair services by extending its Independent Repair Provider Program to more shops in the U.S., Canada and Europe.A step forward Just a few years ago, Apple fell foul of regulators and consumer groups when it attempted to make life much harder for customers who had used independent repair service providers.To read this article in full, please click here

As the ’90s end, this government department rolls out laptops to the executives and directors, reports this IT manager pilot fish, and they’re all given a quick “put your laptop on the docking station and plug the Ethernet cable in” demonstration.But one director — she’s the one with oversight of IT, though she thinks IT is a waste of money — calls day after day to say that she has no network connection. And day after day fish goes to her office, finds her dangling network cable and tells her, once again, that she has to plug it in.“Over the next three weeks, she forgot several more times,” says fish. “I eventually made up a bright yellow label for the cable so she would remember.”To read this article in full, please click here

If you'd told me five years ago that I'd one day write another article about the importance of Google Voice, I'd have responded with a friendly but firm "fuhgeddaboudit."Google Voice was once one of Google's greatest but most underappreciated services. When it launched way back in the prehistoric era of 2009, it promised to change the way we thought about our phones by taking over our primary numbers and then acting as the gatekeeper and controller of all our communications.For years, Voice was a power-user's dream — especially on Android, where its simple system-level integration made it easy to have Google own your actual phone number and turn the phone itself into a mere node instead of letting it act as the nucleus of your mobile-tech universe. But then, well, Google...Googled. It let Voice languish for years, without any attention or updates, then awkwardly half-merged it into Hangouts and had it rot away unattended for years. And we all know how the whole Hangouts saga ended (or is still in the process of ending, I guess we should say).To read this article in full, please click here

Like iPhones and iPads, Apple Silicon Macs will use an Apple-designed GPU – something that makes complete sense when you consider this is how current iOS devices work. But it could be a reason for pause by some high-end users during the transition period from Intel-based hardware.Tile Based Deferred Rendering You see, while Intel Macs contain GPU’s from Intel, Nvidia and AMD, Apple Silicon Macs will use what the company seems fond of calling “Apple family” GPUs. These use a rendering system called Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR), which iOS devices already use.To read this article in full, please click here