Enlarge (credit: Jeremy Reimer/Waldemar Brandt/NASA)

The story so far: As the 20th century came to a close, ARM was on the precipice of massive change. Under its first CEO, Robin Saxby, the company had grown from 12 engineers in a barn to hundreds of employees and was the preferred choice in RISC chips for the rapidly expanding mobile market. But the mobile and computer worlds were starting to merge, and the titans of the latter industry were not planning to surrender to the upstarts of the former. (This is the final article in a three-part series. Read part 1 and part 2 .)

It started, as did many things in the ARM story, with Apple.

Steve Jobs had returned, triumphantly, to the company he had co-founded. The release of the colorful gumdrop iMacs in 1998, an agreement with Microsoft, and the sale of Apple’s ARM stock had brought the company from near-bankruptcy to a solid financial footing. But Apple’s “iCEO” was still searching for the next big thing.

Enlarge / PCB for the prototype PineTab 2, a successor to a tablet that hit production at the worst possible point in 2020. (credit: Pine64)

Pine64, makers of ARM-based, tinker-friendly gadgets, is making the PineTab 2 , a sequel to its Linux-powered tablet that mostly got swallowed up by the pandemic and its dire global manufacturing shortages.

The PineTab 2, as described in Pine64's "December Update," is based around the RK3566, made by RockChip. Pine64 based its Quartz64 single-board system on the system-on-a-chip (SoC), and has all but gushed about it across several blog posts. It's "a dream-of-a-SoC," writes Community Director Lukasz Erecinski, a "modern mid-range quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that integrates a Mali-G52 MP2 GPU. And it should be ideal for space-constrained devices: it runs cool, has a variety of I/O options, solid price-to-performance ratio, and "is genuinely future-proof." While Linux support was scarce early on, development for RK3566 is "booming," and it's now a prime candidate for mobile operating systems, Erecinski writes.

Inside a PineTab 2 prototype, with a battery and connectors that are far from hidden for a potential replacement.

The PineTab 2 is a complete redesign, Erecinski claims. It has a metal chassis that "is very sturdy while also being easy to disassemble for upgrades, maintenance, and repair." The tablet comes apart with snap-in tabs, and Pine64 will offer replacement parts. The insides are modular, too, with the eMMC storage, camera, daughter-board, battery, and keyboard connector all removable "in under 5 minutes." The 10.1-inch IPS display, with "modern and reasonably thin bezels," should also be replaceable, albeit with more work.

Enlarge / The Acorn Archimedes 3000, released in May 1989. (credit: Wikipedia)

The story so far: At the end of the 1980s, Acorn Computers was at a crossroads. A small team, led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, had invented a powerful new computer chip, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM). Acorn released a new computer line, the Archimedes, that used these ARM chips. But the world wasn’t beating a path to the company's door. ( Read part one here .)

From the beginning, it was hard to get anyone to care about this amazing technology. A few months after the first ARM chips had shipped, Acorn Computers' Steve Furber called a tech reporter and tried to get him to cover the story. The reporter replied , “I don’t believe you. If you’d been doing this, I’d have known.” Then he hung up.

As Acorn struggled, Furber tried to imagine how the ARM chip could be spun off into a separate company. But he couldn’t figure out how to make the business model work. “You’d have to sell millions before royalties start paying the bills,” he said in an interview . “We couldn’t imagine selling millions of these things.”

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

It was 1983, and Acorn Computers was on top of the world. Unfortunately, trouble was just around the corner.

The small UK company was famous for winning a contract with the British Broadcasting Corporation to produce a computer for a national television show. Sales of its BBC Micro were skyrocketing and on pace to exceed 1.2 million units.

A magazine ad for the BBC Micro. The tagline was "The Shape of Things to Come."

But the world of personal computers was changing. The market for cheap 8-bit micros that parents would buy to help kids with their homework was becoming saturated. And new machines from across the pond, like the IBM PC and the upcoming Apple Macintosh, promised significantly more power and ease of use. Acorn needed a way to compete, but it didn’t have much money for research and development.

Enlarge / Microsoft Teams running on a Mac. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has announced plans to roll out an Apple Silicon-native version of Microsoft Teams, but the release isn't going to happen overnight.

In a blog post on its website, Microsoft claims the update will offer "a significant boost in performance" to users of Macs with Apple's M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, and M2 chips.

Teams has just been running as an Intel app via Rosetta 2 on M1 Macs since the beginning of the Apple Silicon transition in 2020. Direct competitors Zoom and Slack have offered native Apple Silicon support since December 2020 and February 2021, respectively.