Month: November 2020

Enlarge / What went up... (credit: RocketLab)

The small satellite launch company RocketLab made its first successful recovery of its Electron rocket after it had sent a collection of payloads toward orbit. While this rocket itself isn't going to be reused, the company expects that it will get valuable data from sensors that returned to Earth with the vehicle. The satellite launch was a success as well, an important validation after the loss of seven satellites earlier this year.

As an added bonus, the company sent a garden gnome to space for charity.

One small step

The launch took place from the company's facility on New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula and in many respects was uneventful. The countdown went off without a hitch, the second stage took the payloads to orbit, and the kicker vehicle distributed the satellites to individual orbits. But things got a bit more complicated as the second stage separated, with engineers immediately starting to calculate the likely location where the first stage would return to earth—or, more accurately, ocean.

The graphic representing the Apple M1 chip, as presented by Apple at an event earlier this month.

Some time ago, in an Apple campus building, a group of engineers got together. Isolated from others in the company, they took the guts of old MacBook Air laptops and connected them to their own prototype boards with the goal of building the very first machines that would run macOS on Apple's own, custom-designed, ARM-based silicon.

To hear Apple's Craig Federighi tell the story, it sounds a bit like a callback to Steve Wozniak in a Silicon Valley garage so many years ago. And this week, Apple finally took the big step that those engineers were preparing for: the company released the first Macs running on Apple Silicon, beginning a transition of the Mac product line away from Intel's CPUs, which have been industry-standard for desktop and laptop computers for decades.

In a conversation shortly after the M1 announcement with Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi, SVP of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak, and SVP of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji, we learned that—unsurprisingly—Apple has been planning this change for many, many years.

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  The M1. The two black boxes on the side are the RAM. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

As expected, iFixit has done a teardown of two of Apple's three new M1-based Macs: the MacBook Air and the 2-port, 13-inch MacBook Pro. What they found is somehow both surprising and not: almost nothing has changed in the laptops apart from the inclusion of the M1 chip and directly related changes.

The biggest change is definitely the omission of a fan in the MacBook Air. iFixit notes that given the Intel MacBook Air's history of overheating in some cases, it speaks volumes about the efficiency of the M1 that so far it seems the Air gets on just fine without that fan now. Also missing: the T2 chip, which we noted in our Mac mini review has been replaced completely by the M1 in all these new Macs.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro is even more similar to its predecessor. The T2 chip is also gone, but the laptop retains the exact same fan and cooling system, with no differences whatsoever. Reviews of the 13-inch MacBook Pro claim that the fan doesn't spin up as often as it used to, but iFixit concludes here that that's because of the shift from an Intel chip to the M1, not because of an improved cooling system. The fans on the Intel and M1 Pro are interchangeable.

Enlarge / Pfizer headquarters in Manhattan, New York City, United States on November 19, 2020. (credit: Getty | Anadolu Agency)

Today the US Food and Drug Administration will receive its first submission of a candidate vaccine to fight the pandemic coronavirus.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech announced early this morning that they are submitting the formal request to obtain an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the FDA for the companies’ mRNA vaccine, BNT162b2.

The submission follows the celebrated news just Wednesday that the companies had wrapped up their Phase III trial and found the vaccine to be 95-percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.