Month: January 2021

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  The 2020, M1-equipped Mac mini. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

For the first time, users of Apple Silicon Macs using Apple's M1 chip—such as the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and MacBook Air—can now boot in to and natively run Linux.

The vintage at play here is Ubuntu, and the port was developed by Corellium, which otherwise virtualizes iOS and other ARM-based OSes to enable easier security testing. It's worth noting as well that Apple has previously sued the company over said iOS security testing tool. The lawsuit didn't go Apple's way.

Corellium Chief Technology Office Chris Wade announced the culmination of the team's work on Twitter yesterday. And in a blog post on Corellium's website, the team behind the port writes that it was developed in parallel with the group's efforts at "creating a model of the [M1] for our security research part."

Enlarge / The 2020 Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, which had a 4K OLED display. (credit: Samsung)

The world's biggest OLED manufacturer is making a push for more OLED laptop screens. A press release from Samsung Display says the company is making "very large quantities of 14-inch, 90Hz OLED displays destined for laptops and notebooks, beginning in March." Apparently, Samsung has a lot of orders coming in, and the company says that "several global IT companies are expected to release new laptops or notebooks with 90Hz OLED screens this year."

Usually, faster-refresh-rate displays are the realm of gaming laptops, where you can get anywhere from 90Hz to a blazing-fast 300Hz (that sounds like overkill) but those are all LCDs. Thanks almost entirely to Samsung, OLEDs have completely taken over smartphones, with the company supplying panels to Apple, Google, its own Galaxy line, OnePlus, and pretty much everyone else. On many Android phones, these are 90Hz or 120Hz displays, and now it sounds like Samsung is ready to scale up to laptops.

OLED displays are a grid of organic, light-emitting material (this electrified pickle video is a great explainer) and are usually thinner and less complicated than LCDs. LCDs need a ton of layers—a backlight to light up the display, various layers of polarizers and diffusers, the namesake liquid crystal layer to turn pixels on and off, and a color filter. An LCD's single source of light for the entire display (sometimes "zones" of light with local dimming) means LCDs can't match the high contrast of OLED, where every pixel is also its own light source. OLEDs can turn off pixel light sources individually, so "black" can be truly black, with the display producing no light.