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Enlarge / Developers are wasting no time getting their hands dirty with the new A12Z ARM Developer Transition Kits. (credit: Axel Roest)

As reported by MacRumors, eager Apple developers are already posting benchmarks on the developer transition kits for Macs with Apple silicon. These kits are based on the Mac mini chassis but include ARM-derived Apple silicon rather than Intel CPUs.

Before we dig in, it's important to note a few caveats. First, the CPU included in these developer kits may or may not reflect the CPUs included in future Apple Macs. These are not consumer products; they're developer tools. Second, the benchmarks were done using Rosetta, which likely still has many changes and optimizations coming. And thirdly, the developers who've leaked this information are in violation of non-disclosure agreements at Apple.

Developers who wanted access to the kit were required to pay a $500 access fee, agree to return the kit after one year—and agree not to publicly write about, review, share, or display the unit without Apple's prior written approval. At least eight developers so far seem not to have read the fine print, judging by the uploads to Geekbench's online leaderboard.

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  Enabling Chrome's bottom tab strip.

Everyone reading this probably uses multiple tabs on a desktop computer, but on mobile, tab management can be tough. On and Android tablet, Chrome looks like a real browser with a top tab strip, but on a phone, you don't get any kind of tab UI. There is a button that will take you to cascading UI of different Chrome windows, but a one-tap tab strip hasn't existed on Chrome for phones—until now!

A new Chrome for Android experiment, first spotted by Android Police, will add a tab strip to the bottom of the Chrome window. Tabs take the form of site favicons, and just like on a real computer, a single tap will switch between tabs. The currently active tab gets a little close icon next to it, meaning that tapping the tab again will close it. An "X" button to the left will close the tab bar entirely, while a plus button on the right will open a new tab.

For now, the feature is in Chrome Beta for some people, and you'll need to turn on a flag to enable it. To turn it on, paste chrome://flags/#enable-conditional-strip into the address bar, hit enter, enable the flag, and restart. Right now it can be kind of finicky to pop up at first. When I first open Chrome, sometimes I have to tap on the old window-switcher button to make the tab strip appear. This is just an experiment, and Android Police says it plainly doesn't work for some people. So there is probably a server-side switch involved, too.

Enlarge / Although an undeletion utility may occasionally save your bacon, it's never been a good idea to rely on one. (credit: AFP via Getty Images / Benjamin Esham / Jim Salter)

Although it isn't yet built into Windows, Microsoft has finally released its own file undelete tool—it's called Windows File Recovery, and it works with the newest builds of Windows (variously known as 20H1, 2004, and 19041). We were pretty excited to see this tool has become available—even though proper system administration means frequent backups, which render this tool unnecessary. In the real world, proper system administration and frequent backups are a lot less common than we might wish.

The lack of a proper file undeletion tool in Windows means that many of us have been hoarding one of a handful of old shareware or freemium third-party utilities capable of scanning disks and looking for remnants of deleted files. The "hoarding" part is unfortunately necessary because finding one of those utilities means sorting through stacks of scam apps targeting desperate users—and frequently, you can't be certain whether you've found one of the good ones or one of the scams until after you've installed it (hopefully, inside a sandbox or isolated VM).

Installation

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  Microsoft has an advertising problem—searching Bing (the default search provider in Edge, on a brand new 2004 install) for Windows File Recovery gets you buried in pages of ads for other things. [credit: Jim Salter ]

It's great news that Microsoft is finally bringing that capability in-house—but the tool certainly could be easier to find. When we looked for Windows File Recovery by name on Bing, in a freshly installed Windows 10 2004 VM, we got buried under pages of ads for other things.