Linked List: June 15, 2020

Monday, 15 June 2020

Apple Adds New MacBook Pro Graphics Option and Mac Pro SSD Upgrade Kit ★

Brian Heater, reporting for TechCrunch:

A week before kicking off WWDC, Apple introduced a pair of upgrades to its pro-level hardware lines. Both the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro desktop are getting select internal upgrades, starting today.

On the notebook front, the 16-inch model gets an additional graphics configuration. The addition of the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU marks the best graphics performance yet for the notebook line, marking up a 75% speed increase over the the next-highest configuration, the Radeon Pro 5500M.

Time to start keeping a file of announcements that didn’t make it into next week’s WWDC keynote. (See also: new 0% Apple Card financing for Mac, iPad, and other hardware.)

Adobe Flash Player End of Life: December 31 ★

Adobe today:

As previously announced in July 2017, Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31, 2020 (“EOL Date”). We made this announcement in collaboration with several of our technology partners — including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla — which issued complementary announcements with more technical detail on what the Flash Player EOL will mean for developers, enterprises, and consumers using their specific OS environments or browsers.

[…]Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages from its site and Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.

Steve Jobs, 10 years ago:

Flash was created during the PC era — for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards — all areas where Flash falls short. […]

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too).