The tech media, particularly the Apple fan sites, will be poring over Apple’s new OS announcements at the 2020 WWDC keynote. In large part, most of the changes are largely predictable upgrades, though there are some notable developments.

So, after 19 years, version X of the macOS will go away, to be replaced by macOS 11 Big Sur. But that’s really the biggest change, as the remaining enhancements are largely incremental. According to Apple, it’ll run on an assortment of Macs dating back to the 2013 MacBook Pro, and the 2014 iMac that includes models with the 5K Retina display.

Ditto for iOS 14, which will run on the same gear as iOS 13. This means that Barbara’s iPhone 6s is not yet out of date and she won’t ask for a new one until at least the fall of 2021. Good thing, because it still works just fine. But the change that will impact many of you is the ability to change your default browser and email. You won’t be forced to use Safari and Mail, and that’s a good thing.

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A lot of what passes for tech journalism — or mainstream journalism for that matter — fails to recognize the history behind a matter. So for several years, as Apple produced faster and faster custom ARM-based CPUs that vanquished competing silicon, there has been growing speculation that the Mac will get them next.

On the surface, it makes plenty of sense sense. In recent years, Intel has begun to hit the wall in improving the performance of its own CPU. Its efforts to build mobile processors haven’t gone so well. At one time, the low-power chip that came to be known as Atom was considered as a possible contender for use in the iPhone, or perhaps other Apple mobile gear.

It never happened, and Intel’s efforts to move from its core competency – PC processors — haven’t gone so well. For a time Apple even bought billions of dollars of baseband modems for iPhones from Intel, but the company hasn’t been able to scale up to 5G. In the end, Apple settled a simmering series of lawsuits with Qualcomm to buy its hardware instead.

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Before I get to the meat of this column, my main question about the 2020 iPhone SE is why it took Apple so long to release it?

The original came out in 2016, and was fundamentally an iPhone 5s with most of the guts of the far-faster iPhone 6s. While it mostly went under the radar at times when mostly top-of-the-line gear received the serious attention from the tech media, a lot of customers loved them. Not just because its $399 retail price was cheaper, but because its smaller form factor, with a four-inch display, made it especially attractive to people who found the mainstream models just too large.

Indeed, Apple once touted smaller smartphone displays as an advantage, making it easier for one-handed use. But market forces aren’t always driven by logic and reason, and thus Android gear with larger displays gained sales sometimes at the expense of Apple

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It’s fair to say that if you repeat a somewhat reasonable rumor about Apple year after year, it might eventually come to pass. So as its ARM-based CPUs have become more and more powerful, it seems a given that Apple is poised to ditch Intel one of these days and make the third processor switchover in its history.

Now when Apple first moved to the PowerPC in 1994, it didn’t seem so much of an issue at the time, although it survived for 12 years. But the Intel rumors were around for quite a while. One of the most interesting ones focused on Apple having a secret project, “Star Trek,” where new Macs were being tested with Intel CPUs at the same time that Steve Jobs was reassuring everyone that they were perfectly happy with the progress of the PowerPC.

Lest you forget, the most powerful Macs with the G5 required liquid cooling to keep the chassis from frying. It was never tamed for notebook use, so year after year the fastest PowerBooks lost traction against even cheaper Intel-based Windows portables.

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