The Morning After: Segway's Personal Transporter is going away

After nearly 20 years, the Segway PT model is going away. Dean Kamen’s invention didn’t quite live up to the city-reshaping hype, but the self-balancing two-wheeler has, at long last, ushered in a new wave of electric urban mobility.

Mall cops and tourists will miss it the most, while Segway’s current owner Ninebot will continue to manufacture electric scooters, as well as self-balancing skates and chairs. I’m not sure that Kamen foresaw bored teens and NBA dunk contest participants applying their creativity to the tech, but the future is a weird place to live sometimes.

— Richard

Do Apple's new Mac chips mean ARM has won?

Apple is dropping Intel and the x86 architecture in favor of ARM and RISC.

At WWDC, Apple announced a radical change to its computers. The company is dropping Intel as its CPU provider, transitioning its laptops and desktops to custom Apple-designed chips over the next two years. Based on Apple’s current smartphone and iPad chips, these new processors are launching a development platform that is essentially a Mac mini with an iPad Pro’s A12Z crammed into it.

These Apple chips follow ARM architecture, a RISC design. Now, ARM underpins pretty much every smartphone and mobile device in the world, but in the last 15 years, it’s struggled to gain traction in high-performance computing. In the latest episode of Upscaled, Chris Schodt walks us through the history of ARM, RISC and everything related to it all.
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iOS 14 will respond to taps on the back of your iPhone

Your AirPods will also charge intelligently to maximize battery life.

On one hand, watchOS 7 kills the force touch feature, where sustained pressing offered a ‘right click’ style secondary input. The company has already removed the feature from its iPhones, where it was called 3D Touch.

Meanwhile, testers have noticed a new “Back Tap” feature that lets you perform actions and shortcuts by double- or triple-tapping the back of your iPhone. It’s intended as an accessibility function and could clearly be helpful for those with limited motor skills, but it’s easy to see this being helpful for anyone who’d rather not reach across a massive phone screen to perform a common task. Is this your new camera button shortcut?
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Acer's new ConceptD PCs are for creatives on a budget

And the Predator gaming laptops have a surprise.

This year’s iteration of creative-focused ConceptD PCs from Acer maintains the line’s innovative styling but with a twist: They’re a bit more affordable than usual. Along with 10th-generation Intel CPUs inside, this ConceptD 3 Ezel has a floating hinge and a price that starts at $1,500.

The company has also refreshed its Predator gaming laptops with the latest Intel hardware. While they feature a second Thunderbolt 3 port and up to 64GB of RAM, the showstopping feature on its Helios 700 flagship is a sliding keyboard that exposes extra cooling vents on top. Is it entirely necessary? Maybe not, but it does stand out.
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Dell's latest gaming PCs include large G7 laptops and a G5 desktop

Beefier options for folks who aren’t ready to go full Alienware.

The PC maker is introducing a trio of gaming machines headlined by its new G7 series in 15- and (most notably) 17-inch sizes. It’s relatively sleek with a design as thick as 0.72 inches, optional four-zone RGB keyboard lighting and plenty of chassis lighting. The real allure, apart from the existence of a 17-inch model, is performance. You can opt for up to an eight-core Intel Core i9 processor, GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q graphics, 32GB of RAM, a 4K OLED screen and a 1TB PCIe SSD.

An updated version of the G5 desktop can pack 10th-generation Core CPUs inside its case, and there are some new peripherals to choose from.
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