Apple warned us of their walking off the pier by fabbing their own chips and kissing Intel goodbye. And that transition is now upon us. The new M1 machines are here and are gaining popularity - sort of. This new hardware affects everything!

USB-C at 10GB, that's cool, but requires new cables and connectors. Thunderbolt4 at 40GB, that's very cool, but requires a bit of interpretation by stuff it connects to. This new world order is driving a paradigm shift for periphreal makers. New add-ons are slow to get to market. These new gizmos are complex pieces of hardware. How would you control, split, and distribute 40GB in a small box? Who's making the chips to do this in a chip depleted era.

Then Microsoft drops the mic with Windows 11. Buy a new computer or you can't play. Oh, you did but the CPU was three years old or older. Sorry, no can play. This isn't any different than dealing with the Apple new age, but Microsoft didn't have the slow buildup. It came as a shock to the community. That's a rather poor marketing scheme.

Thunderbolt4 is here to stay but complex to deal with. Both Apple and Microsoft embrace it but it doesn't play with Windows 11 yet! It does play with Windows 10. Oops.

So, where is this going? We are on one of those boundaries like many from the past where we are going to have to wait until the boat stops rocking before we know who fell out of the boat and who's staying.

I purchased a new iMac M1 and am impressed but can't buy a docking station for it. They're all out-of-stock right now. So how do I hook up to a USB-2/3 or second monitor, or anything else? Oh, and Apple just announced there is going to be a new chip coming out in September.

Like anything in history that constitutes a New World Order, there will be casulties. If you move too quickly, you will have failure to execute properly. If you wait for things to settle, you'll never make any progress. Time to shore-up your budget and get ready to spend a lot of money and at the same time generate a lot of obsolete electronics that are destined for the landfill - I mean recycling of course.