Microsoft released the first Surface Go tablet in August 2018. Its small size, 1.15-pound weight, and relatively low price were of interest to many at the University. ISC testing revealed that the Surface Go's low-end Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y processor made it relatively slow in an era when almost all new tablets and notebooks are fast. This slowness would typically have disqualified it from significant interest at the University.
Today, Tuesday, August 4th, 2020, Apple introduced new iMac desktop systems. These systems form the basis of the macOS configurations in the University's Desktop Recommendations and Desktop Purchasing Guide.
With the advent of macOS 10.15 Catalina (expected to release sometime in early fall 2019), Apple will be removing support for all 32-bit applications. Apple has been warning about this for a few years now and has gotten increasingly aggressive at informing users who run macOS 10.14 Mojave that they have dated applications that won't work in the future.
This blog entry will detail one person's efforts to clean his system of 32-bit applications (or at least become aware of the applications that will be an issue).
The University has had Desktop Recommendations (originally called Desktop Standards) since the mid-1990s. At that time, Penn was anticipating the roll-out of a new client/server application and we discovered that we had no public standards for personal computers—only the hope that the Computer Connection was stocking appropriate systems.