Locked bootloader, no headphone jack, dealing with a kickstarter. I’d absolutely risk the last one for the first two.

Right, at this point I am carrying around a DAP to listen to headphones. Being able to go back to just the phone would be very convenient for me.

That was what I assumed, and clearly I was wrong.

Whoops, I figured this was the usual thing where people in Europe get screwed by paying the euro amount for what we pay in dollars (e.g. where we pay $500 and they pay €500 for the same product). Either way, for $1600 they could have at least included a headphone jack. I would have been very, very tempted despite the price to have GrapheneOS and a headphone jack again.

$1900 and still no headphone jack.

This is such a bad idea, though it is funny to imagine people smuggling in hard drives like they are narcotics to avoid the crazy data tax. If this took off Physical games would be even more valuable, what a great time for Sony and MS to kill them!!

While I have never seen it, the picture of Ron Jeremy as !Mario is, and always will be, hilarious.

Yes obviously, but only out on the lakes.

The Sony that made the PS3 was arrogant and also weirdly idealistic. The Sony of today is just a greedy husk.

That’s demo was awesome. It makes a lot of sense that no one at the time really figured out how to get significant performance from the TI. With most systems/consoles, it took 5+ years before games really managed to show what a system could do, and that was with third parties trying their best.

Yeah, the peripherals just daisy chained to the right. I never saw most of them in use, the tiny one in the pic is the voice synth.

My dad bought it for us with the rest, which was typical in how irresponsible he tended to be with money. It had something like 10MB capacity IIRC, which was more than it sounds as you were mostly just saving text.

Edit: I just caught that you mentioned the display. No one I knew bought the official tiny display, you could hook it to any TV just fine (it used the little antenna hooks like an Atari 2600 and everything else at the time)

This PC was interesting because it was in an odd middle ground of personal computer and video game console, while trying to be low priced like the latter. It had a lot of “edutainment” stuff for kids (I suffered through these as a kid), but you’re right that hardware-wise, it was pretty lame. PCs were so new that most people didn’t know it was lame yet of course, only that it didn’t have a lot of software selection.

This was my first home computer as a kid. I didn’t have much use for the gigantic HDD addon (the large Betamax looking thing under the screen here), but the voice synthesizer was kinda awesome. It was had a similar robotic voice, though lower quality, to the one in the movie War Games. It defaulted to loading TI Basic when you didn’t have a cartridge or diskette inserted, so I inadvertently ended up learning to program out of boredom at a very early age.

The PS3 didn’t actually require linux surprisingly enough.

Crazy as it is. you can still get the (slightly modernized) hardware. IBM just makes too much money to stop supporting it.

As someone that makes use of an AS400 (well i series), I can confirm that there is no fun to be had.

No, his analogy is poor for many reasons. One is that people using local models are likely using that computer for other things as well, it is a resource that does many things unlike their slop farms. Also, DRAM wasn’t a “scarce resource” until they devoured the industry with their AI ponzi scheme.

Don’t get our hopes up, Yoda

Wendy’s locations are a TON of variability. Within the same town you can find a Wendy’s that is stellar and a Wendy’s that sucks to the point that it barely makes sense that they are the same restaurant chain. You’re right about the serving sizes and such going down. I am sure they’d have been forced to do that eventually if Dave was still around, but he would have likely pushed back hard to prevent it as much as he could.