Tuesday, March 31, 2026

So This is Peak Foldable


@john2001plus
0 seconds ago
When a phone unfolds from 6.6 inches to 8.1 inches, why bother—especially with a $1700 price tag? Normal phones range from 6.1 to 6.9 inches, which is fine for everyday use.

It seems to me that people want a tablet in a phone, but an 8.1-inch display falls short of my 11-inch tablet.  Maybe the argument is that you can have one device instead of two, but for this price you could get two devices.

Thursday, March 26, 2026

68000 - The CPU ahead of its time


I found the 68000 easy to program.  The instructions are very straightforward.  i.e. move 8, 16, or 32 bits to a register.  Add two registers.  Move 8, 16, or 32 bits to memory.  It is almost as easy to follow as C code.

Likewise, I found the Z80 easy with its many 16-bit registers.  The 6502 has few registers, which is more difficult to program.  However, the 6502 has a trick, which is zero page instructions that use fewer clock cycles to access the first 256 bytes in memory.  Programmers can use the zero page like registers.

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

Re: Apple’s Cheapest MacBook


The benchmark for the A18 Pro chip is not bad, but a little slower than the M1 chip.  For a low cost and likely low power laptop, I think that it will be terrific.  On a phone this seems insane.


The 2017 Core-i7 iMac I sold had a benchmark of around 10,000.  My 2020 Core-i7 model is around 19,000, but it has twice as many cores.  These are power hungry computers compared to the low power RISC style chips that Apple makes.

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