Antiques For Geeks
@antiquesforgeeks
We should have been revising.
Latest missive from New Commodore. Just wondering about that first sentence, after seeing this posted on here last week... Happy to be proved wrong. Also, my name is still not 'Bins'.
“An incredible endorsement of our vision”; so incredible we felt the need to send out a schmaltzy email to defend it and have since reduced the spec, unbundled headphones and dropped the price in response to feedback. This is a definition of “incredible endorsement” I was previously unaware of.
Honestly this website is unusable on a phone. Ads crowd out everything. God knows why I am being offered implants. Not even close to that age.
These fellas. Braun industrial design is art. The calculator especially. I have no idea why, it just resonates. I’m aware that Apple’s iPhone calculator is an homage to the Braun design, but in person really hits the right notes. And that Braun amplifier/radio is just… I need one in my life.
Plenty of Apple and Sony there too and very handsome they were too; but what surprised me was that it wasn’t what I was impressed by the most…
Never seen a Grid in the flesh and loved how futuristic it felt, despite being ancient. The BBC’s inclusion was also a bit of surprise, as was the Nokia N-Gage. I always quite like the idea, if not the execution. And of course the physical media. Who don’t love a Zip disk?
Loving the walls of objects. The current range of generic products really have lost that certain something… The IBM Thinkpad with the folding keyboard really is quite smart when you see it up close. And the Sinclair Executive calculator is an unexpected thing of beauty.
Your actual dumb phone. Designed for a time when your phone wasn’t your wallet or bank branch. Can’t think why this resonates this week.
This really didn’t have me expecting much, as once an Amiga brand deal was ruled out, it was pretty obvious the new product would be a phone. This kind of thing does NOT smack of a serious tech company. This is how you sell an off-brand energy drink to teenagers, not <cough> $700 phones to GenXers.
Right on cue! Sure Autocorrect, just change your to you. Why not? You know best, right?
It’s over 31 degrees in the spare room, sat in front of my work laptop on my day off. The fans I have going don’t make much of a difference and what’s more…
Is it the inherent superiority of Marmite as a spread on toast? No? Oh well.
And now, we move onto “liars”. Father Peter Sorenson. Father Desmond Clerents. Remember him?
The Mac Studio was hard enough to buy if you wanted local storage inside the machine; not due to scarcity, but due to the incredible price gouging long before AI sucked supply out of the market. 512Gb of SSD on a power user machine was ridiculous. £600 to upgrade to 2TB - seriously?
Used to marvel that the schematics for a Commodore Vic 20 and C64 were readily available. Just there for you to copy if you wanted. Bet you if you sent off for the bits and built your own, you’d have been recruited by this guy to join his crack team of scientists…
The Sneaker Pimps got there first, but no-one likes to mention it.
Return of the Jedi : Death Star Battle on the Spectrum. As a kid who loved the films even though everyone else by 1985 would groan at “Oh not Star Wars *again* when looking at the Christmas TV listings, I loved it. Not the best Star Wars game, but I still enjoyed it when it was all I had!
Or to put it another way. We sold it because it wouldn’t make us enough money.