Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Sealed Original iPhone Gets Auctioned For Over US$63000


Phones are getting more and more expensive as the years go by, and among the brands most guilty of this include Apple and its iPhones. There’s a very fair chance that you’ll be right in thinking that the iPhone 15 series coming out at the end of the year will be more expensive than ever. But whatever that price may be, it will still be dwarfed by the price that the first ever iPhone just went for in a recent auction.

The still factory-sealed first-generation iPhone was put up for auction with LCG Auctions earlier in the month, with the auction itself having ended over the weekend. It had a starting price of US$2500 (~RM11080), which is already a ridiculous price to pay for any phone, never mind one that’s 16 years old. But by the end of the auction, it went for US$63356.40 (~RM280796), including a “buyer’s premium”.


There’s also an interesting story to go with this relic from the earlier days of the second millennium. This still sealed first iPhone was owned by one Karen Green, who got the iPhone as a gift, according to a linked Business Insider article. As for why the phone remained sealed, this was because it wasn’t something that Green could use anyway. iPhones of the time were only compatible with the telco AT&T in the US, while Green already had three phone lines with another telco, Verizon.

An old relic of the past like the original iPhone selling for such a huge sum of money is pretty incredible on its own. But what makes it more so is the fact that it’s not the only one in recent times. Just last October, another sealed iPhone was auctioned off to the tune of US$40000 (~RM177280). Indeed, Green intended to hold on to hers for awhile longer to let its value bloat up even further, but decided to sell it to fund a business she’s running.

Modder Transforms Portable Gas Stove Into A Small Form Factor PC


The PC Modding and custom-design casing community are nothing new at this point and safe to say, the stuff that comes out of the minds of some individuals are nothing short of creative feats. Recently, one PC modder showed how they were able to make a DIY PC by transforming a portable gas stove into a chassis.

The modder, Sunoshop, hails from Vietnam and originally shared the video of his portable gas stove custom PC on TikTok, but has since caught fire within the PC Master Race subreddit. If one were to dig a little deeper into the chassis thickness of the stove, one would find that it is around 120mm thick, with the encased space just nearly half that. For reference, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition is about half the overall thickness at 61mm, and it is unlikely that the chassis would accommodate the card’s PCB, length-wise.

 For that matter, you can especially see why the GPU slot within this portable gas stove PC remains empty; as fun as a project as this chassis may seem, the Sunoshop would have to dig deep and figure out how they would be able to cram a GPU into it.

Despite its lack of a GPU, that isn’t the point that defines this portable gas stove PC. To boot it up, the modder made it so that they’d have to turn the gas knob on the side, just as you normally would on such an appliance. Then, instead of bright blue flames in the centre, what you get is a ring of RBG, emanating from the PC fan that is built in the middle of the system.


As for where the canister for the portable gas stove would be, that space has been filled with the PC’s PSU. Then, just underneath where the hob lays is where all the PC internals lay, in all their RGB glory.

The only factors that remain a mystery to us are what components Sunoshop had used to build the portable gas stove PC. Even at a glance, our resident PC enthusiast can’t quite finger the chipset the build is based on. In fact, the only thing that could made out was that the SSD inside was definitely one from Kingston.

Whatever the case, this design sure beats the heck out of the KFConsole, at least in terms of creativity.

Thursday, February 9, 2023

Bloatware pushes the Galaxy S23 Android OS to an incredible 60GB


As a smartphone operating system, Android strives to be a lightweight OS so it can run on a variety of hardware. The first version of the OS had to squeeze into the T-Mobile G1, with only a measly 256MB of internal storage for Android and all your apps, and ever since then, the idea has been to use as few resources as possible. Unless you have the latest Samsung phone, where Android somehow takes up an incredible 60GB of storage.

Yes, the Galaxy S23 is slowly trickling out to the masses, and, as Esper's senior technical editor Mishaal Rahman highlights in a storage space survey, Samsung's new phone is way out of line with most of the ecosystem. Several users report the phone uses around 60GB for the system partition right out of the box. If you have a 128GB phone, that's nearly half your storage for the Android OS and packed-in apps. That's four times the size of the normal Pixel 7 Pro system partition, which is 15GB. It's the size of two Windows 11 installs, side by side. What could Samsung possibly be putting in there?!

We can take a few guesses as to why things are so big. First, Samsung is notorious for having a shoddy software division that pumps out low-quality code. The company tends to change everything in Android just for change's sake, and it's hard to imagine those changes are very good. Second, Samsung may want to give the appearance of having its own non-Google ecosystem, and to do that, it clones every Google app that comes with its devices. Samsung is contractually obligated to include the Google apps, so you get both the Google and Samsung versions. That means two app stores, two browsers, two voice assistants, two text messaging apps, two keyboard apps, and on and on. These all get added to the system partition and often aren't removable.

 


Unlike the clean OSes you'd get from Google or Apple, Samsung sells space in its devices to the highest bidder via pre-installed crapware. A company like Facebook will buy a spot on Samsung's system partition, where it can get more intrusive system permissions that aren't granted to app store apps, letting it more effectively spy on users. You'll also usually find Netflix, Microsoft Office, Spotify, Linkedin, and who knows what else. Another round of crapware will also be included if you buy a phone from a carrier, i.e., all the Verizon apps and whatever space they want to sell to third parties. The average amount users are reporting is 60GB, but crapware deals change across carriers and countries, so it will be different for everyone.

Just on the surface, Samsung's 60GB system partition looks bad compared to the Pixel 7's 15GB, but it's actually worse than those two raw numbers. Samsung isn't even using one of the big, storage-hungry Android features that you would normally get on Pixel 7: A/B system partitions. The Pixel 7 (and most other flagships) can actually have two copies of the operating system, one that is online and being used, and another that is offline and sitting in the background. When an OS update gets downloaded, a Samsung phone, with only one copy of the OS, will have to reboot and have as much as 30 minutes of downtime. A Pixel phone, with two copies of the OS, will just keep running and update the second offline OS in the background. Then, when the update is done, it will just do a normal 30-second reboot, and the device will swap operating systems, moving over to the OS copy that was just updated in the background. The dual OS system also gives a phone a backup if something goes wrong. If that new, updated OS boot fails, Android will switch back to the old OS and try the update again.

This A/B partition feature launched in Android with version 7.0—so it's seven years old—but Samsung is the only major OEM to not use it. Google threatened to make it mandatory several times in the past, but it keeps losing its resolve. Naturally, two copies of the OS will increase storage demands somewhat, but today it's a lot smaller than it used to be. The feature previously involved keeping two copies of the OS around all the time, but today, with "virtual A/B partitions," you normally have one copy of the OS, and when an update arrives, a second copy of the OS is created, updated in the background, and swapped, too. Upon successful boot, the old copy is discarded. That means you only need a chunk of free storage during the update process. Google has a detailed breakdown of how the feature will affect storage, and it lists 4.5GB for the main OS (a Pixel's additional space is for packed-in Google apps), and while the space used for that would normally double during the update, with compression it's only an extra 2.1GB.

That's on a Pixel, though. Samsung's operating system is such a mess, it doesn't seem like it will ever be able to adopt a feature like A/B partitions. The system partition can grow over time, so that 60GB is will only get bigger as the updates roll in. As always, Samsung is happy to throw more hardware at the problem, and while the base model of 128GB might start to feel cramped, the Galaxy S23 Ultra has plenty of room for crapware, with sizes up to 1TB.

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