Basically the writing is separate from sounds.

And that’s how people who speak mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese can communicate through writing. The word (sound) may be different, but the written character is the same.

I more surprised by how slow the start menu is. It’s absolutely incredible. Windows 7 start bar was faster on my core 2 duo with spinning hdd both to open and search than windows 11 on my 9800X3D with nvme ssd.

In addition, too many people don’t even care enough to use the correct bin. Every bin day my neighbours bins are overflowing with no recyclables in their recycling bin. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bins were meaningless and it all went in a hole in the ground

Many phones support it. My old mid range Samsung galaxy phone from 2020 had it, as does my Pixel 9a.

Wow that’s crazy we had such different experiences. I think mine locked up once in 5 years.

If Samsung came out tomorrow and said “we’re bringing it back into support for the next 2 years” I’d probably go back to it and put my pixel in a drawer.

I used the A71 early 2020 till about a month or two ago, and it was a fantastic phone. Only reason I moved was it’s out of support, so no more security updates.

The battery was still rated at >90%. And I’d believe it, I never had to worry about it lasting a whole day. My only complaint about the phone was even during its support period the security patches were infrequent.

I contemplated Samsung again but chose a Pixel 9a due to the monthly security updates for 7 years. And in doing so I’ve given up dual sim, headphone jack and sd card slot (but few phones have all those features now).

I’m curious what made your experience with the A71 so terrible?

One of the biggest bottlenecks in many workloads is latency. Cache miss and the CPU stalls waiting for main memory. Flash storage, even on an nvme bus is two orders of magnitude slower than ram.

For example L3 cache takes approximately 10-20 nano seconds, ram takes closer to 100 nano seconds, nvme flash is more than 10,000 nano seconds (>10 microseconds).

Depending on your age you may remember the transition from hard drives to ssds. They could make a machine feel much snappier. Early PC ssds weren’t significantly faster throughput than hard drives (many now are even slower writing when they run out of SLC cache), what they were is significantly lower latency.

As an aside, Intel and Microns 3d xpoint was super interesting technically. It was capable of < 5000 nano seconds in early generation parts, meaning it sat in between DDR ram and flash.

Gigabytes plural? Maybe a while. Gigabyte singular? Already a thing. AMD EPYC 9684X(https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-generation-9004-and-8004-series/amd-epyc-9684x.html)

I never had one (but did want one, just financially couldn’t justify it at the time), but it would have a great fit for me. I just wanted a watch to tell the time, and display my phone notifications plus vibrate to alert me to them. That would have been legitimately useful for the job I was in at the time which was challenging to carry a phone (but it was nearby in my bag).

Now, I have no use for any of that. But I am now interested in a heart rate monitor that doesn’t hoover my data to replace my old dedicated Polar heart rate monitor (which also told the time, but I only wore it exercising), so the more expensive model is tempting!

This is one of my motivations for dumping my games and modding my consoles. Pull out Wii sports and it doesn’t work? No problems I’ll run it off usb.