It’s not known to be a backdoor, but it’s a juicy attack surface that customers are largely ignorant of and provides little consumer benefit. If I were an NSA employee and my boss handed me a blank check to develop a preboot exploit for Intel PCs, I’d start with IME.
20 years ago the pocketable digital cameras that took over the consumer market didn’t have hot shoes. 30 years ago the compact point and shoot viewfinders that were the weapon of choice for vacationing didn’t have hot shoes. Today neither are relevant and are all outclassed by smartphones, and there is hardly a consumer camera market.
You don’t have to spend five figures for that exposure, but it’s going to be an intentional hobby.
The intersection of people who aren’t five figures into photography and know what a hot shoe is, and people who recognize a wall mount phone trend old.
Oh, like back in the Before Times when everything was statically linked?
Eternal September has happened before, and it will happen again. One service is enshittified, another takes its place.
Apple historically can’t or won’t bring mixed signal design in-house. It could be related to patents, standards compliance, or the much more complicated silicon design, DV, and test for analog vs digital. It’s not just the modem either. The bulk of Cirrus Logic’s business nowadays is making audio, haptics, and focus servo chips for Apple, and if Apple ever went vertical with those components Cirrus would collapse overnight. Yet Apple has been buying custom audio chips from them for over 30 years, so obviously this isn’t a new trend.
I work from home 3 days a week. I have a decent battlestation, 5800X and RX6700 with a 38" widescreen and homebuilt ergosplit on a sit-stand desk. During work hours I use a KVM so I can use my work laptop with my setup.
When I built it out, I wasn’t prepared for how little I would want to game at that desk.
The only gaming I did since I built that PC was sitting on my couch with an old Steam Link and Steam Controller. It didn’t matter that the screen wasn’t as good or that I had to timeshare the TV with the rest of the family. It was a change of scenery that let me leave work behind.
Since getting a Steam Deck, I’ve finished more games than I have in years. Not only can I game away from my desk, I can hang out with the rest of the family without disturbing them. And if someone needs my attention, I can put it to sleep without worrying about save points or load times.
This makes sense only if you’re rolling your own silicon, and it depends on the application. I could see this as an alternative to a scalar DSP core or to provide more flexible high speed interfaces. The unspoken cost is going to be adding another proprietary set of tooling in the BSP for your chip.
However the X1 motherboard is almost but not quite microATX, so if you can’t stand it in the rack mount format you can shove it in a case with a PC PSU. Also, you can safely cut the SCC card flush with the socket to keep it from getting lost.
If you can live without a video console, they’re a great first Sun.
Seconded on Sofle, though Moonlander would be a good choice too. Having the numrow helps ease the transition and reduces the chances that you give up on ergo splits. If you buy a 50+ split and later get the minimalist bug, you can change your keymap to test drive a numrowless layout.
I use Sofle V2 for WFH. I started with a Lily58 at the beginning of the pandemic because I was getting shoulder and wrist pain from using a TKL all day. I liked the Lily58, but I also have big hands and found the thumb cluster cramped and the stagger too shallow. The Sofle V2 is nearly the same layout except the thumb row is moved out by a column for more natural thumb placement. I’ve been using the Sofle for a little over a year now and am planning to build another for the 1 day a week I need to drive into work to hotdesk.
QMK is great, but I switched to VIAL, which is a fork of QMK that allows for on-the-fly keymap changes from an app without having to recompile.
OP, DM me at al177 on Discord if you’re in the US and decide to DIY a Sofle. I have extra unpopulated V2 main PCBs (not top or bottom tho) and would be glad to send you a pair to get you started. I also have a Lily58 I would part with for cheap.
PineTime’s CPU isn’t that grunty - 64MHz Cortex-M4F.
Today $300 or less can buy a watch that runs UNIX, can emulate any machine in 1981 in realtime, and stream data from the ARPAInternet over a wireless connection orders of magnitude faster than any leased line.
Applied Engineering DataLink 1200 baud for my //e, purchased at their office in Addison.
letmealiexpressthatforyou.