It's All About the Benjamins

Jump to Comments So today was an enormous day for electronics news. Steve Jobs took the stage at an apple event for the first time in months to introduce iPods with cameras, and a new version of iTunes. Additionally they proclaimed an iPod with a new “larger” hard drive that’s the same size as it was originally released with and was subsequently withdrawn a year ago. Plus, obviously don’t you know that the iPhone is really the ultimatest gaming platform ever? Seriously, though, Apple, at least fifteen thousand of those games are either Mahjongg or Snake, and all but a couple dozen of the rest are as bad as the old Gameboy-era shovelware or other smartphone “games.” Bejeweled knock-offs.

Also today is an enormous day in the history of good music and electronics: An egregiously expensive box set of all of the Beatles songs “dropped” — finally remastered correctly after about 20 years of muddy CD transfers from the ’80s when sound techs couldn’t even make live performances on real drums not sound like some sort of awful synth kit. Of course, not to worry about the price: Amazon’s got it for 30% off MSRP if you’re willing to wait four weeks for it to ship, presumably from sub-Saharan Africa. Or Mars. Via donkey. With only three legs.

Also plus too, today marks another merger of technology with the Fab Four, as some sort of video game with plastic guitars and one of them looks like a really long violin was released. Here is a video from Cone Zone about it:


Okay but honestly, the whole point of me making this post is this because Anandtech released a new article today on the newest of intel’s confusingly-named processors. This one is called a Core i5. I have no idea what that means, honestly. I know there’s a Core i7, and a Core 2 Duo, and a Core Duo, and a Core 2 Solo, and a Core 2 Quad, and like a Core 2 Extreme, and probably Core 2 Mountain Dew Baja Blast. I enjoyed those heady days of the 286 and the 386 and the 486, because obviously the bigger the number the faster the processor. I mean, yeah, okay, so you had to watch out for the difference between the 486SX and the 486DX, because one didn’t have a math coprocessor. Which is critically important when coprocessing math. But I didn’t need to worry about whether the Core i465 Dual-Carriageway (intel codename: David Letterman) was faster or slower than the Core iAATB Han Solo.

But, you know, those old PCs weren’t the only things back then with turbo modes, either. I mean, there was KITT from Knight Rider. And of course, there was Turbo from American Gladiators, who usually destroyed people on the shooting gallery course with the hilariously-inaccurate weapons. But that Turbo pales in comparison to the Original Gangsta Turbo, by whom I mean Marcius Turbo, one of the greatest Roman generals and Emperor Hadrian’s lead praetorian.

]But the of course there’s the joystick in the old-school Battlestar Galactica fighter ships, that had a turbo button too. It could also, apparently, be used to send IMs. What else has a turbo mode and can send IMs, huh? That new Core i5th French Republic, that’s what. It’s almost like a return to the eighties. Except without the terrible hair. And the awful sounding drum-beats.

(For those of you not hip to obscure internet jokes from the year 2000, the title of this post is a reference to page 2 of the script-kiddie-parody JeffK’s overclocking guide.)