My path to the S8 replacement.

So my trusty Samsung S8 died the other day without any apparent reason. It was just charging and all of a sudden in the middle of the night it starts screaming (well beeping really loud) and the screen flashes. Half drunken I just pushed the power button to shut it off. That is the last thing I ever heard of it. It was dead from the next day. I have insurance, however because the phone is "too old", there is no way to have it repaired. The only option is a A42 as a replacement phone. This sounds good, as it is a new phone and thus gets a somewhat recent Android version, however being an "A" phone from Samsung - it lacks a lot of features that my S8 had. I was never a big fan of the "Samsung Experience" (quite an awful experience imho), but I found multiple work-arounds via 3rd party apps to make it bearable (Nova, other keyboard, Bixby-button work-around app, force uninstall some apps via USB).

That made think: What are the average peasants options?

I came up with these for me:

The somewhat affordable droid		Pros	Weight		Cons	Weight
Google Pixel 5a		No bloatware - no "custom" experience - no extra assistants	5		Relatively expensive for the average peasant	4
		Big modern screen	4		You submit to the digital overlords	1
		Good stereo sound - headphone jack	3		Big and chunky	2
Score		Fingerprint sensor that "just works"	5		No Wireless charging	2
16		Very good cameras	2		The side buttons are not very ergonomic	1
		Long software support expected	2
		USB-C	1
		5G support	1
		Multilingual (Keyboard, Interface, Assistant)	3
		Total	26		Total	10
The DoCoMo "replacement" for the S8		Pros	Weight		Cons	Weight
Samsung A42		Big modern screen	4		Bloatware OVERLOAD	5
		Headphone jack	1		Awful speaker - MONO	3
		Pretty good cameras	2		under screen fingerprint scanner (works about 50% of times)	2
Score		Cheap	4		There will be 0 feature updates / OS updates and security updates will be months late (I know from S8 experience)	2
-9.5		USB-C	1		Only Japanese and English of the relevant (for me) languages are supported. (No German, No Español, No Pусский)	3
		Pitty for non big IT company	0.5		No wireless charging	2
					The side buttons are not very ergonomic and "inverted"	1
					Extra malus for the system stability, random crashes and quirky work arounds to get basic apps like youtube and casting to work	3
					No 5G	1
		Total	12.5		Total	22
5 year old device from apple		Pros	Weight		Cons	Weight
Refurbished IPhone 8		Cheap	4		Small, but good screen	2
		Good stereo sound	2		No Headphone jack	1
		Still surprisingly good camera	2		Thunderbolt	1
Score		Fingerprint sensor that works best	5		used (battery not 100%, might not have as much life left as a new one)	4
12		Multilingual support (really good with Apple)	3		outdated specs (C/GPU slower than modern)	2
		Wireless charging	2		No 5G (of course)	1
		Long software support	2
		Ergonomic side buttons - quiet mode switch	1
		Great integration with Mac	2
		Total	23		Total	11

M1 Mac vs the beast

 It's time to upgrade the computer - aka the beast. Short story - the whole M1 concept convinced me and I got myself one of those M1 Macs. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and really can't complain. So now, the old beast has got to go. But before I pass on it's parts for recycling - I wanted to compare how this old, big and heavy Xeon electric heater compared to the M1 performance wise.

Compare the Geekbench5 results

	Single Core	Multi Core	OpenCL
The Beast	528	2816	21098
M1 Mac	1559	6080	17628

As the above table shows - the M1 is significantly faster than the beast. However, for gaming the beast has a small advantage  - mainly due to the somewhat modern GPU that I inherited from my nephew.

Obviously the M1 is better in so many other ways - energy efficiency - size - connectivity (yes - only 2 thunderbolt ports, but that's vs 0 on the beast) - noise (no fans vs 8 ). So yeah - another hurray for the Apple M1. The only thing I miss is my virtual machines - but I will come up with a solution for that (probably a new beast - headless - AMD based).

The beast - definition

Motherboard Information

Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. X58A-UD7

CPU Information

Intel Xeon X5650
1 Processor, 6 Cores, 12 Threads
GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 44 Stepping 2
Base Frequency 2.68 GHz
Maximum Frequency 3 GHz
Socket 1366 LGA
Codename Westmere-EP
L1 Instruction Cache 32.0 KB x 6
L1 Data Cache 32.0 KB x 6
L2 Cache 256 KB x 6
L3 Cache 12.0 MB x 1

Memory Information

16.00 GB 669 MHz TypeDDR3 SDRAM 2 Channels

OpenCL Information

AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series
Compute Units 16
Maximum Frequency 920 MHz
Device Memory 2.00 GB