Between the App Store and the Adobe Creative Cloud, I freely delete large apps when they're not in daily use. For example, I use Adobe After Effects about once every three or four months. It's a 1.8 GB app, and my SSD is pretty small. So I install it when I need to use it and delete it when I'm done with that project.

It's pretty handy—I definitely wouldn't have done that in the old days of slow CD-ROM installers and serial number stickers.

You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. If you request access to the camera because you might need it in the future, you risk turning off a group of users who may rightly ask why their calendar app wants the camera.

I agree—in the past, I deleted apps that update very frequently, especially if I hadn't used them since the last update. But recently iOS has switched to automatic updates, and now I don't think about it.

I wonder if OS X will switch to auto updates. It's one thing to have a 10 MB Tweetbot update happen in the background, but something like Final Cut Pro might come with a 1GB update.

Well, I have four debit cards from the same bank (my account, joint account with my wife, and cards for two businesses), and they all look identical (the CC lettering is emboss-only). So Coin would be an improvement in a half-drunk scenario. :)

Sadly, none of my cards have chips, which is a bit of a hassle when traveling to Europe.

I doubt they would send the CC#s to the server, since it's not needed for the Coin to function. You swipe a card, it stores it locally, then sends it to the Coin via Bluetooth. Why would you need the internet for that?

People who have separate business and personal debit cards, to start.

And that is why they should have sold to FB and walked away. Let FB take the flak for adding ads to Snapchat. Now they're basically screwed. They either have to sell themselves for more than $3B to someone (who?), or take the company public.

Going public will be a nightmare for them, because investors and the board will demand that they have a hard plan for monetization. They'll need to immediately start running ads. When that doesn't work (it won't), they'll have to awkwardly insinuate themselves into other markets. It hasn't worked for Groupon.

Oh, I didn't realize you were the author of jor1k! It's amazing. Congratulations! I also didn't realize it was completely hand-written, rather than cross-compiled to asm.js. That is impressive.

It definitely seems like you've gained a lot of speed by hand-coding the emulator. Have you seen jsbochs? I'd be curious to test it against the Virtual x86 you linked to.

I just looked up what exact model my MBP was. It was a MC226LL/A, running a Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 at 2.8 GHz. That particular model averages about 2800, but there are scores in the 2500s, and there were lower end MBP 17s released that year.

So yes, the new iPhone does match a 2009 MBP 17. In any case, we agree that this is a fast phone (not to discount the new Nexus or other top-of-the-line Androids, which as fast or faster).

I think the thing with desktops / laptops is that we reached "way, way fast enough" a while back. The most processor-intensive thing most people will do is play 1080p content via YouTube or Netflix, which is a pretty low bar to clear. Couple that with declining computer sales at the same time as increasing smartphone sales, and it's definitely easy to see why the gap is narrowing. That's why I think it's inevitable that we'll get an ARM-based MacBook at some point.

Ugh, exactly—except Java runs in more browsers. I honestly don't know who NaCl is for, or what problem it's trying to solve that can't be addressed with asm.js.

It's possible to compile bochs to Javascript using Emscripten, so it's only a matter of time. If you do get Crisis running, let us know what kind of framerate you're getting. :)

I was mistaken—I misremembered the baseline. The Geekbench 3 baseline is 2500 for the single core score of a 2011 Mac Mini.

But my MacBook Pro 17 was a top of the line machine 4 years ago, not five. It's still pretty impressive that the 5s (and yes, top-end Android phones) can match it.

Not necessarily. Just start with an x86 emulator instead of an OpenRISC emulator.

Really, with Emscripten you can do just about anything. There was a classic Mac emulator posted about a month ago.

No need—it has already been done.

Oh, you're right—I had remembered the Geekbench 3 baseline (2500) as a 2011 Mac Mini multi-core, but the baseline is the single-core score.

In any case, 2500 is very impressive for a phone. I did a lot of 3D rendering and video editing on that old 17" MacBook Pro, and this phone is just as fast.