Photoshop on a 60p Chip: The Case for Simpler Computers

Forget the latest GPU launch. The most interesting computer story this week is a 60-pence chip running Photoshop. Not the full-color, 4K-editing Photoshop — but a 1990s-era Mac emulated on a Raspberry Pi RP2350, displaying a monochrome canvas and a stick-figure self-portrait. It's a stunt, but it's a stunt with a point.

The RP2350 is a dual-core 150MHz microcontroller that costs around 60p in single-unit quantities. Add a few peripherals and you have a mid-1990s Macintosh SE equivalent for the price of a coffee. Adjusted for inflation, the original SE cost £9,554 in today's money. That's a 15,000x price drop in three decades.

The author's point isn't that we should all ditch our MacBooks. It's that we've normalized a level of complexity and power consumption that most daily tasks don't need. WordPerfect, running on the same emulated Mac, was described as "surprisingly pleasant to type and concentrate with" — uncluttered, distraction-free, unlike a modern OS with its notifications and busy displays.

The hardware side is accessible: the Adafruit Fruit Jam board, ready-assembled with WiFi and IR, runs the pico-mac emulator with VGA output. The author walked through the setup: flash the image, load a disk image into Mini vMac, copy software, format an SD card, and deal with the quirks (like Mac's extra files breaking the boot).

Beyond the nostalgia, there's a serious question: what is the minimal viable modern computer? The author imagines a solar-powered, e-paper laptop with a calm interface, enough for reading, writing, and messaging — and notes that the modern web is too heavy for such a device, but a Gemini protocol browser or IRC client would work.

This isn't about rejecting progress. It's about recognizing that the trade-offs we make — power, complexity, e-waste — aren't inevitable. As the author puts it, "playing with some of these things can help us make computers which are kinder."