The 6502 can't actually address more than that. The flash controller built into modern SD cards are also going to be significantly more powerful than the 6502. And I'm surprised you can even buy SD cards that small still!

That's a CompactFlash card. You often see them used in places where an IDE drive would have been.

Not much later there was the Radio Shack Model 100, and a bit after that the Gateway portables, and of course, eventually the NEC Ultralite and eventually the Sharp PC-6220 (which was available under two other brands as well).

Also, for those with deep pockets there were the GRiD laptops....

It weighed 23 pounds. It was approximately as portable as a tower PC. You could schlep one around, but it'd get heavy after a while.

It's traditional:) The original machines with simpler hardware largely converged to BASIC, so it's a nice benchmark for "is this a Real Computer™"

A lot of machines based on this CPU booted a ROM that ran a BASIC. It seems more of a challenge than running a Forth.

There used to be small IBM PC compatible "palmtop" computers capable of running for many days on a pair of AA batteries. HP 200LX was pretty cool. I think it had 80C186 running at 10 MHz or thereabouts, with 1MB of RAM, monochrome graphic LCD and PCMCIA cards for storage. Norton Commander and Turbo C run on it without any problems.

It's gotta be integrated together (and possibly be at a smaller process size) before you get all the power savings. If you have a real 6502, it has no internal RAM or cache, and you need to send power back and forth to the RAM chips. (I presume it's SRAM, but it could also be PSRAM)

If you ran a 6502 emulator on a cheap ARM SOC, it would be much lower power.

The display also takes power, quite a lot actually - 2-5W

The superpower of the PC over the previous generation was an order of magnitude more memory.

The machine itself was not necessarily faster, but the extra memory was a real game changer.

Even segmented like on the 8086 was a better solution than the banking options on 8 bit hardware. The ‘86 segment registers were much more flexible.

Long term, 640k may not have been enough, but in a text based environment, 640k is just so much more from both a data and code aspect to be really empowering.

256k and Lotus 1-2-3 was much more capable than anything an Apple could do. Having much more room for more capable code aspect as well as richer and more data.

You could do gymnastics with code overlays and data paging, but that was hard software to write and just painfully slow.

Extra memory just made things that much better.

I favor simpler machines, but that seems a bit of a stretch. Most people would like to communicate over the internet without every intermediate hop seeing their traffic (so, their emails, their chats, their credit card number, ...), therefore they want TLS which I don't think is practical on a 6502? To say nothing of watching videos and listening to music.

Those people you speak of, how big are their numbers all in all you think? And is that a subgroup of a subgroup?

Because most people I know certainly have different workloads and need their rendering as part of the work, not to decorate it nicely.

But for keeping a distraction free digital diary, it might be a nice device.

Zoom calls?

Maybe Bullshit Jobs was onto something, it seems that my entire work day consists of work decoration.