The Ware for June 2023 is a Sony TR-733 “7-transistor radio” from the mid 1960’s. I’ll give the prize to Pedro Rodrigues, because even though the model number isn’t correct, as far as I can tell the portion of the electronics shown is identical between the TR-729 and the TR-733. Congrats, email me for your prize!

The main differences between the two models seem to be cosmetic; the TR-733 has a round speaker grill and a blue plastic case, whereas the TR-729 has a rectangular grill and a white plastic case. I’m not sure what the story is behind introducing a model revision with such subtle differences, but I suppose it’s probably either linked to some sort of market differentiation (e.g. regional or price discrimination), and/or a cost-down or engineering fix to improve a design issue.

It’s funny to think that around 60 years ago, we could count the number of transistors in a flagship product on our fingers. Now our handheld gadgets have … about 10 orders of magnitude more transistors in them (an Apple A14 has 11.8 billion transistors and that’s just the CPU; the ~100’s GiB of FLASH memory also counts as transistors).

The ware for June 2023 is shown below.

This ware should be possible to match to an exact model number, based on this photo alone — if not simply because in its era there were fewer consumer electronics devices to choose from.

I tested the image against Google Image search and this particular crop of the ware seems to foil any exact matches. However, if you do manage to find an exact hit with a simple image search engine query, I’d be curious to know what you’re using, so I can use this to test against future wares.

According to the original owner, this ware cost almost a month’s wages back when it was purchased!

Last month’s ware is the Automatic AUT-450C “Connected Car Assistant” (OBD-II code scanner and GPS tracker with cellular, WiFi, and Bluetooth connectivity). The company went out of business shortly after the start of the pandemic.

Here’s some more views of the ware — I had left out some boards and views that made it a bit more challenging to identify, perhaps a bit too challenging.

The hole cut-out that many assumed was a camera was actually a supercap — it is rated for 3.0V at 1F. Based on its direct connection to a switching regulator I’m guessing it’s there to coordinate safe shut-down of the SoC, and not for RTC maintenance.

It’s a bit tough to pick a winner this month. Both Cody and Adrian shared detailed explanations, but I think overall Adrian might have gotten closest first, with a link to a fleet tracking device. I think the device is pretty close to what you’d have in a fleet tracker, but with a B2C business model instead of a B2B business model. Congrats Adrian, email me for your prize!

The Ware for May 2023 is shown below.

This is yet another fine ware contributed by jackw01. I suspect this one may be guessed quite quickly, but I’ll leave one hint anyways: there is more than one board in this assembly.

Hint #2

June 15 2023 — No correct guesses yet, yet it’s difficult to give another hint without totally giving it away. But, here goes! This is another one of the boards in the assembly:

The ware for April 2023 is an X-rite DTP22 spectrophotometer. This one almost made it through the month without being guessed, but congrats to cpresser for figuring it out in the last week! email me for your prize.

Here’s some more context images of the ware. The colored filter disk is quite pretty, but if I had included it in the original photoset the function of the ware would have been a bit too … transparent.

Thanks again to artemb for contributing such an interesting ware!