Retroid Pocket 5 vs 6 (2026): 70% Faster, $50 More

Retroid did a strange thing between September 2024 and January 2026. It built a handheld that is comprehensively better than the one before it, priced it thirty dollars higher, then raised that price by twenty more before most people had finished reading the reviews. The result is a comparison that looks trivial on paper — newer is faster, faster is dearer — and turns out to be one of the more genuinely difficult buying decisions in the Android emulation space. This is the long version of why.

We are comparing the Retroid Pocket 5 and the Retroid Pocket 6 as they actually exist in mid-2026: not as launch-day press releases, not as the confident bullet points of an affiliate blog, but as two objects you can hold, charge, and be quietly disappointed by. Before we start, one piece of housekeeping, because half the internet has it wrong.

The Thirty-Dollar Argument

The premise, corrected

You will read, repeatedly, that the Retroid Pocket 5 launched in late 2023 at $199. The price is right. The year is a fabrication that has been copy-pasted across enough comparison articles to acquire the sheen of fact. The Pocket 5 shipped in September 2024. The confusion is understandable — the Retroid Pocket 4 and 4 Pro were the 2023 products — but understandable is not the same as correct, and a review that cannot date its own subject has no business ranking its silicon. We mention this now because it changes the frame: the Pocket 6 is not a three-year iteration on a stale design. It is a roughly sixteen-month successor, and sixteen months in Qualcomm's calendar is one full generational leap. That is the whole story compressed into a sentence.

What a year of silicon actually bought

The 6 upgrades nearly everything that carries a number. The chipset jumps from the Snapdragon 865 to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The display doubles its refresh rate from 60Hz to 120Hz. Memory advances from LPDDR4x to LPDDR5x. The battery grows from 5,000mAh to 6,000mAh and finally learns to fast-charge at 27W. Wi-Fi 6 becomes Wi-Fi 7. What it does not buy you is a redesign, a bigger or sharper screen, or a single feature that did not exist in some form on a competitor's spec sheet already. The 6 is the 5 with a better engine and a heavier body, and whether that is worth the money is a question that depends almost entirely on what you intend to emulate.

The one-paragraph verdict, for the impatient

If your library tops out at PlayStation 1, PSP, Dreamcast, and the 8- and 16-bit back catalogue — and for most people it quietly does — the Pocket 5 on sale is the smarter purchase and it is not close. If you want GameCube and Wii at upscaled resolution, PS2 that holds its frame rate, 3DS without apology, or any Switch emulation at all, the Pocket 6 is the only one of the two that clears the bar, and the extra fifty dollars is the price of admission. Everyone else is arguing about the middle. The rest of this piece is the middle.

The Spec Sheet, Line by Line

The table, without the marketing gloss

Here is the honest accounting. Note the rows people skip: weight, charging, and the launch date that keeps getting mangled. Note also that the Pocket 6's price has already moved once since it shipped, which is why two numbers appear in the price row and only the second one matters if you are buying today.

Where the brief lies to you

Three specification claims float around these devices that do not survive contact with the actual hardware. The first is the launch date, already dispatched. The second is memory: you will see the Pocket 5 credited with LPDDR5. It has LPDDR4x. The listings confirm it, the benchmarks are consistent with it, and the jump to LPDDR5x is one of the genuine reasons the 6 feels quicker in menus and shader compilation. The third is Bluetooth. A widely-circulated spec sheet gives the Pocket 5 Bluetooth 5.4 and the Pocket 6 Bluetooth 5.3, which would make the newer device a downgrade — an absurdity that should have triggered a second look. The reality is mundane: the 5 runs Bluetooth 5.1, the 6 runs 5.3, and the newer radio is, predictably, the better one.

The rows that decide it

Ignore the hero numbers for a moment and look at the quiet rows. Fast charging: the 6 has it, the 5 does not, and if you have ever tried to top up a handheld in the twenty minutes before a train, you know that 27W is not a luxury spec. Weight: the 6 is roughly forty grams heavier, which sounds trivial and is not, over a two-hour session, for smaller hands. Video-out: both do DisplayPort over USB-C, and — contrary to another persistent myth — the Pocket 5 is not missing this feature; it simply tops out at 4K30 undocked where the 6 reaches 4K60. If you plan to dock either of these to a television, both will oblige. The 6 just does it in a higher gear.

Silicon: 865 vs 8 Gen 2

The Geekbench gap is bigger than they told you

The headline the manufacturer and its echo chamber settled on is a “50% increase in raw power.” It is a strange number to choose, because it undersells the product. In Geekbench 6 single-core, the Pocket 5's Snapdragon 865 posts 1,176; the Pocket 6's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 posts 1,985. That is a 69% gain, which rounds honestly to ~70%, not fifty. Multi-threaded and aggregate synthetic scores tell the same story more dramatically: AnTuTu-class aggregate benchmarks land near 1.2 million for the 6 against roughly 668,000 for the 5 — call it a clean doubling. Whoever decided 50% was the safe marketing figure was, for once, lowballing their own hardware.

The GPU is the part that actually matters

Single-core CPU performance is what recompiles your shaders and drives the interpreter loops in older emulators, and the 70% figure lives there. But emulation of sixth-generation consoles is a GPU-bound problem the moment you turn on upscaling, and here the gap is wider still. The Adreno 650 in the Pocket 5 gives way to the Adreno 740 in the Pocket 6, and the practical throughput roughly doubles. This is why the two devices draw a line precisely at the PS2/GameCube tier: below it, the CPU does the heavy lifting and both chips are comfortable; at and above it, the GPU decides whether you get native resolution at full speed, a 2x or 3x upscale, or a stutter. The 865 can reach some of those systems. The 8 Gen 2 can reach them and then render them at a resolution the original hardware never dreamed of.

What a node shrink does for your hands

There is a thermodynamic subplot here that the spec sheet buries. The 865 is a 7-nanometre part from 2020; the 8 Gen 2 is a 4-nanometre part from late 2022. The newer process does more work per watt, which means the Pocket 6 can sustain higher clocks before it throttles and before it cooks your palms. In practice the 6 runs its harder workloads without the thermal cliff the 5 hits in demanding GameCube titles. That efficiency is also why the 6 can carry a 6,000mAh battery and still post competitive endurance despite pushing a 120Hz panel and a much hungrier GPU. If you want the full walkthrough on squeezing frames out of either chip, our guide to installing and tuning RetroArch cores covers the per-core settings that turn a benchmark number into an actual playable frame rate.

The Panel: 60Hz vs 120Hz

Same glass, different metabolism

On paper the two screens are twins: 5.5 inches, 1920x1080, OLED. Retroid did not change the size, the resolution, or the fundamental panel technology between generations, and anyone hoping the 6 would grow to six inches or drop to a more emulation-friendly aspect ratio will be disappointed. What changed is the refresh rate. The Pocket 5's panel runs at 60Hz. The Pocket 6's runs at 120Hz. That single number is the most divisive spec on either device, because its value depends entirely on what you play.

What 120Hz actually buys — and what it doesn't

For emulation, 120Hz is frequently useless and occasionally transformative. Useless, because the overwhelming majority of the systems you will run were locked to 60Hz, 50Hz, or the strange fractional refresh rates of the CRT era; a Super Nintendo game does not care that your panel can draw twice as fast, and forcing it to only invites tearing and judder unless your frame pacing is immaculate. Transformative, because native Android games, PSP titles patched for higher frame rates, Dreamcast games running unlocked, and the general act of navigating a 120Hz Android UI all feel conspicuously smoother. If you bought a Retroid to play mobile ports and modern indies alongside your ROMs, 120Hz is a real upgrade. If you bought it to run a curated set of 16-bit classics with perfect scanline shaders, you will set it to 60Hz on the first day and never think about it again.

The reviewer who could not fault it

RetroDodo's Brandon Saltalamacchia, who has handled more of these devices than is healthy, was unusually unguarded about the Pocket 6's display in his 8.4/10 review, calling it a “beautiful display, one I simply cannot fault,” with “no screen tearing, no light bleed, great brightness adjustments.” That is high praise from a critic whose entire brand is finding the fault. The Pocket 5's 60Hz OLED is the same excellent glass with a slower heartbeat; it was never the weak point of that device and it is not the reason to skip it. The panel, in other words, is a genuine but narrow win for the 6 — real if you play modern software, close to irrelevant if you live in the fifth console generation and earlier.

The Emulation Ceiling

Where the Pocket 5 tops out

The Snapdragon 865 remains, in 2026, a completely serviceable emulation engine for the bulk of gaming history. Everything from the NES through the 16-bit era, PlayStation 1, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, and PSP runs at or near full speed with the right cores and a little patience. It reaches into PlayStation 2 and GameCube, but this is where the caveats begin: the 865 can play a lot of PS2 and GameCube, but it plays it at native resolution, with per-game tinkering, and with a meaningful list of titles that stutter or break. For the definitive account of what PS2 emulation demands of a chip, the Hardcore Gaming 101 history of the PlayStation 2 is a useful reminder of just how strange and hostile that console's Emotion Engine architecture was to emulate in the first place. The 5 is a fifth-generation-and-below machine that occasionally guests in the sixth. That is not an insult. For a great many buyers it is the exact ceiling they need.

Where the Pocket 6 tops out — and where the marketing lies

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 changes the ceiling, not the sky. It handles PlayStation 2 at 1.5x and 2x native resolution — Saltalamacchia's review confirms it holds those upscales well — and it drives Dolphin to run GameCube at 3x native resolution, which is the sort of thing that makes a twenty-year-old game look startlingly modern. It brings 3DS into comfortable territory and, crucially, it opens the door to select Nintendo Switch titles, which the 865 simply cannot attempt. That is the real jump: the 6 is a sixth-generation machine that upscales cleanly and pokes its head into the eighth.

What it is not — despite a claim making the rounds that the Pocket 6 runs “nearly all PC ports from the PS3 and Xbox 360 eras” — is a seventh-generation emulator. RPCS3 and Xbox 360 emulation on the 8 Gen 2 are a slideshow outside of a handful of trivial cases. Reviewers are blunt about this: if PS3 or Xbox 360 emulation is your priority, this is not your device, and no firmware update will change the underlying arithmetic. Anyone selling you the Pocket 6 as a PS3 machine is either mistaken or hoping you are.

The compatibility matrix, without the asterisks buried

Here is the practical map of the two devices across the systems that matter, based on 2026 testing. Read the PS2 and GameCube rows carefully — that is the entire fifty-dollar argument, rendered as a table.

SYSTEM              RP5 (SD 865)         RP6 (8 Gen 2)
-----------------   ------------------   ------------------
NES / SNES / GB     full speed           full speed
Genesis / TG-16     full speed           full speed
GBA / DS            full speed           full speed
PlayStation 1       full speed           full speed
Sega Saturn         full speed           full speed
Nintendo 64         near-full            full speed
Dreamcast           full speed           full speed
PSP                 full speed           full / overclocked
PlayStation 2       playable, native*    1.5x-2x upscale
GameCube            playable, native*    3x upscale
Wii                 hit or miss          playable
Nintendo 3DS        playable             upscaled
Nintendo Switch     no                   select titles
PS3 / Xbox 360      no                   no (ignore the ads)

* native res, per-game tuning, notable exceptions

If you would rather sidestep Android entirely and run a dedicated emulation OS on comparable hardware, our walkthrough on downloading and flashing Batocera is the cleaner path for people who want a console-like front end instead of a phone that happens to have buttons.

Five Ways to Hold It

The casual and the commuter

The casual player — someone who wants to replay Chrono Trigger, dip into Pokémon, and run a few PS1 RPGs — is the buyer for whom the Pocket 5 was practically designed. Nothing in that library troubles the 865, the 60Hz screen is perfect for 60Hz-native games, and every dollar spent on the 6 is a dollar spent on headroom that never gets used. Buy the 5, buy it on sale, spend the savings on a decent case and a 256GB card.

The mobile commuter, who plays in fifteen-minute bursts on trains and in waiting rooms, should look harder at the Pocket 6 — not for the power but for the 27W fast charging and the larger battery. The ability to reclaim a meaningful charge in a short window is worth more to this person than three extra GameCube frames. Sleep/resume reliability and quick-charge turnaround are the specs that survive contact with a real commute.

The completionist and the speedrunner

The completionist, chasing 100% runs across long games, cares about two things: save-state reliability and the ability to run the higher-effort systems where the big time-sink games live. If their backlog is PS2 and GameCube — the Persona 4s, the Metroid Primes, the sprawling sixth-gen epics — the Pocket 6 is the correct tool, because native-resolution stutter is exactly the kind of friction that turns an eighty-hour game into an abandoned one. Both devices handle save states identically well; the difference is whether the game runs smoothly enough to finish.

The speedrunner is a special case and, honestly, neither of these is the ideal instrument — serious runs demand frame-perfect input latency and deterministic timing that emulation on Android does not guarantee. But if a runner insists on a handheld for practice, the Pocket 6's 120Hz panel and faster SoC shave input latency in native and higher-refresh contexts. For anything run at a locked 60Hz — which is most of the canon — the 5 and 6 are effectively tied, and the runner should be practicing on original hardware or a PC anyway.

The co-op night and the collector

The co-op couch player, docking to a television with a second controller for four-player Mario Kart or GoldenEye, is well served by both, but the Pocket 6's 4K60 video-out and pairing of Bluetooth 5.3 make it the smoother living-room citizen. The Pocket 5 will do the same job at 4K30 undocked or 4K60 through the official dock; the experience is a notch behind, not absent. If your idea of a good evening is emulated split-screen on a big panel, the 6 earns its keep here in a way it does not on a train.

The collector-tinkerer, finally, who unlocks bootloaders, dual-boots Linux, and treats the device as a platform rather than an appliance, will find the Pocket 5 the more interesting canvas simply because it has been in the wild longer and has deeper community image support, including the Linux route the 6 has not yet fully grown. This is the one scenario where the older device is arguably the better one, because maturity beats horsepower when you are the one writing the config files.

The Field: Odin, G2, Ghosts

The comparison, across the aisle

Neither Retroid exists in a vacuum, and the most damning comparisons for both come from inside and adjacent to their own price bracket. Here is where they sit against the peers that matter in 2026.

The Odin problem, which is a real problem

The single most inconvenient fact for the Pocket 6 is that AYN's Odin 2 Portal starts at the same $249 with the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, but wraps it in a 7-inch 1080p 120Hz OLED and an 8,000mAh battery. For the identical outlay you can have the identical brain in a substantially larger screen with a third more battery capacity. The Pocket 6's counterargument is pocketability — 5.5 inches genuinely fits where 7 inches does not, and 320 grams beats the Odin's heft — but this is a real trade the buyer must make consciously, not a slam dunk for Retroid. If you never leave the couch, the Odin's screen is the better use of $249. If the device lives in a jacket pocket, the Retroid wins on the only axis that matters there.

The G2 that ate the 5

Below both sits the ghost: the Retroid Pocket G2, discontinued in March 2026, which spent its life quietly cannibalizing the Pocket 5 from underneath at $219. HandheldRank's Phil Retro put the 5's predicament with unusual clarity in his 2026 reassessment: “The problem isn't the device; it's the neighborhood it lives in.” The 5 is, in his phrase, a “sale-only device… outpaced by its own shadow,” squeezed between cheaper Retroids below and the faster 6 above. It is a remarkable thing to say about a machine that, as he also concedes, “in a vacuum… is still a fantastic gaming machine.” The vacuum is the problem. There isn't one. If you want to understand how much cheaper the floor of this category goes before quality collapses, our review of the Miyoo Mini Plus maps the sub-$100 end of the same street.

Price and the RAM Tax

The pricing table, as of mid-2026

Pricing is where this comparison stopped being simple. The Pocket 6 you can buy today is not the Pocket 6 that was announced, and the configuration you may have read about no longer exists. Here is the current state of play.

Why the 6 costs $249 now, not $229

The Pocket 6 launched at $229 and did not stay there. Around the start of March 2026, Retroid raised the base price to roughly $249 — the goRetroid storefront has hovered near $244–249 — and attributed the increase to a spike in LPDDR5x memory costs. This is not a Retroid-specific story; DRAM pricing has been volatile enough across 2025–2026 that the same pressure shows up in unrelated corners of the industry, a dynamic we traced in our look at how the Switch 2 and Steam Deck are pricing against each other. The upshot for you is arithmetic: the delta over the Pocket 5 was $30 at launch and is closer to $50 now. Every recommendation in this article assumes the $249 reality, because that is what you will pay.

The discontinued 12GB tier, and what it signals

The quiet casualty of the RAM spike was the 12GB/256GB Pocket 6, which sold briefly at $259 and was retired in the same March reshuffle. The practical loss is small — 8GB of LPDDR5x is ample for everything the 8 Gen 2 can emulate, and 12GB was always more future-proofing than necessity — but the signal is worth reading. When a manufacturer kills its own halo configuration within weeks of shipping and raises the price of the survivor, it is telling you that its margins are thin and its component costs are moving against it. That is not a reason to avoid the 6. It is a reason not to wait for a sale that is unlikely to come. Retroid handhelds do not discount like Steam hardware; the price you see is, more often than not, the price.

The Law: What Goes On It

Connectix, and why the box itself is legal

An emulation handheld is a legal object. This bears stating plainly, because the hobby is haunted by the vague sense that the entire enterprise is contraband. It is not. The foundational text is Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp., 203 F.3d 596 (9th Cir. 2000), in which the Ninth Circuit held that Connectix's reverse-engineering of the PlayStation BIOS to build its Virtual Game Station emulator was fair use. The court called the result “modestly transformative” and found the intermediate copying “necessary” — language that, a quarter-century later, still shelters every emulator core running on your Retroid. The device is legal. The software that emulates a console is legal. This was settled while the PlayStation 2 was still new.

The ROM you didn't rip

What is not settled — or rather, is settled unfavorably — is the ROM. An emulator is a legal engine with nothing legal to run unless you supply the fuel yourself, and “yourself” is the operative word. Downloading a game you do not own is straightforward copyright infringement, no matter how old the game, no matter that it is out of print, no matter that the publisher is defunct. Abandonware is a community norm, not a legal category. The clean path is to dump your own cartridges and discs — which is why hardware like the tools in our cartridge-dumping walkthrough exists — and even then the personal-backup defense is shakier than the forums admit, because the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions can make the act of ripping a protected disc unlawful even where owning the backup would not be. The law here is a maze, and The Machine's advice is boring: own the media, dump it yourself, and do not distribute.

BIOS files and the ghosts of Bleem

The murkiest corner is the BIOS. Several systems — PlayStation, Saturn, Dreamcast — emulate best or only with a copy of the original console's firmware, and that firmware is copyrighted code that is not yours to download even when the emulator politely asks for it. The historically literate will remember Bleem!, the commercial PlayStation emulator that won its courtroom fights against Sony in the wake of Sega v. Accolade's reverse-engineering logic and then died anyway, bankrupted by the legal costs of winning. It is the perfect parable for this hobby: you can be entirely in the right and still lose everything to the process. Preservation, as chroniclers like the Digital Antiquarian have argued, is a genuine cultural good — the emulators and disk archives that keep dead software playable are doing work the copyright holders abandoned. The law has simply never fully caught up to that argument. Buy the handheld with a clear conscience. Fill it with a careful one.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy the Pocket 6 if…

Reduced to recommendations, the decision resolves into a short list of buyer profiles. Buy the Retroid Pocket 6 if any of the following is true. One: your library centers on GameCube, Wii, PS2, or 3DS and you want them upscaled and stutter-free, not merely “playable.” Two: you want to run at least some Switch titles, which the 865 cannot attempt at all. Three: you play modern Android games and mobile ports alongside emulation and will actually use the 120Hz panel and 27W charging. If you fit any of these, the $249 is not a premium; it is the entry fee for the only one of the two devices that does the job.

Buy the Pocket 5 if…

Buy the Retroid Pocket 5 — ideally on sale, ideally near $150 — if your emulation ceiling is PlayStation 1, PSP, Dreamcast, N64, and the entire glorious 8- and 16-bit archive, which for most human beings it genuinely is. Buy it also if you are a tinkerer who values the more mature community and the Linux images the 6 has not yet earned, or if you simply refuse to pay 8 Gen 2 money for a 5.5-inch screen when the systems you love ran fine on hardware from four years ago. The 5 is not a compromise for this buyer. It is the correct answer, and the 6 would be a waste.

Buy neither if…

Buy neither in two cases. If you want the same 8 Gen 2 power on a bigger screen with more battery and you never leave the couch, the AYN Odin 2 Portal is the same $249 spent more generously — get that instead. And if your real dream is PS3, Xbox 360, or serious PC emulation, stop shopping in this price bracket entirely; the Steam Deck OLED at $549 is the honest floor for that ambition, and no Android handheld at any price in 2026 will get you there. Wanting the wrong device badly does not make it the right one.

The Ledger: Pros and Cons

Retroid Pocket 6

The strengths are real and the weaknesses are mostly about value rather than execution.

• Pro: ~70% faster single-core, roughly double the GPU — the only one of the two that upscales GameCube (3x) and PS2 (1.5–2x) cleanly.
• Pro: 120Hz AMOLED that reviewers struggle to fault; 27W fast charging; 6,000mAh; 4K60 video-out; true analog triggers.
• Pro: Reaches select Switch titles the 865 cannot touch.
• Con: $249 now, not $229 — and the Odin 2 Portal matches its silicon at the same price with a far bigger screen.
• Con: No design innovation over the 5; same size, same resolution; heavier at ~320g.
• Con: Cannot emulate PS3/Xbox 360 despite what the ads imply; 12GB tier already discontinued.

Retroid Pocket 5

An excellent device wearing the wrong price tag on a shelf full of better-positioned neighbors.

• Pro: Runs everything through PS1/PSP/Dreamcast/N64 at full speed; superb 1080p OLED; the deeper, more mature community and Linux support.
• Pro: Frequently on sale near $150, which makes it one of the great value handhelds in the category.
• Con: A “sale-only device,” in HandheldRank's phrase, cannibalized from both directions; poor value at the full $199.
• Con: No fast charging; only reaches PS2/GameCube at native resolution with per-game tinkering.
• Con: 60Hz panel and Wi-Fi 6 now look dated next to the 6's numbers.

The shared sins

Both devices inherit the same two frustrations, and neither generation fixed them. The first is that they are Android handhelds, which means setup is a chore of sideloaded emulators, front-ends, and per-core configuration that no amount of polish fully hides — a phone's complexity in a console's body. The second is thermal and ergonomic: a 5.5-inch slab is a compromise between pocketability and comfort that pleases no one completely, and the demanding workloads that justify the 6 are exactly the ones that warm the shell. These are category problems, not Retroid problems. But a ledger that only lists the wins is a brochure, and The Machine does not write brochures.

The Verdict

The Pocket 6: excellent, uninspired, worth it for the right library

The Retroid Pocket 6 is the best pure emulation handheld Retroid has made, and it is faintly boring, and both things are true at once. It does the hard thing — delivers a premium 8 Gen 2 spec sheet at a price that historically meant disappointment — and it does almost nothing to surprise you. Saltalamacchia's verdict is the correct one: “a remarkable $250 Android handheld,” where “the only disappointment comes from knowing that Retroid can do better here.” For the buyer whose backlog is GameCube, Wii, PS2, and 3DS, it is the obvious purchase and the fifty-dollar premium evaporates the first time Metroid Prime runs at 3x native without a hitch. Score: 8/10. It loses points not for what it is but for what sits beside it at the same price.

The Pocket 5: a great machine in the wrong year

The Retroid Pocket 5 is the harder score, because the number depends on the sticker. In a vacuum, as Phil Retro concedes, it is “still a fantastic gaming machine,” and for the enormous population of players who never emulate above PS1 and PSP it remains completely sufficient in 2026. But it does not live in a vacuum; it lives in a neighborhood with a cheaper Retroid below it and a faster one above, and at the full $199 that context is merciless. Score: 6.5/10 at MSRP — 8/10 the day it drops to $150. Few devices have a rating that swings so hard on a discount, and few buying decisions are so cleanly solved by simply waiting for the sale that always eventually comes.

The Machine's final word

So: 70% faster, $50 more, and a hard ceiling that neither device will ever break through no matter what the marketing promises about the seventh console generation. If you emulate above the PS2 line, buy the 6 and do not agonize over the Odin — pocketability is a real feature and $249 is a fair price for it. If you emulate below that line, buy the 5 on sale and put the eighty dollars you saved toward media you actually own and dump yourself, because a legal engine deserves legal fuel. The one thing you should not do is buy the Pocket 5 at full price or buy the Pocket 6 expecting a PS3. Both are mistakes the spec sheet was trying to warn you about — you just had to read the rows nobody quotes.