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> we would have an iPod with 160TB of storage by 2017, but of course we didn’t. 160 Tera Bytes to store what? I probably would never listen to more than a fe

> we would have an iPod with 160TB of storage by 2017, but of course we didn’t. 160 Tera Bytes to store what? I probably would never listen to more than a few GBs of high fidelity music in my life time. Why would anyone keep investing in exponential growth or even linear growth beyond a point of utility and economic sense. This can be extrapolated to miniaturization also ... why is a personal computer not smaller than my fingertip already?

roenxi 2y ago
Arguing from a lack of personal imagination is not a strong position. It is the people with ideas who are responsible for finding uses for resources. They've succeeded every other time they were given an excess of storage space; I'm still not sure how I manage to use up all the TB of storage I've bought over the years. Maybe we store a local copy of a personal universe for you to test ideas out in, I dunno. There'll be something. > I probably would never listen to more than a few GBs of high fidelity music in my life time. Well from that I'd predict that uses would be found other than music. My "music" folder has made it up to 50GB because I've taken to storing a few movies in it. But games can quickly add up to TB of media if the space is available.
- albert_e 2y ago
  Storage did become cheaper and more compact. Both flash drives and SD cards offer this functionality and showed significant improvements. Whatever innovative use cases people could come up with to store TBs of data in physical portable format is served by these. And along the way the world has shifted to storing data more cheaply and conveniently on the cloud instead. IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing (for average global consumer) and proprietary connectors and software would not have made a compelling economic case to over-spec it in hopes that some unforseen killer use case might emerge from the market.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing... Well, yes but if we're literally talking the iPod, it has been discontinued. Because it has been replaced by devices - with larger storage, I might note - that do more. I'm working from the assumption that as far as Brooks was talking iPhones basically are iPods. This is why the argument that the tech capped out seems suspect to me. The tech kept improving exponentially and we're still seeing storage space in the iPod niche doubling every few years.
hanche 2y ago
> I probably would never listen to more than a few GBs of high fidelity music in my life time. FWIW, I currently have about 100 GB of music on my phone. And that is in a fairly high quality AAC format. Converted to lossless, it might be about five times that size? I don't even think of my music collection as all that extensive. But still, 160 TB would be a different ball game altogether. For sure, there is no mass market for music players with that sort of capacity. (Especially now that streaming is taking over.)
- grugagag 2y ago
  You have a collection. Do or will you ever listen to it all end to end? I doubt it.
  - hanche 2y ago
    Of course not. I must have misunderstood what you meant, sorry.

roenxi 2y ago

Arguing from a lack of personal imagination is not a strong position. It is the people with ideas who are responsible for finding uses for resources. They've succeeded every other time they were given an excess of storage space; I'm still not sure how I manage to use up all the TB of storage I've bought over the years. Maybe we store a local copy of a personal universe for you to test ideas out in, I dunno. There'll be something. > I probably would never listen to more than a few GBs of high fidelity music in my life time. Well from that I'd predict that uses would be found other than music. My "music" folder has made it up to 50GB because I've taken to storing a few movies in it. But games can quickly add up to TB of media if the space is available.

albert_e 2y ago
Storage did become cheaper and more compact. Both flash drives and SD cards offer this functionality and showed significant improvements. Whatever innovative use cases people could come up with to store TBs of data in physical portable format is served by these. And along the way the world has shifted to storing data more cheaply and conveniently on the cloud instead. IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing (for average global consumer) and proprietary connectors and software would not have made a compelling economic case to over-spec it in hopes that some unforseen killer use case might emerge from the market.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing... Well, yes but if we're literally talking the iPod, it has been discontinued. Because it has been replaced by devices - with larger storage, I might note - that do more. I'm working from the assumption that as far as Brooks was talking iPhones basically are iPods. This is why the argument that the tech capped out seems suspect to me. The tech kept improving exponentially and we're still seeing storage space in the iPod niche doubling every few years.

hanche 2y ago

> I probably would never listen to more than a few GBs of high fidelity music in my life time. FWIW, I currently have about 100 GB of music on my phone. And that is in a fairly high quality AAC format. Converted to lossless, it might be about five times that size? I don't even think of my music collection as all that extensive. But still, 160 TB would be a different ball game altogether. For sure, there is no mass market for music players with that sort of capacity. (Especially now that streaming is taking over.)

grugagag 2y ago
You have a collection. Do or will you ever listen to it all end to end? I doubt it.
- hanche 2y ago
  Of course not. I must have misunderstood what you meant, sorry.