The Gigabyte Fight
I can’t remember the last time I watched a TV show actually ON a T.V. For that matter I can’t remember the last time I listened to a song on the radio. I don’t think I’ve seen or heard a commercial for quite some time. (sports not included) I wonder if advertisers are concerned about this. Then again, I’m sure there are enough people still adhering to the TV guide channel. I for one choose the internet. I just can’t wait until when printers can print (or produce) food, movies, books etc. Then again, I guess that might upset the delivery folk. UPS and all them might be a little miffed that there business was stolen by a futuristic printer/vending machine. I sometimes worry that companies that face extinction like that might get in the way of technological development because it suits their interest to maintain a certain level of invariability or lack of progress. A good example is say if we cured diabetes, the insulin manufacturers would probably go out of business. So they have some vested interest in people continuing to get sick. I also worry sometimes that computer companies, like Apple or Dell, are just slooowly releasing and/or updating their products to maximize the profits. (I guess this might be obvious) But i always have trouble with the fact that every six months or so they make a “breakthrough” that makes the computer go just a wee bit faster (but enough to warrant a new purchase). I mean, there is no way that they are making these breakthroughs along the type of time table that allows them to release something every six months or so. If they actually released things as they became available, they would really only do it once a year, or maybe once a week, who knows, but it would not be so predictable. Of course, doing things this way would really benefit us, the consumer, greatly because we would truly have the most up-to-date technology. What we would have would be the best possible thing that the company could produce. But for the producer, they would be all out of ideas, and actually have to wait until they made some legit breakthrough that they hadn’t been saving or releasing in pieces. Think about hard drive size. When I bought my computer 4 years ago it came with a 40gb hard drive. THAT was a lot (at the time). Now, my iPod has that much and my computer has 250GB! In 5 years, who knows it may even be as much as a terabyte. Well, why not now? Why doesn’t my iMac come with a standard 300GB hard drive? Is it because they don’t know how to do it? No. They know that right now, we expect that 250GB should be more than enough for our needs. But what happens next time they want to release a new iMac? They have to bump something up so why not make it the hard drive. They can say, “ooo look, a new 300GB hard drive, what a great new feature!” And oh look! More RAM! What fun! And of course, the jump in speed or memory isn’t that much, but just enough to warrant a new purchase. That last bit might have been a little misguided/confusing, but the point is that I think technology companies are taking advantage of us. My other theory is actually that hard drive size is going to go down in a couple years as the methods of digital compression get better and we no longer need monstrous hard drives, but that’s beside the point.
alex
