Red Giant Mojo 
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RRP: $99.00
1988 vs. 2008: A tech retrospective
Think the iPhone is pricey? The cool cell phone of 1988 cost $4382 in today's dollars. A 150MB hard drive? $8755. Take a trip with us down memory lane, and you'll never whine about the price of a gadget again.
Portable Audio Players
1988: Sony Discman D-10
•Price: $350 ($613 adjusted for inflation)
•Format: CD-audio
•Capacity: 650MB or 70 minutes
•Battery life: 4 hours
•Weight: 14 ounces
2008: Apple iPod Touch
•Price: $299
•Formats: AAC/MP3/AIFF/WAV/ lossless audio
•Capacity: 8GB or 87 hours
•Battery life: 22 hours of audio or 5 hours video
•Weight: 4.2 ounces
The New York Times' Hans Fantel of rhapsodized about the wondrous Sony D-10 in 1987: "This complex piece of laserized machinery easily fits into the pocket of my raincoat. And when it isn't raining, I just sling it over a shoulder with a strap...the new elastic mounting of the laser makes it less likely to skip when bounced or jostled in portable use."
Though the iPod Touch offers skipless playback, thanks to its solid-state memory, portable audio quality has actually declined from what it was in the Discman years, because formats like MP3 and AAC compress files at the expense of sonic detail.
But the Touch's many other features — including video playback, touchscreen operation, and wireless e-mail and Web browsing — tip the value equation in its favor.
In the future we'll probably get our portable audio via subscription and live Web streaming. Who needs to carry around a library when you can access any song you want from the Internet cloud?
References
- 15 percent of U.S. households
- other home systems were popular as well
- Tandy 1000 TL
- Bookshelf
- HP Pavilion Elite m9100z
- The Next 25 Years in Tech
- fold-up screens
- 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
- yottabyte and gibibyte
- Canon Pixma iP3500
- "fabbers"
- CompuServe
- Motorola DynaTAC 8000X
- and drug dealers
- Google's Android initiative
- 35-inch Diamond Vision television in 1985
- 50-inch Panasonic TH-50PZ77U
- the average TV screen size will have increased to 60 inches
- filmlike analog quality to the sometimes blocky and banded DVD format
- Pioneer still makes combination Laserdisc/DVD players
- at least until Super Hi-Vision comes along
- rhapsodized about the wondrous Sony D-10 in 1987
- the iPod Touch
- declined from what it was in the Discman
- EOS 650 was the first in Canon's EOS line
- lives on in the EOS Digital Rebel XTi
- Now that parity has been achieved
- knocked the bottom out of the film market
- full-frame image sensors
- Nintendo NES was a great value
- Nintendo Wii
- its advanced Cell
- The Legend of Zelda
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
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