You probably take your iPod for granted at this point. I mean, iPods have been out for years now and they're pretty ubiquitous. There's nothing crazy or novel about carrying a few thousand songs around with you anymore. But do you remember when MP3 players first hit the scene? No? Well, it was 10 years ago this month, and the first one ever was the MPMan F10.
Loaded up with a whopping 32MB of flash storage, or about enough for a half-dozen songs, this bad boy connected to your computer via a painfully-slow parallel cable. The price for this gem? $250. How far we've come in a decade! The largest iPod is 160GB, or approximately 5,000 times as big. Where will we be in another 10 years? Only time will tell, but my guess is that we'll have even bigger players. You can hold me to that.
Via Reg Hardware
editor@dvice.com
By murray at 6:18 PM ON 03/11/08
20 terabytes of HD, or 2 terabytes of flash should be possible in 10 years, but I'm not sure we'll need that much in a mediaplayer. Still, somebody will probably want it.
By Tony at 10:33 AM ON 03/12/08
When we get to affordable terabyte storage we will return to quality of sound as desireable. Compression will no longer be necessary. At todays standard of 128mbps music quality is not the best, and 160 GB is not enough to handle most peoples music collections in a loss-less format, but go over a terabyte and it becomes possible.
By murc at 8:52 PM ON 03/12/08
by then, they wont be their own device. by then these items will all be one device:mp3 player/camera/phone/portable gaming/portable gps/ect.
there are devices out there now that can do all of these things....but they suck at doing it.
I'm hoping that 10 years from now, it will be good enough that it will be your only portable electronic device.
By Grunter at 2:50 AM ON 03/17/08
The scaling up in the past 10-15 years is scary. PS3 is 100 times more powerful (pesimistic guess, the PS3 is multi core) compared to the PS1 - 33mHz vs 3.2 gHz.
5 1/4" discs hold ~100 gig of info with blu ray, or ~140 times more than a 700 meg CD. Internet @ a 20 meg connection is 600 times faster than the 33.6k connection of 1997...
Think of 100 times more growth in the next 10 years...