Scott McNealy hints at the end of gadgets. From CNET:
"Your iPod is like your home answering machine. It's a temporary thing," McNealy said at a panel discussion featuring reminiscences by Sun's four cofounders at the Computer History Museum here. "It's going to be hard to sell a lot of iPods five years from now when every cell phone is going to be able to automatically access your library wherever you are."
I agree--but not just about iPods. It applies to computers, downloading, files, etc etc. Imagine 30 years on explaining to a child: "back in 2000 you had to go to these sites and download these mp3 files to your computer... then you would bring your mp3 player and do a 'sync'... and plug it to your stereo. People would buy these big hard drives to store all their files."
It all sounds like those stories of radio sets with vacuum tubes and big antennas that had to be wired around the room, with the house aficionado spending hours at night fiddling with the dial, trying to get the news through the crackle. Terribly quaint.
Even quainter: sitting in front of a PC to watch movies. Like pre-vacuum-tube radios - the sound was so soft you had to listen with headphones. Internet TV is just beginning to get its first vacuum tubes, but it's not quite there yet.
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