more like write-at-most-once (don’t know how many blanks I lost to the dreaded buffer underrun)
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Yes, the failure rate was ridiculously high. And some disks had an unbelievably short shelf life before they started breaking down and failing, so you had to buy your blanks very carefully and resist the temptation of going with cheap no-name media.
In the CD-R days we lived and died by the ability to trick an expensive blank disk into writing more than once by using multiple sessions. You would wind up with a disk with several (possibly very many) volumes on it, but it was better than using up a whole disk for a couple of files that would have fit on a floppy.
Most of these issues were ironed out by the time Apple started shipping computers without optical drives, but it’s easy to forget just how much of a mess the whole thing was for 10 years or so. (And that wasn’t just Apple nor particularly Apple’s fault, it was the entire industry that took its sweet time delivering on the promise of optical media.)
You’re making a fair point…however CDs were still superior as a storage format, even if the technology wasn’t there at the time to reliably deliver on this promise.
I agree, in hindsight, that CDs were a confusing, haphazard mess when they first launched. I had a precious 1x CD-R drive in my PC at the time…it took 45 minutes to burn a single music disc, when it didn’t fail. I think claiming that CD-Rs were more expensive is a bit of misleading statement though…you could store many, many times the equivalent of single floppy drive on one CD-R. I think your price reference really depends on your perspective, at the time. If you were simply attempting to backup your system, or were a data hound, CD-Rs were huge, and a handful of them would rival your entire hard drive for storage space, usually. It would have been far cheaper to use CDs for mass storage, after your initial drive purchase.
When it came time to delivering media, such as software or music, CDs were clearly cheaper to produce.
That being said, there were obvious things that a CD could do that were impossible with a floppy drive, such as play music in a car stereo. It offered pretty clear advantages with few inherent drawbacks. The writing was clearly on the wall…the shortcomings of the floppy drive were insurmountable.
Again, though, this is nothing like a standard 3.5mm jack. It’s closer to an electric socket or a keyboard than a floppy drive. It hasn’t changed in decades because it’s excellent at what it does, and doesn’t need any improvement. Similarly, ethernet connections didn’t go away just because we invented fast wireless connections. For a lot of things, you still need to be plugged in. It’s faster, cheaper, easier, based on an open format, and far more stable. No server, for example, is going to switch to “wireless”. Similarly, keyboards are never going to disappear. Touchscreens are an alternative at best.
The 3.5mm jack is in no way “outdated” because, honestly, there’s not a better way, theoretically, to have a direct connection to a signal. This would be the point where an engineer could step in, but I’m pretty sure that the signal gets converted to an analog one either way, either before the 3.5mm jack, or in the guts of the fancy headphones. The choice between said jack and newfangled tech, like wireless headphones, is a false dichotomy - the phones have already included both options.
Instead, this is forced obsolescence. You’d have to make a strong argument as to why, exactly, the 3.5mm jack is “outdated”, and simply saying that it’s old doesn’t cut it. The alternatives have to present very clear - inherent -advantages, and they currently don’t. For example, the tradeoff for wireless headphones is that you have to manage an internal power supply.
Those $160 headphones only get 5 hours of life, for example, versus the infinite time I get with my wired ones. You can then argue that you can use the lighting earbuds…but those only work on iDevices. This is what I mean…this is not time marching on, it’s about control.
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You’re right that the CD-R was a huge improvement over the floppy disk in just about every way, despite the many issues. The point is that Apple didn’t even offer CD-R when it went floppy-less with the original iMac.
CD-R had existed for a few years by that time, but the drives and media were still too expensive in 1998 to be viable in a consumer-grade computer… I remember blanks costing around $20 a pop c. 1997, which was fantastic in a production environment where one $20 disc replaced $200 worth of floppies and saved all kinds of time and space, but it was not likely to fly with home users, who mostly didn’t have the know-how to do the multi-session burns that made the discs suitable for lighter use. Even the Powerbook I had around the time only had DVD-ROM and it cost about twice as much as an iMac, if not more. (Aftermarket RW drives eventually became available for that computer, but on release a tech told me any existing burner would run too hot to work well in the drive bay.)
That’s the crux of the analogy: they’re once again pulling this familiar move before most people are ready for it, and just like back then it will be a big hassle for some people.
You may be right that it’s a terrible move. That’s my first impression, too. But as I said in my first post in this thread, I don’t fully trust initial reactions in this kind of situation because they’re usually proven wrong with the fullness of time. Curious to see how it plays out.
And we’re in full agreement on the headphones, but then again I’m the wrong person to ask for opinions on headphones because I hate most of them.
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I’m not an engineer, but I think it’s certainly possible to construct a connector, thinner than a 3.5mm jack but serving the same purpose, which transmits an analog signal, and is strong enough to survive many plug-unplug cycles. Heck, Lightning is a 16-pin connector; I have no doubt that a practical, smaller 3-pin connector (L,R, and Ground) is possible. There’s been no need for it until now because we’re just now shrinking to the point where 3.5mm is not much thinner than the size of the device.
So, I’d argue against your assertion that “there’s not a better way.” I think that Apple could have taken the initiative and come up with a new, non-proprietary analog connector to replace 3.5mm, which would have allowed them to keep shrinking their devices.
I just think that they chose not to.
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side note: even the non re-writable cdr could be written to multiple times with multisession. they couldn’t be rewritten so any file changes had to go in the remaining empty space and the file allocation table was updated to reflect the changes. Most people couldn’t figure out how to get multiession burns to work or how to read discs that weren’t finalized, but it was sorta a thing.
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There’s the 1/16" jack but I don’t think it can handle enough channels. Remember, it’s not just left/right, it also has microphone and I think another collar for just signalling. Also with a smaller jack you’ll still need an adapter so there’s no win there.
I agree that the loss of such a ubiquitous connector being built in sucks but it’s really just not that big of a deal to me. It’s not like all of your existing stuff stops working or anything.
I was far more pissed off from the switch to lightning from the old 30 pin dock connector which actually rendered a huge swath of existing products obsolete and largely unusuable. I still wouldn’t want to go back to the old connector since the lightning connector is so much better.
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All I’m saying is Z-axis expansion is better than XY axes expansion.
I found that even a five minute summary was too long, given the (lack of) content. I have a choice of two conclusions:
a) I have ADD.
b) There’s no much that is actually interesting in here.
I guess the question that I’d ask is, if the news came from a smaller/another company, would it even be reported?
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Gosh, up to 10 times digital zoom! how do they do it!?!?!?
I was hoping this would be more like the Matt Lees E3 abridged videos
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I don’t have a Macbook either, because I prefer to have the ports I need on-board, but that actually looks like a great little dock for those with a Macbook.
I don’t see it as ridiculous at all: the Macbook’s one port is designed specifically to work with that kind of peripheral.
It’s a, um, jack of all trades.
But, that’s one thing on a full computer and another on a pocket computer (phone).
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