Russ Roberts, over at Cafe Hayek, has this lovely hymn to progress:
In 1979,
Sony introduced the
Walkman, the first portable music
player. It weighed 14 ounces and cost $200. It could play a
cassette that could hold about 90 minutes of music. It was a little
bigger than a cassette. It was pretty ugly.
A new nano from Apple was
announced yesterday. It weighs less than an ounce. The 8GB model is
$149. It holds about 60 hours of music. It is smaller than a
matchbook. It is very beautiful.
So it is cheaper (even without
accounting for inflation), weighs 1/15th as much, and holds about
40 times more music of higher quality. I can't get
over how beautiful
it is.
What strikes me about this kind of story is how invisible it is.
Even among thos of us old enough to remember the Walkman's launch,
not enough people know the facts about how much more we can get for
how much less. I might start collecting them (the stories).
