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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

How would they play music when jogging or in the train then?

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect ubiquitous wireless connectivity of one kind or another, and cloud storage. As for what form the device might take, who knows? It would have been pretty hard to predict smartphones in 1990; I expect further consolidation of devices, but have no idea what they'll look like.

Do you live in a major US city or Small European or Asian Country?

Look at remote places in Canada or Australia.

Local data caching is important.

I'd agree that caching is important, but when, realistically, would you not have any sort of wireless access in 20 years? Driving? Many cars these days have hard drives; it's easy to see that becoming more prevalent as storage gets even cheaper. The people designing mobile devices aren't worried about a single farmer in the middle of Saskatchewan. Cell phone providers didn't even bother with the whole of Saskatchewan for a number of years.

If you can get a cell signal, you can get streaming media, or at least you will be able to. I don't see that being much of a problem.

I live in Australia and already try to live mostly in the cloud. I have more than enough mobile data transferring > 5Mbps anywhere that I happen to be to live completely on cloud-based technologies if such technologies existed for all my requirements.

Streaming directly in their brain?

Ear-implant with wireless streaming, probably.

Their data connection will still work on the train or out and about. Obviously. It'll be like a mobile phone now, works everywhere (more or less).

Living in NYC and traveling almost exclusively by subway makes me appreciate my local storage. In time there will be wireless underground, but for now, it's necessary to store music and podcasts on local storage. The AT&T 2 GB limit per month also encourages the need for local storage.

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