Hacker News Reader

Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

What I don't quiet understand is why we never went to flash for media distribution.

SD cards are dirt cheap and can hold massive amounts of data. Seems weird that we can't just hand out 128MB SD cards with an album on it.

View on HN

There were a few attempts, slotMusic is one that comes to mind.

They kind of all were doomed. Why buy a digital music player that couldn't manage music as well as the cheapest MP3 players? These products also felt like an attempt by the flash storage makers to dump older inventory since an album would fit on smaller cards than most consumers wanted. Then the iPod steam rolled the market. The convenience of iTunes, even over poor Internet connectivity, was hard to beat.

iPods became big around 2003. Back then, 128 MB of flash would cost you $40[1]. This was why HDD-backed mp3 players were so revolutionary for the time--flash wasn't viable, yet. By the time flash got cheap enough, portable mp3 players were so established that the time for physical media for audio had mostly passed.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20030520151144/http://www.newegg...

Yep, the reason why the OG iPod was shaped/sized the way it was, is due to the form factor of commodity laptop hard drives. I forget, but I think the OG iPod had a firewire connector (sort of the equivalent of today's Thunderbolt 3/4), which allowed the owner to use the iPod as a portable hard drive. Most macs had at least one firewire port.

2nd and 3rd gen too. I still have a 3rd gen

Still got mine. First gen, Mac only, Firewire. Haven't turned it on in a few years, I wonder if it still goes...

My guess is digital purchases became easier just before flash memory was cheap enough to use for albums. Also, distribution is much simpler, and the labels can get more profit due to decreased manufacturing costs.

This is my thought too. By the time SD cards were cheap and ubiquitous, digital music already had a huge foothold, and has the convenience of not worrying about losing the SD card.

Bill Gates called it when interviewed about the upcoming Blu-Ray format in 2005. "Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it's even unclear how much this one counts."

Isn't that what the nintendo switch is doing?

IMO - collectibility is inversely proportional to media and packaging size.

That said, I think the Switch gets it right. If everybody was handing out microSD cards you’d have a nightmare managing those

Sony would want to use their proprietary Memory Stick format

I think speed of production is also a factor. A factory can stamp out CD/DVDs very quickly, flash has to be written out to by a computer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com