Wired on Friday/Mike Butcher: Apple's latest take on the portable digital music player holds 4 gigabytes of memory, equivalent to 1,000 songs in a half-inch-thick case the size of a business card.
Twenty years ago such memory capacity was unheard of outside high-tech computing labs. But what is this revolution in computer memory ultimately going to mean?
In the late 1980s, I was a spotty undergraduate student, cultivating an interest in journalism via my university's newspaper. We had just switched from typing out our copy and pasting it onto boards for the printer to laying it out on a Macintosh computer - pretty cutting edge at the time. The software was rudimentary, but was certainly more promising than the hardware itself.
A 28-page tabloid student newspaper was run from two floppy disks, which both held a maximum of around 400 kilobytes of data (1,000 bytes). One disk ran the operating system, the other ran the layout program, which, at 300 kilobytes, pushed the boundaries of the technology. There was much crashing of the computer and, consequently, much swearing.
But to give you an idea of how things have changed, a similar desktop publishing program these days comes in at around 7 megabytes. In 1988 the thought that such memory would be required for a single application would have had the average computer user spitting out their coffee. To think that 20 years later around 600 times that amount would sit in your pocket and play about 80 albums in a row was mind-boggling. To be frank, it still is.
In the realm of MP3 players however, superlatives are the norm. Several makers, including Apple, now have players going up to the 20 gigabytes range, or around 10,000 songs. Outside of its announcement about the diminutive iPod mini, Apple also unveiled a corporate server solution which can store up to 3.5 terabytes (1,000 gigabytes) of data. Research firm IDC expects the number of hard drives shipped in portable MP3 players to climb from 900,000 last year to 2.4 million this year.
Curiously, high-capacity memory storage is now so much a part of the cache of owning a computer or a device like a music player, that it's this aspect which gets all the press. The fact that it's possible to buy a song for a dollar on any one of the many music download services - assuming one doesn't download it for free elsewhere - seems almost commonplace.
The revolution in storage capacity could have a profound effect on the technology business. As hardware overtakes software as the industry's darling, software is becoming commoditised, spelling trouble for companies such as Microsoft - whose business is entirely about software - while the hardware-driven Apple is set to benefit.
And the ordinarily mundane storage sector is revitalising all sorts of other areas. Recently, Toshiba launched an 0.85-inch hard drive. What possible use could this have, I hear you ask? Well, the drive is designed to be incorporated inside the new generation of mobile phones. Toshiba and others hope mini- drives will replace the more expensive and lower capacity flash memory in handheld computers and mobile phones. Their drives will hold 2-4 gigabytes. IDC says over 250 million mini-hard drives for these kinds of device will be shipped this year.
Not to be outdone, Sony is revamping an older technology to introduce a new Walkman that expands the recording capacity of its mini-discs, allowing up to 45 hours of music to be recorded on a 1 gigabyte disc. The new format would replace today's minidiscs. The machines will sell in the summer for about the same price as current mini-disc Walkmans.
And the memory revolution is extending to the world of personal digital assistants (PDAs). Orange has brought out the new Handspring Treo 600 PDA/Camera phone which gives a choice of moving data to a high-capacity memory card or backing up data via the phone network itself. It's connected devices like these which could gradually do away with the requirement for physical storage.
It's not just music and mobiles that are being made over with this kind of mega-capacity. My laptop's hard disk is crammed with digital photos of my six-month-old son, taken with a digital camera with a capacity of 256 megabytes. But what will the world be like when there are no more photos fading inside shoeboxes? Where everything you do or say, everything you create, can be recorded and stored on some magnetic spinning disk somewhere? Perhaps we're already there.
