Wow ... CaptainHawk1, I'm not certain why you think the consumer is fixed on spinning media. Some years ago, I read a tech journal article concerning page-oriented holographic storage. No moving parts at all and over two terabytes stored on media the size of a microscope slide. Think of it like Trek's isolinear optical chips. Now ... it's been about seventeen years since I read about that research and there's still no sign of it, but if I'd greatly prefer that format for storage than any kind of optical disk.
Moving parts increase wear and inevitably give out faster than anything solid state. They also require time to "spin up" and certainly can't dump information into a digital system as fast as solid state.
I'm not arguing the merits, chief, I'm just telling you the way it is as far as consumers are concerned. You threw out a bunch of facts which I don't dispute, but failed to address the initial comment you made:
Wow ... CaptainHawk1, I'm not certain why you think the consumer is fixed on spinning media.
I'm not certain why you think they
aren't. After that comment, I expected you to try to convince me why
consumers would embrace flash media, not why
I should.
Those arguments actually do have an effect on me, but they don't have any effect on my wife and trust me, Madison Avenue don't give two shits about me or about you. What they care about is general acceptance which is exactly what spinning media has had since the mid-1980's. Yes, the CD is dying in favor of downloadable media, however they've tried that flash shit with music and nobody wants it. The reasons downloads in music work is because they're convenient as hell, take 5 seconds and are completely portable without a seperate storage device (not to mention the fact that their biggest customers are kids).
Movies... forget it. They take way too long to download at this point and they're not readily portable for the average consumer yet (not to mention the fact that most people tend to prefer to watch movies on something bigger than a computer monitor or iPod screen). Yeah, I get that people can download movies to their XBOX and PS3 but that's a very small fraction of the market right now and whether you like it or not, the average consumer wants that physical disc in their hand and that plastic box with the fancy artwork. It's an emotional attachment that people have had to movies since they started collecting them by building up their VHS collections and they will not be ready for decades to give that up. So basically, you can forget about solid state memory devices replacing disc based media because it's just not going to happen.
This is exactly why the isolinear chip style model never came to fruition more than 20 years after you read that article. Marketing always will triumph over technology and marketing is based on emotion. You can talk all day about the advantages of solid state memory devices over spinning media but nobody gives a shit about technical specifications when they have pretty packaging to look at.
Just look at how the floppy disk has been replaced by usb flash drives.
See above. It simply will not equate to movies.
I hope something like that happens in the consumer entertainment market.
I'm indifferent but it's not going to happen.
