I was looking at the price of SD cards and it’s amazing how cheap these things are getting. For example on the sale page on buy.com you can get a Kingston 16G SDHC card for around $26, which is a bargain by anyone’s book! My fist SD card was 16M in size and cost me £10; this card is 1000 times as large and only costs twice as much. Isn’t that great!
If you try extrapolating that growth into the future you can make up some really crazy numbers as to how cheap memory will get. And you can apply that to processing power also. Moore’s Law postulates that the number of transistors you can place on a chip doubles every 2 years which is an exponential growth rate rather than a linear one and as long as this holds we’ll be seeing massive growth in storage capacities and the speed and power of computers, digital cameras and all the other gadgets we can find around us. Truth be told, if it wasn’t for this fact, a number of gadgets we have available today just wouldn’t be available if it weren’t for the miniaturization we have available to us nowadays.
Should be fun to see what the next 10 years will bring about!
I had some fun with moores law (at three years I thought) and what the world of IT will be like in 9 years or so.
I went to upgrade the cards in my camera and picture frame not long ago, and I was shocked by cheap they were! I hadn’t bought cards in a very long time, and I was expecting them to be at least 3x as expensive as they ended up being.
I’m amazed at how far down memory pricing has come. I sold memory for more than ten years, and we always had a big markup on it. These days I think people are pricing it to make a little less profit in the hopes that people will buy other items or become a return customer.