Storage did become cheaper and more compact. Both flash drives and SD cards offer this functionality and showed significant improvements.
Whatever innovative use cases people could come up with to store TBs of data in physical portable format is served by these. And along the way the world has shifted to storing data more cheaply and conveniently on the cloud instead.
IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing (for average global consumer) and proprietary connectors and software would not have made a compelling economic case to over-spec it in hopes that some unforseen killer use case might emerge from the market.
> IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing...
Well, yes but if we're literally talking the iPod, it has been discontinued. Because it has been replaced by devices - with larger storage, I might note - that do more. I'm working from the assumption that as far as Brooks was talking iPhones basically are iPods. This is why the argument that the tech capped out seems suspect to me. The tech kept improving exponentially and we're still seeing storage space in the iPod niche doubling every few years.
Whatever innovative use cases people could come up with to store TBs of data in physical portable format is served by these. And along the way the world has shifted to storing data more cheaply and conveniently on the cloud instead.
IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing (for average global consumer) and proprietary connectors and software would not have made a compelling economic case to over-spec it in hopes that some unforseen killer use case might emerge from the market.