> That’s an entirely meaningless and nonsensical statement unless you have some rigorous way to quantify quality.
We have a qualitative measure of quantity, that was where the discussion started - size in bytes.
Storage size in bytes on a pocket iDevice seems to be growing exponentially. Brooks said it stopped doubling and I don't think that is true. iDevices are still doubling their storage size every 2-4 years or so and have been for a while. There was a one-time change to SSDs where they lost a few generations and they are only up to 1TB instead of 160TB (suggesting SSDs are around 7 generations behind HDD which seems reasonable on the face of it to me). But apart from that it has been a pretty steady doubling every few years.
His claim was that iPods didn't get to 160TB because it "nobody actually needed more than that" and that observation is misunderstanding what happened. Apple switched from HDD to SSD because SSD is a much better fit and put the rate of growth back by a few generations but the growth is still ongoing and probably will reach 100s of TB sooner or later.
He was right that iPods didn't need >a few gig of storage ... but that just meant Apple discontinued the iPod brand and replaced it with iPhones, where there is no usage barrier to consuming terabytes of storage. They were obsoleted by the very trend he claimed was over! It appears Apple thinks people did need more, because they aren't making iPods any more.
We have a qualitative measure of quantity, that was where the discussion started - size in bytes.
Storage size in bytes on a pocket iDevice seems to be growing exponentially. Brooks said it stopped doubling and I don't think that is true. iDevices are still doubling their storage size every 2-4 years or so and have been for a while. There was a one-time change to SSDs where they lost a few generations and they are only up to 1TB instead of 160TB (suggesting SSDs are around 7 generations behind HDD which seems reasonable on the face of it to me). But apart from that it has been a pretty steady doubling every few years.
His claim was that iPods didn't get to 160TB because it "nobody actually needed more than that" and that observation is misunderstanding what happened. Apple switched from HDD to SSD because SSD is a much better fit and put the rate of growth back by a few generations but the growth is still ongoing and probably will reach 100s of TB sooner or later.
He was right that iPods didn't need >a few gig of storage ... but that just meant Apple discontinued the iPod brand and replaced it with iPhones, where there is no usage barrier to consuming terabytes of storage. They were obsoleted by the very trend he claimed was over! It appears Apple thinks people did need more, because they aren't making iPods any more.