Proudy BITCH!

robot-heart:

anygivenwebdork:stevenf:

Floppy Disks

An anecdote: When the iMac came out, Apple drew a line in the sand. They said: we are no longer going to ship a computer with a floppy disk drive. The entire industry shit its pants so loudly and forcefully that you probably could have heard it from outer space.

Are you insane? I spent all this money on a floppy drive! All my software is on floppy disks! You’ve committed brand suicide! Nobody will stand for this! Fast-forward to today. I can’t think of a single useful thing to do with a floppy disk.

I thought this was a humorous. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m a total late-adopter when it comes to technology, and I held onto my floppy disks—and my casettes and my disc-man and my VHS tapes—until long after it was fashionable. In fact, I still have a VCR and VHS tapes as I can’t see any point in throwing the old videos out when they still work.

Of course, my technology adoption decisions have largely been framed by my finances. For many years, I couldn’t afford a DVD player or to replace my entire VHS collection with DVDs. I couldn’t afford to upgrade from my super awesome dinosaur of a desktop with a floppy drive until the medium was pretty much already obsolete. An MP3 player was out of the question for a long time, and in actually, I’ve yet to pay for one of those personally and only got my first legit MP3 player—with functionality like playlists and shuffle—this past Christmas. We won’t even talk about my cell phone, which I got for a whopping $10 and doesn’t really do much more than store contact information and act as an alarm clock.

I’ve only actively embraced downloading movies on the internet and watching them on my computer-hooked-up-to-the-TV because, well, I get those movies for free. (As long as, you know, no one finds out. Shhh!)

My thing with the iPad, as with most technology? I don’t need it. I certainly don’t need the debt, and the only reasonable way I could pay for something like that is with a credit card. (Reasonable meaning “and still able to pay my rent.”) I’m not a luddite. I’m not technology-phobic or new-innovation-phobic or particularly clingy to my old technology. A combination of semi-poverty and laziness pretty much keeps me with my old stuff, and as long as my old stuff does what I need it to do, it’s not really going anywhere. Unless there is a compelling reason for me to invest in new technology (e.g., the dinosaur desktop died, someone gave me a cheapie MP3 player that could replace the discman, and the downloaded movies are free and much higher quality than my seriously worn out VHS tapes), I’m not going to get it.

I think my thing with the iPad is: what’s the compelling reason to buy?

For me personally, there isn’t one. I’m not into technology for technology’s sake. I can appreciate innovation. I know that someday I will probably use it and benefit from it. Even so…there’s not a use for it in my life right now. At some point, there may become a use for it, and this I think is the gamble you are talking about—trying to make that third category a necessity as opposed to the third wheel on a bicycle, trying to predict a need before it arises.

Until it becomes useful, though, my response to it is kind of…meh. I can use the money for something else.