To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die. — Ecclesiastes 3:1
“For many technologies, the time to die will be 201,” Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes for Computerworld. “That doesn’t mean there won’t be people still using the deceased technologies. After all, at least one company is still using an Apple IIe for accounting.”
“ut these dying technologies are so far gone they’re not going to matter to most users and companies,” Vaughan-Nichols writes. “I don’t see BlackBerry staying alive for another year. The latest model, the BlackBerry Priv, hasn’t found much love. It was fun for a while, BlackBerry, but you can stop thrashing now. It’s time to lie quietly in your grave. I wonder too just how long Microsoft will pour money down the Windows Phone rathole? I mean, the company wrote off its entire smartphone investment in Nokia in July 2015. NetMarketShare has the Windows Phone OS with a lousy 3.4% of the mobile market. This is a dead operating system walking.”
More dying stuff in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Pouring money down the rathole is Microsoft’s specialty and there’s a lot of it left to pour, so maybe they keep Windows Phone on life support past 2016.
BlackBerry the company will be around, but this indeed might finally be the year when the “BlackBerry phone” dies.
iPhone, killer.
Heh… I remember when I cared about whether Microsoft lived or died. Once AAPL passed up twice their market cap, it just didn’t matter anymore.
-jcr
I’m looking forward to the death of hard drives.
Then kindly don’t use them and leave the rest of us with 2TB in their MacBooks, and 4TBs in their pre-2014 mini’s, for $99 and $198, respectfully, alone.
Yup. I have SSDs in all my computers.
Unfortunately, for large storage, I still have to use them in my NAS. But due to how unreialble they are and how often they fail, I have to resort to using redundancy to keep the data safe for when another hard drive dies.
SSDs have their own particular issues. Not to mention their expense.
Other than cost, I don’t see any other down sides.
SSDs wear out quicker than traditional hard drives, they wear out after repeated reads and writes. If you are moving your data every few years to new Macs, this should never be an issue for US.
Take a look at the MTBF ratings of modern SSDs. They are all rated to last far longer than the lifespan of a human.
Yes, SSDs do not retain data forever without power. For data archival, they are a non-solution.
Yes, I’ve read about SSDs losing data if left unpowered for extended periods. I’ve also personally had hard drives that refused to spin up after sitting on shelves for a while.
Ironically, spinning hard drives are the cats meow for long term safe, recoverable data storage.
Can’t say the same thing for SSDs.
Over the years, I’ve lost data due to dead hard drives. To date, I’ve never had an SSD die on me.
Bear in mind your own words: “to date”. No memory storage is perfect. Hard drives are easier to recover than SSDs if something did happen.
Sure anything is possible. But during the several years that I’ve been using SSDs, none have died on me and about half a dozen hard drives have.
The only time I trust hard drives are when there’s some level of redundancy because it’s not a question of whether or not they will die, it’s a question of when.
For you sake, I hope you have some level of redundancy form your SSD data. I have backups of backups. When it come to my work, I have never lost a single file. I have had HD go bad, not to many thou. I buy server garde drives. I pay more, they last more.
It doesn’t matter what grade of hard drive you use. It’s just a matter of time before they die.
Your sample of one is irrelevant. If you don’t use back-ups to your SSDs, you are foolish in the extreme.
Sample of one what?
I never said I don’t have any backups.
How long have you had your SSDs and how often is data changed on the drive? As I understand the Flash memory tech used in SSDs storage ‘blocks’ are completely rewritten even if only a few bytes have been changed. In the past it used to replace data in the same physical block, more recent in-device controllers will write the entire block in an open block and erase the ‘old’ location to help balance wear and tear on the physical memory block.
The oldest one I have has probably been in use for about 5-6 years. In that time, I’ve had a lot of hard drive failures.
Some of the SSDs I have are used as “scratch” disk where data written to and erased very often.
Here is a good article where it took the author between 1.5-2PB of data to kill some SSDs:
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
The key for hard drive long life is to leave then off when not in use. My main bkup drive only runs a few hours a week.
Yeah, I wouldn’t hold your breath on that one. All of our mobile devices still have them. File systems are there too, though largely invisible. The tech will get so small you won’t even know they are there, but I doubt we’ll be 100% in the cloud anytime soon.
Not talking about cloud. I’m talking about mechanical, platter based hard drives.
I guess while they insist windows 10 on phone is exactly like it is elsewhere they can save a bit of extra cost keeping it all going, though in truth its mostly a marketing ploy and it will be a long time before in reality, if ever it actually is the same. But give them their due they are at least trying to aim for a gorge in the shear mountains of Google and Apple either side of it and its success relies to a degree upon how well those other two proceed in making it all irrelevant in the real World as they persist with it.
In MS case since the same OS is used for all manner of devices it is conceivable that should Windows 10 gain ground it will pull up sales of Win10 smartphones as well. Another possibility is the elimination of smartphones for light tablets that can also make phone calls increasing the popularity of video calls.. For voice call privacy all you would need is a bone-conduction earpiece.
“the time to die will be 201,”
I guess that is probably AM, since he would have written 1401 had it been PM.
“ut these dying technologies…”
Hmm. Might be something else going on here…
hat could it b
Adobe Flash is already well past walking dead status. It now mainly just exists as pieces of decomposition dotted about the Internet much like real player.
or one of the most effective virus and malware delivery systems on the planet.
Who ever copies and pastes blurbs from these articles often missing the first or last letter on certain paragraphs. Does anyone at MDN actually pay attention before posting?
“Does anyone at MDN actually pay attention before posting?”
Judging by how often there are mistakes, the obvious answer seems to be “no”.
I get the idea that MDN doesn’t have a formal editor. We’ve been seeing incomplete copy-pastes from source articles every day here.
Agreed.
I also agree that “old school” audio systems are not going away. I have an beautiful Classic Marantz 2270 receiver with a digital/analog converter driving my Klipshorn Floor-standing corner horns. Vinyl or digital, the sound is something truly amazing and beautiful.
Yes the receiver weights 50 lbs and the speakers are monsters but so worth it. My wife hates them and doesn’t understand but that’s alright, I don’t understand her sometimes either.
Some tech dies but some last a long, long time.
Darn tootin’. Classic audio hardware has quite the following nowadays, as seen on forums like AudioKarma and Audio Asylum. I myself run a Dynaco ST-70 vacuum tube amp and Bang & Olufsen Beogram 8000 turntable just about every night, and they never fail to please. Vinyl has made quite the comeback in the past several years, with both new and used LPs being far easier to come by than when I first started collecting records in the mid ’90s.
Getting back to the topic at hand, I have a fair-sized collection of dead technologies going, as seen on my website above. In addition to vintage stereo equipment, I have a few dozen early computers (mostly 8-bit types), classic video game systems, antique radios, and much more. We still have a landline at our house, to which I have several rotary phones connected. It might not be as slick as the modern digital tech, but it still gets the job done.
PLEASE Microsoft. Keep pouring your cash cache down rat holes, until you’re dead. Please please please!