Get With The Times

I've been taking advantage of my sister's camera's movie recording feature for the past 2½ days and it's been bumming me out that the camera keeps crapping out after about 23 minutes or so. So I popped open her memory stick and ...

... saw that it was only a 512 MB stick. As a non-PSP owner, I haven't had to touch memory sticks since I first bought my mother the family's first digital camera, back in 2001 or 2002 or so, for her trip to England. So I had no idea how expensive it would be to upgrade. All I remembered was that back in the day, "I had spared no expense" (which was uncharacteristic for me) and bought my mother the largest or second largest stick they had available, and it had cost me a good $100 or so.

So here I am, looking on Wiki, then heading off to Amazon.com to find a compatible memory stick for my camera and to see what the current prices are. I tell myself, "If it only costs $50 to get 1 GB or more, then we'll get it. I'm willing to spend up to $50 to at least double the space here." And so I about fall out of my chair when I see this: a 1 GB SanDisk Memory Stick Pro Duo for $6.49. Curious, I press on and discover Sony's 4 GB offering followed by SanDisk's more affordable $16.77 4 GB offering. Bought a copy of the SanDisk 4 GB, standard shipping (free), says it should be here in a week or two (which is fine by me).

512 MB back in the day as $100 ... and now 4 GB today, eight times as big, for roughly one-sixth the price at $16. Crazy.

All that stated, I am enough of a computer nerd to slap myself awake and recognize that this is still highway robbery (in a sense), since bit-for-bit you're being screwed. Yes, yes, yes, I do recognize that what you're paying for here is a) the flash memory and b) the compact micro-mini size of the damn thing, but still! At $4-per-gig (roughly), it would be a selling price of roughly $4000 to get a 1 TB flash drive. In-fucking-sane. Particularly so when one considers I snagged my 1 TB in July 2007 in the form of two 500 GB drives, each priced back then at around $160. Today you could get those same two drives for half or less that price. A TB for $160. And yet Sony and SanDisk's flash technology would require $4000. Oh, scales of economy!