Daily Activities Include: scooter around the block!

[walkitout]

T. went for a long bike ride with R., and I went around the block with him later (he scootered, I walked). A. and I hung out and played cards (actual deck of cards -- a new one I had to open, even) and on the iPad we did Pass & Play Uno and The Game of Life. She really enjoyed _Monsters vs. Aliens_ (thank you, J., for the suggestions! It was perfect!) and was completely bored with _Puss in Boots_. Inevitably, there was more My Little Pony as well. She's currently playing Profitville (I love that game).

I've been working on a long piece about which aspects of gadgets at any given point in time are the result of technology limitations and which are an artifact of design failures. The specific design failure I am interested in occurs when an object is designed in a particular context (PDAs, say, assumed to be tethered to one computer), but find an audience that would like to use them in another context (independent of any computer -- so this would be the big win of putting the expansion slot on the Handspring Treo, because it let you transfer from PDA to PDA without resorting to a computer in the middle). A related design failure occurs when you really "hard wire" for the context in a way that offloads costs onto the consumer and then you don't even bother to profit off those costs (here, I have in mind proprietary to proprietary data or power connectors, and then you don't make it easy or sometimes possible at all to buy replacements for lost cords. I would mind _less_ if the company treated the cords as a profit center, but back in the 1990s, they didn't seem to. Either way, it was incredibly annoying that you had to keep track of all those cords and none were interchangeable. Hard to believe in the post-USB world, I know!).

Anyway. I've had to (re)learn a whole lot that I really avoided learning in the first place about serial and parallel ports and interconnection standards (or lack thereof), and I would like to avoid blaming companies for technological limitations if at all possible, so I've been trying to nail down timelines and dependencies wherever I can. The article is currently morphing into a different direction that is more business model focused (the gadgets I have in mind are pseudo-peripherals that are at least somewhat portable, and the interaction between the durability of solid state stuff and the early obsolescence of same turns out to have destroyed a lot of companies along the way, and Apple's v2 run is stunningly long-lasting as these things go -- and it turns out there are some really good reasons _why_ Apple has done so well off of generations of the same kind of gadgetry that killed so many well-capitalized and well-run predecessors).

I'm not sure if it will ever be done, or what it will look like when it is, but that's what I've been up to the last two or three days.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

The cord thing is still with us to some limited extent. The camera I bought just a couple of years ago has a proprietary camera-to-USB charging/data transfer cord. I lost the cord and found that replacements are actually readily available IF you can figure out which one to buy, because not all models from that manufacturer use the same kind of cord, oh, no, that would be way too easy. Luckily I did figure it out, and the replacement cost very little, but it was a PITA.

camera?

[walkitout]

I have questions! As near as I can tell, the point-and-shoot, separate from a phone camera is more or less a moribund product category. You can still get them, but there is no real value-add, and there is very little development going on in this area.

Your experiences shows a couple important differences between 2015 and 2003 or thereabouts. Between manuals being widely if not universally available online, and google images having a -lot- of pictures, it is usually possible to eventually figure out what the hell that proprietary connection is (altho it still annoys the heck out of me that there are proprietary connectors! But it will be that way forever). And if you can figure out what it is, you can usually get it for not too much money on amazon or ebay or similar.

When did you buy the camera, and was it a point-and-shoot or something more special?

Re: camera?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I don't know exactly when I bought it, but am pretty sure it was no more than two years ago. It's a point-and-shoot. Are dedicated cameras really becoming legacy tech? People are still apologizing for their phone pictures, after all. Oh, and speaking of design flaws: my phone has no way to transfer pictures anywhere else. None. You can't do it via the data cord. You can't email pictures off it. As it was an exceedingly cheap phone (I was surprised it had a camera at all -- it was like getting a working camera inside a box of cereal), I suppose I should not complain.

Re: camera?

[walkitout]

There are some intentionally disabled phones out there, altho preventing you from transferring the photos off the phone is a new one on me. Perhaps there used to be a facility for getting the photos off and they've disabled it? Or they want you to pay to get stuff off it?

When I said "moribund", I had in mind the lacking vitality or vigor, not the at the point of death meaning of moribund. Point and shoot was previously the biggest segment of the camera industry, but has been in decline since 2010. It is unclear to me where sales will stabilize (just like I can't figure out where paper books are going to stabilize).

Dedicated cameras are always going to be around for niche purposes, obvs. But I can't even predict whether point-and-shoot will stay above or fall below sales of, say, DSLR cameras.

This is a couple years old, but what a terrible sign for a once popular and ubiquitous product.

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/2101371529/camera-shipments-2013-cipa

A graph and a little bit more data:

http://petapixel.com/2014/12/15/chart-shows-badly-digital-camera-sales-getting-hammered-smartphones/