Hey! Interesting topic with a lot of replies!
I think every old thing connects with our current convenience and nostalgia, how good it was 10, 20, or more years ago.
I have good memories of helping my grandpa (RIP) to copy cassettes and audio CDs. Watching DVDs with my brothers or rent a movie in the library or video center.
Now they are obsolete for me since I don't have any way to use them. My wedding video is available on a DVD and I don't have a single device to play it. Nor a CD/DVD/Blue Ray in my computers.
I never used Blue Ray either (maybe indirectly for the Play Station 4 games but never a movie).
It was different for my grandpa, he had every device available for his music. Cassette Tape, 8-Track, Vinyl LP, CD, MP3 on CD-ROM and USB sticks, DVD players, and even a Smart TV later. A lot of CD burners, even some of them integrated into music players so you could burn an LP into a CD or USB drive.
Nowadays, I listen mainly to Spotify Premium, YouTube, and some backups of my CDs on MP3 or FLAC.
Sorry, I'm part of that generation who doesn't own their stuff. The last album I bought was about 7 years ago.
With my Nintendo Switch, I have only a few of the cartridges and the remaining games are digital. Again, I'm a lazy dude with storage problems (kidding).
There's something that _feels_ nice about popping in a tape or CD and interacting with a simple interface with a single purpose: Selecting which music is playing.
I have discussed before how the phone or the PC have become a convenient device, with all the available features, always-on, and waiting for your amusement. In my pursue of minimalism, having a single device for each function has been nice. Allows me to disconnect from all those distractions.
My wife listens to the local radio while she is cooking. On an FM radio! She is crazy.
A few years ago having a physical collection of books, comics and albums was impossible. Moving out to different cities, and living in small spaces made me store my stuff in a warehouse. The advantage of digital distribution was good enough for me. I had the product quickly, in any city I was traveling in, without the need of wasting space at home. I know the inconvenience too. It's strange that some songs magically disappear from Spotify or YouTube. They are never "my copy".
Re: Compact Discs / Is Obsolete Technology Obsolete?
A little bit ago I wrote about burning a small collection of CDs to use in my car.
I have similar memories. Traveling with my grandpa or parents, and in the middle of nowhere the only available music was what you recorded on a 70 minutes CD or MP3 songs later.
Even nowadays my car has an SD memory slot where I can store 16 GB of songs in MP3 or even WMA, ha!
As you say, I think the technology eventually moves to the end of their product life to the decline stage. If you have some media you, your friends, or any stranger can't play, well, it doesn't matter if it was the standard 5 years ago. It's losing its purpose and function. It's painful to think that.
I have a different opinion than Chris
For me, CDs were superior to audiotapes and floppies.
The audio quality was many times better and more reliable than a Tape (IMO), although you had to clean them and avoid scratches, I agree!
Floppies were always painful to me, slow as hell, and with so little space for the needs of that age. In the 2000s, recording a CD was not that hard, the software was accessible and the blank CD-R were cheap enough.
You could create something playable in most music and CD-ROM readers, even with CD-RW.
But that same advantages is something I don't miss nowadays. An SD card is many times faster and smaller than a CD...
For me, and maybe my family and workmates, CDs ARE obsolete. SD cards, SSD, Internal storage, and the Cloud are what I use daily.
My parents have a tower of CDs they haven't touched in years. I like to show off my collection of physical albums and games, but I use their digital versions that are going to be unavailable in a few years when the stores become obsolete again.
Not every technological increment is good by itself, sometimes we have to go backward to cope with the disadvantages, so instead of using a single way, I think is better to be open to the old, the current, and the future state of affairs.
EOT
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