Speaking at the 2007 Captains of Industry Conference in Singapore, a Google executive speculated that at current rates of storage growth, an iPod capable of holding all the world’s content could be a reality as soon as 2020. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, vice president of Google’s Asia Pacific and Latin America Operations, said that since 1982, the price of data storage has fallen by a factor of 3.6 million. “To put that in context for you, if gas prices fell by the same amount, today a gallon of gas would take you around the earth 2,200 times,” she said. “More importantly, if this trend continues, and the cost of storage continues to decrease, we estimate that somewhere around 2020, all the world’s content will fit inside an iPod, and all the world’s music would sit in your palm as early as 2015, rendering the CD format unnecessary.” Put in perspective, the original iPod debuted in 2001 with 5GB of storage and a price of $400. Currently, Apple’s highest-capacity iPod, the 160GB iPod classic, sells for $350 — 32 times the storage, for $50 less than the original.
Charles Starrett was a senior editor at iLounge. He's been covering the iPod, iPhone, and iPad since their inception. He has written numerous articles and reviews, and his work has been featured in multiple publications.