Beta was far better quality than VHS. Far better. Too many people cite the lines of resolution thing. That is not the only measure. E.g., VHS has horrible color smearing.
The difference between standard BIII and even VHS in SP mode was glaring.
In addition, Beta had features that VHS was slow or never incorporated in many cases. I remember buying my SLHF-300 which had “HiFi” stereo sound (digital). The salesman tried to sell me a much more expensive, best at the time, VHS machine that had Dolby. Yeah, real genius there. There was also the great skip-scan feature that Sony Betas had that didn’t appear at all until much later on some VHS machines. You couldn’t buy an equivalent VHS machine for any amount of money. And on and on.
Can you point to a link with more information about this claim, please?
LOL. Right, because EVERY phone had an OS built entirely around a multitouch capacitive touch screen when the iPhone came out… “elderly”, that’s funny stuff. Also, a cite please that “iPhones still fall well behind the curve in most technical respects.”
In your vague memory, almost certainly. In labs, maybe. In showrooms, just possibly.
In living rooms? Not really. You can cite all kinds of little ticky-tacky fix-ups like comb filters and timing stabilizers that grew on both kinds of VCR over the decade they were viable tech, and one or the other was often ahead of the other in implementing it, but it was a race between snails and a battle over least-fuzzy. The very, very best 1/2-inch home video tape - best tech, best deck made and a pristine, HQ movie recording - looked like sheeeyit up against the rather primitive 480-line laserdisc.
Point to a link for a game on the PS3 that used more than 9GB of data (the DVD-DL limit). Even if you can, it’s likely to be padding like endless cutscenes and shovelware, not the game itself.
I’d wager most games in the first few years of the PS3 used no more than 2-3GB.
So what did it need with a 25GB, theoretically eventual 50GB, disc?
As for the iPhone, go read any of the sober tech analyses published during its first year. They’re all disappointed at how back-of-the-curve things like the memory and processor speeds are, and at how little truly leading-edge tech is in the thing. I’m not knocking the iPhone in any way - it just wasn’t crafted from nothing but the latest and jazziest, and that’s no secret except perhaps within ten steps of a Genius Bar.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear on the first point- I meant to ask for a cite that engineering concerns were secondary to marketing concerns with regard to including a Blu-Ray player in the PS3.
As for the iPhone, if you can’t be bothered to back up the claims you made that the “iPhone did not contain a single leading-edge component” and instead resort to dismissive ad homs about the Genius Bar, well then…
I learned this very quickly when I bought my first MacBook eight years ago; it was very not-special spec’s wise, and needed immediate upgrades to even run MS Office. That said, it did work perfectly for EIGHT years (though sadly one of the memory slots crapped out last month, though it still runs).
If you bought your Macbook when it new, then Office 2004 was the current version for Mac. It ran under the Rosetta translator and had system requirements of 256 MB of RAM and 610 MB of disk space. If you bought a base Macbook, it would have come with 512 MB of RAM and a 60 GB hard drive.
How did it not “even run MS Office?” What immediate upgrades did it need to make Office usable? A precursory web search for other people who couldn’t run Office 2004 on 2006 MacBooks until they made hardware upgrades results in pretty much nothing.
Exactly where do you think we might find a cite - an admission from Sony to the public that a feature’s supposed engineering necessity and value was baloney and the real purpose was marketing hype and a chance to push a video platform on the back of a must-have product? My position, in the much, much larger spectrum than this itty-bitty teapot, is based on observation, inference and analysis, and is often backed up by later revelations. It is not the kind of thing that can be ploddingly assembled from a body of prior work or proved with cites from company materials. Unlike Wikipedia, the real world runs on new discoveries and their interpretation, not on endless assemblage of what someone else said.
Since you are firmly standing on the “iPhone is a work of incalculable genius and innovation” pillar it brings to mind the Genius Bar types.
List any component of the original iPhone that was new and unique. No, not even the “OMG capacitive touch screen WOW.” Those had been around a while.
Note that I am not dismissing the innovation that went into combining these elements to make something new - only that none of the components was even leading-edge, much less newly invented. This is not news and was no secret except perhaps to the portion of the tech crowd that barely realizes what’s under the aluminum shell.
And Apple is one of the companies that’s very good at producing durable, long-lifetime products. In good part by using proven components over ones still in the development stage… but they go to great lengths to conceal that approach. They like to foster the image of innovation down to the silicon atoms with every product.
Okay. I’d have to go back and do far too much tedious digging to judge whether that’s representative or opportunistic; I’ll just say ya got me.
The innovation was the software, and the packaging and energy management that made the phone possible. The iPhone may not have used leading-edge components, but then NO mass-market electronics ever do. When the iPhone shipped, other manufacturers thought that Apple was faking it, since they couldn’t believe that it was possible to make such device with current technology.
Apple, being a very intelligent engineering company, tends toward proven solutions over untested ones, at least at the component level. As do most manufacturers who have burned their fingers trying to use the newest of the new when it’s not absolutely needed.
That doesn’t mean every one of them tries it episodically, and for every success takes a number of huge hits for a buggy, problematic product.
Apple is… well, not unique, but has taken it to a rarified artform of claiming the absolutely thinnest, sharpest, shiniest and furthest leading edge of design and innovation for new products, in part by obscuring the almost-dull real tech under the skin. (Just wanted to get my salient point back into the mix, here. It’s the opposite approach of the PS3, cramming fragile, untested tech in almost entirely for marketing purposes. Both are “marketing” - that is, allowing sales facets to trump, control and obscure engineering ones. Apple has its factions that are perpetually pissed that they are not using bleeding-edge tech all the time.)
I only asked for a cite because you’ve beaten the “it’s all due to marketing” drum repetitively without backing it up.
You’re overreacting when you use ad homs and jumping to conclusions when you think that listing just one advanced component used in the iPhone equals firmly standing on the iPhone as a work of incalculable genius.
MiniDiscs are what I thought of also, but the issue is that the file transfer had to be done in real time. I.e., if you wanted to record something to or from a MiniDisc it took as long as the song in question, unlike a CD, where the transfer/copy takes seconds. If there was/is a way for faster file transfer I’d love to hear it. Because I still have mine and wish I could get more use out of it.
That’s why - just enthusiasts who get to see plasma screens at their friends houses or in a special ‘living-room-esque’ demo room in a store. I worked in Wal-mart in 2008 and in a big-box store plasma screens look glassy and reflect the fluorescent lighting, something which a matte-type-finish LCD screen by Samsung doesn’t. You could tell customers that plasma is superior in many ways, but they pretty much came for LCD and that’s what they bought. I think Wal-mart got out of the plasma TV business around that time.
But yeah, not a “tech-war” any more than how tube amplifiers are superior to transistor based amps.
Sky is blue and water’s wet - but if you live under a rock you might need a Wiki cite to “prove” it.
And you’re characterizing a stereotype as an ad hominem argument. (A stereotype many of us have encountered in the true-bleeving, pecksniffian flesh.) But I’ll give you credit, you didn’t use “straw man” once.
There were NO particularly advanced components in the iPhone, and they continue to be somewhat behind the curve in "advanced"ness - to their credit. The only thing advanced was the overall synthesis, which was brilliant. But whipping up the most fantastic pastry in the world doesn’t mean the chef invented flour, and that tends to be the dogma of too many Apple aficionados… but there I am, stereotyping again.
Plasmas also use a lot more power, which is bad for individual electric bills and other things. I’ll miss plasma when we have to replace my second lovely Panasonic, but having an 80-inch screen or a larger projection display at half to one-third the power consumption will be to the good.
I’m going to be a heretic and say the original premise of the OP is flawed in two ways.
One, as often pointed out above, is that the superiority of Beta over VHS is much more in the retelling of the story now than it ever was in actual use back then.
My real heresy is to assert that the kinds of events the OP postulates (market failure in the face of technological superiority) simply almost never happen. Beta vs. VHS wasn’t an example of it, and neither was anything else posited up thread. Dvorak vs. QWERTY is another classic shibboleth which is/was not, in any sense, the market embracing a contemporaneous but second-best solution.
The nature of the edge of the state of the art (any edge of any art) is such that most innovating competitors are pushing the same boundaries. And face the same cost & schedule constraints. Certainly some have deeper R&D pockets than the other guys, but all competitors are facing the same constraints of producing to a cost the customer will pay. And all are facing the reality that marketing drives sales far more than spec-sheets do.
My bottom line: Engineering superiority is rarely clear cut. And very very rarely so clear cut that it can serve as a canonical example like the OP desires.
In fact I’d go so far as to say whatever overarching point the OP is attempting to teach with the Beta vs. VHS example is of negative value to the class. You’re teaching them a false general idea using a false example.
There is a real effect which is sometimes mistaken for this one: The concept of path-dependent lock-in. As an example, now that we have gasoline cars with 70mph cruising speeds, 300 mile gas tanks, and filling stations everywhere, most any electric car has to meet all of those mission specs before it becomes anything other than a niche product.
And we’ll be stuck with some of the design decisions of early PCs for another 50 years. Backwards compatibility is a cast-iron bitch.
So those types of issues act as constraints on innovations now. But they aren’t examples of engineering superiority being trumped by marketer prowess or buyer stupidity / bovinity.
All very good points but I’m going to quote sparingly.
It’s become increasingly rare because almost no products are developed and brought to market based on any genuine superiority. It’s too risky to bring something Completely New & Different to the market even if it has the potential to revolutionize daily life. So companies take one, and usually only one, technological point and build an entire product and (yes) marketing campaign around it. So instead of a complete reinvention of the household vacuum cleaner, something that’s possible and has been needed for fifty years, we get a bagless swirl-tank design housed in an otherwise completely ordinary vacuum… accompanied by stratospheric pricing and unrelenting marketing hype.
It really is “all marketing,” and has been for quite some time. No major company, especially not one that has to keep stockholders happy, is going to pursue a path that might not extract maximum potential revenue from each product, and sheer technological superiority has never been sufficient to overcome market inertia and consumer wariness of “the different.”
Exactly. If you are going to introduce a technological innovation, no matter what its advantages it CANNOT have, or seem to have, any disadvantages. It has to match ease of use and familiarity and smell just like the traditional tech before the one big leap it contains will be accepted.
One of the things that reinforces this response from the market is that too many manufacturers have brought out “completely new and different” products that were utter shit, either due to outright fakery (a new kind of plastic does not a better vacuum cleaner make) or insufficient regard for how they would be used in the real world (people won’t completely change the way they wash clothes, for example).
Both very easy to prove. So your claims should be just as easy to prove, right? Right…?
No, you are using a stereotype to dismiss an argument. That is an ad hom. Or does the Genius Bar have anything at all do with the argument?
You seem very proud of being reduced to employing stereotypes, ad homs and your determined refusal to back up your claims. I hope that is not the case. But if it is, that’s where we can end it.
The crowd that populates Apple stores and hangs out over at the Genius Bar tend to be convinced that their various i-goods represent the pinnacle engineering on earth in every respect, even when tech analyses of each new product show that it is technologically behind the curve with respect to competitors. Your responses place you in this group of thinkers. My entire point about iPhones is that they are well-proven tech presented as the absolute newest possible tech in incomprehensible, foamy marketing-babble - so if you can’t see the connection between what Apple aficionados tend to believe and my points about marketing, then I guess all that’s left is an ad hominem attack. Or a straw man. Or something.
