So now you’re trying to justify your stereotyping. How nice of you.
All I’ve asked of you is to back up what you’ve said, to demonstrate the courage of your convictions. For that, you gleefully project stereotypes.
What he meant was “iPhones are a curve in most technical respects.”
Also, you’re holding it wrong.
Yes, it’s probably inevitable that the mass-market buyer shopping at a big-box store won’t care. But I think what did plasmas in was the advent of LED backlighting. That’s what made it possible to have the LCDs outshine the plasmas on the big-box showroom floor (even though in your own living room, you’re never watching TV at that brightness level.)
I think this is one of those triumphs of “marketing” that’s being discussed in this thread. Everybody knows that “plasmas use more power,” but do they stop to think about how much more? According to this calculator, at an electricity rate of $0.11 per kWh, watching 5 hours of TV per day, a 55 inch LED-LCD will cost $13.39 per year, while a plasma of the same size will cost $27.25. So you’re paying $1.16 more per month for having a plasma. That difference might make you feel good about doing your small part to be green, but it’s not like the people who buy these TVs are sending their kids to school with no lunch money because they opted for plasma over LCD.
I’ll politely disagree somewhat on this one. A lot of the 126 Instamatics had a stiff shutter release that made it easy to twist the camera as you were depressing it. That made for a lot of blurry pictures that didn’t need to be. If you had a steady hand with it, the pics were typically pretty decent, especially for what you were paying for.
But its various successors and replacements the 110 and the Disc Camera were successive regressions in quality, regardless of what you did.
Plasmas are also heavy and they run hot (you can literally feel the heat coming off the screen if you’re close enough). Superiority in this space is subjective, but just like Beta versus VHS, there is superior technology when comparing Plasma versus LCD/LED.
Not sure if this fully qualifies
In mountain biking, the early 90’s saw a lot of bikes with twist shifters as standard, which had several advantage over thumb button shifters. But they did have some crucial disadvantages as well (the biggest being that while there were fewer ways for grip shifters to break, when they did break that was it for them). Opinions differed as to which one was better but bikes seemed to stop coming with twist shifters by the middle 90’s.
SRAM still makes high level grip shifters alongside their trigger style shifters.
I think these objections arealso more of the same “marketing” that shouldn’t really make that much of a difference. I just bought a Samsung PN51F8500 (the reason I’m somewhat vested in this topic,) my first plasma, and in fact the first big-screen flat panel TV I’ve personally owned, as I lived with housemates for 3 years, and one of them had an LCD-LED in the living room, and before that I still had a CRT. I don’t know whether the heat objection was overstated from the beginning, or plasmas have just improved a lot (I have read old reviews where people complain that their AC runs continuously when they have their plasma TV on,) but my TV feels… barely warm. I’ve stood in front of flourescent-backlit LCDs that gave off more heat than my plasma.
As for the weight objection, that’s somewhat akin to the “power use” comparison–while technically true, it’s pretty trivial. My TV weighs 50 pounds, and I didn’t exactly break my back mounting it. Perhaps more importantly, a TV is a pretty permanent fixture in a room. You bring it home, mount it on the wall or place it on a stand, and don’t move it for several years. With that in mind, how much does weight really matter? For comparison’s sake, let’s say I had bought the 60 inch version (Samsung doesn’t make a 51 inch LED-LCD.) It weighs 64.4 pounds. Their latest-and-greatest 60 inch LED-LCD smart TV weighs 45.1 pounds. When it’s something you barely move at all, how much difference does 19 pounds really make?
Weight was always an important consideration to me because I used to move a lot as a young twentysomething and lugging a 90-pound CRT around got old after a while. So when the 42" LED I bought was 33 pounds and a comparable 42" Plasma in the store at the time was 53, that was just one more check in LED’s favor.
You say “marketing,” I say feature I was looking for independent of the marketing…
It was inferior to the NES (and SMS), not better, though. If it had come out in 1984 as intended instead of waiting 2 years, it would have been the best around, but it didn’t.
The Wii certainly kicked the asses of the PS3 & 360 though, and it was hella underpowered compared to those.
The PS2 was far weaker than the GC and Xbox, but that year of lead time on the market, plus free DVD playback (Xbox made you pay extra, GC didn’t have it at all), and backwards compatibility with the vast PSX library made for a perfect storm of dominance.
And going back further the 2600 was king of the pre-crash era, even though Intellivsion, Colecovision, and even Atari’s own 5200 far outperformed it. It was so dominant that all three of those systems wound up with converters to play 2600 games!
Going back to laserdisc, flipping/changing discs several times per movie certainly didn’t help the format to take on VHS.
More than enough capacity if you wanted games coming on 10 discs, maybe. Hell, why not put a simple CD-ROM drive in there, I mean you’d only need 50 discs then. Would have worked just fine.
I think you’re over-stating the effect, and under-estimating the effort it takes to refine a new product category. It takes a lot of iterations to refine a new technology until it becomes a refined, reliable product. When the first commercial jet airliner was sold, it took 13 fatal crashes before the cause was identified. Apple’s first tablet (Newton) was a failure, and widely ridiculed.
And plenty of new technologies take hold despite obvious disadvantages, because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. DVD replaced VHS even though you couldn’t record TV shows on them. (Yes, there’s DVD-R, but that’s a niche market, at least in the US.) High-end laptops used to have 500GB or larger hard drives, now 128GB (SSD) is typical. We used to have cell phones whose standby time was measured in days, while our new smartphones need to be charged every night.
Didn’t the Commodore 64 have S-video long before anyone else did?
From what I can tell, no: It had a video output which was similar to S-Video, but wasn’t; it is, however, apparently straightforward to convert what the C64 had to S-Video using only a cable, with no extra logic.
The spec’s you provide are correct; however the minimum requirements for MS Office you cite are for a native processor (no revised requirements for Rosetta appear to have been issued). With only 500 mb of RAM, Microsoft Word under Rosetta would hang and crash frequently. I believe it even corrupted files I was working on occasionally when it crashed. Only after upgrading to two gigabytes of RAM did the program become reliable.
If you objected to strictly “even run”, understand that this was meant as hyperbole. Technically, it ran, but for a brand new computer, its performance was abysmal. I could have easily added “even run with any reliability”, but that seemed to be unnecessarily exact language. After all, I was ultimately complimenting the computer’s reliability. I am still able to edit this post, even with one memory slot dead (although performance suffers with 1 gigabyte today).
Apple has been building up their CPU/GPU design capabilities for years, and for the last couple generations their internally designed chips are substantially outperforming all rivals.
While the CPU/GPU is only one component, it has a huge impact, and they are clearly leading in that arena.
Plus, you could bootleg tape MUCH more easily than Lasers…
But - If you want the last remaining version of the original Star Wars - see Laser - the tapes rotted years ago, but I still have my Lasers AND a player 
Sheet film - even the baby 2x3’s produced hugely superior images to anything ever produced on roll film with the same optics.
But roll film was cheap and easy, and you could carry hundreds of images in a large pocket.
But mainly, George Eastman owned a ton of patents on everything relating to roll film, and he bought camera companies and started turning out roll film cameras. By 1930, it was over.
well, there was a 3rd thing, even if it isn’t mentioned much.
Sony, with its usual desire to control everything, was more restrictive in what content could be put out on Beta. Whereas anybody could produce and sell VHS tapes. Specifically, porn. Sony made it hard for porn producers to use Beta, so they used VHS. Thus there was a lot more porn available on VHS early on. And frankly, a lot of the young, male, early-adopter types went with VHS because of that.
As an aside, I have been told that the death knell for BetaMax was when people started to conflate VHS and VCR