ext_83620 ([identity profile] elvum.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] pozorvlak 2006-02-23 12:35 pm (UTC)

DVDs - better picture quality than VHS tapes; less convenient in some respects (region coding).
Television - took off because it was better than radio, and less convenient - you can't watch television while driving, for example.
CDs - *they're* what replaced Vinyl, not cassettes IMO, and they offer better sound quality *and* more convenience. Audiophiles will hate me for saying this, but for 99.9% of the population, their CDs sound better than any LPs they may have.
Mobile phones - pretty much sold purely for convenience, and not significantly worse than landlines in any way that I can think of.

Basically, I don't buy the theory. :-) For any given technology you can probably think of one way in which it is worse than its predecessors and one way in which it is more convenient. I think it would be fairer to say that convenience is probably the most important driver for consumer take-up of new technologies, and that retrograde steps in other aspects are sometimes insufficiently important to prevent this.

Incidentally, I got two pairs of cargoes in Topman for £20 last weekend - possibly worth checking.

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