At the local office supply store I picked up a PNY* 32GB flash drive for $29.99—call it $32 with tax. A dollar per gigabyte. Shee-it. My first hard disk, early in 1986, was a whopping ten megabytes for only $700 (plus tax, but let's make the math easier by disregarding this). So I just picked up the 1986 equivalent of $2.25 million worth of storage for about the price of lunch for one in a sit-down restaurant in the San Francisco financial district. Bite me. What a shame that other necessities have not become so readily affordable!

cordially,

*I've always had good luck with this make, and they seem physically sturdy in construction, unlike some other brand products. I have my entire graphics library—photos, illustrations and vector—and other media resources (music clips, etc) on one of these already, and this has come in handy in more than one pinch. At this price a backup seems prudent.

I just downloaded the most recent iPhoto, which took the better part of a gig, and reflected that the original Adobe Illustrator, representing the very high end of Mac consumer software a quarter of a century ago, shipped on one or maybe two 800K floppies.

Still, I can purchase today "enough storage for your entire OS, apps, and most of the files you'd create in a couple of years," as an external HD for way less than $700.

cordially,