Re:The cassette returns on a wave of nostalgia
by tialaramex on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @11:00AM
(#19255312)
It's a Quality of Implementation issue.
The tape does this because it was mechanically simpler. But in other systems, where it may not be, this is still what you want. So, a good Implementation should do it anyway.
Portable minidisc players _could_ have been made slightly cheaper by removing the solid state storage, then they would have skipped if jogged like old portable CD players (and unlike a portable tape player). But all the official ones had solid state and so the experience for the end user was that they "didn't skip" even though of course in reality a spinning disc can't achieve that, the solid state storage hides it from you for long enough. Good Implementation. CD players copied this technology eventually as RAM got cheaper.
This is the same for TV channel up/down on most digital TVs. It's very slow. Why? Well, mechanically changing channel is more complicated, and so by default it will be slow. But that's not really _why_ the real answer is that consumers prefer a cheaper TV that has poor Quality of Implementation and so those have won. Vendors could spend $5 extra on the BOM (duplicate tuner and decoder circuitry following adjacent channels) and a few hours engineering to make it nice and fast, but why bother when customers won't pay a dime extra?
The tape does this because it was mechanically simpler. But in other systems, where it may not be, this is still what you want. So, a good Implementation should do it anyway.
Portable minidisc players _could_ have been made slightly cheaper by removing the solid state storage, then they would have skipped if jogged like old portable CD players (and unlike a portable tape player). But all the official ones had solid state and so the experience for the end user was that they "didn't skip" even though of course in reality a spinning disc can't achieve that, the solid state storage hides it from you for long enough. Good Implementation. CD players copied this technology eventually as RAM got cheaper.
This is the same for TV channel up/down on most digital TVs. It's very slow. Why? Well, mechanically changing channel is more complicated, and so by default it will be slow. But that's not really _why_ the real answer is that consumers prefer a cheaper TV that has poor Quality of Implementation and so those have won. Vendors could spend $5 extra on the BOM (duplicate tuner and decoder circuitry following adjacent channels) and a few hours engineering to make it nice and fast, but why bother when customers won't pay a dime extra?