Sunday 4 March 2012

Smartphones making smaller homes affordable.

At $300/sq ft for a new house, flat screens and smartphones shrink houses.  When the wall-mounted flat screen ousts the table-mounted monster, your house can shrink by 9 sq ft and have the same free space.  When you put 4000 pictures on your smartphone, the shelf for the family photo albums isn't needed.  Thanks to a smartphone, the storage space for the camera and the video in the closet is no longer needed nor are the accessories and the insurance for them.   My Dad's Encyclopaedia Britannica took up four feet of bookshelf and cost $400 in the early fifties, but the smartphone in my pocket easily tells me more about the world.   The house needs no place to store magazines and newspapers.  The fax machine and the desk space it took up? Gone.   The three filing cabinets?  Gone except for a few folders.  The cathode-ray computer became a flat screen iMac with the whole brains of the thing built into the back of the screen.  This freed up about 2 1/2 square feet of house at $300/sq. ft.   Remember the FM and stereo cabinet with the LP's stored beneath?  Gone and with it about ten sq ft of floor area.   Seems that I walk about the house less than before because I don't need to fetch the yellow pages and I don't need to get a stamp and an envelope and I don't need to get out my cheque book and don't need to look up stuff in Merck's Manual or the Concise Oxford Dictionary.  The circulation space could shrink and I wouldn't miss it.

h/t Instapundit quoting from Diamandis an Kotler.
Twenty years ago, most well-off US citizens owned a camera, a video camera, a CD player, a stereo, a video game console, a cell phone, a watch, an alarm clock, a set of encyclopedias, a world atlas, a Thomas Guide, and a whole bunch of other assets that easily add up to more than $10,000. All of which come standard on today’s amrat phones…that’s how quickly $10,000 worth of expenses can vanish.

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