Your parent specifically stated 1991 not "before 1991".
I think I understand what you mean but there was also a unfulfilled requirement before 1991. Back then (I'm 50.5 years old) cells didn't explode but then they also didn't set the world alight in terms of longevity either.
We had Walkmans and crappy clones that drained the shitty rechargeable cells we had at the time in a few hours. OK those things drove mechanical beasties - cassettes but cells/batteries were not particularly good before Li-Ion turned up.
Do you have any idea how something as simple as an iPod becomes exciting because no mechanical spinny things means power draw is much, much lower? It also helps if the thing isn't beige or grey. Apple are no more exciting to me than any other mob: design-wise, but they did get a few things right early on: "don't look shit". As it turns out, that simple mantra means that you get to >$1T t/o.
Now I own a phone that runs for around two days before charging. That doesn't sound too grand until you recall that just the GPS thing in it would have required 2U+ in a comms rack back in the day. The camera? If I kept an equivalent camera from the 1990s in my pocket then I'd be making silly jokes about it. The phone: I can stand on the top of Hay Torr and make a call.
Most of that seems true but orthogonal to my point, which is when comparing states of something with a power law growth, it is really easy to come up with big numbers that don’t contain any real information.
That 50,000x or whatever didn’t really give any information about the growth of a product over thirty years, it only really gives information about the growth during the first year which if it had been marginally different would give you a wildly different value for your “market growth today” number.
We should all be careful not to publish large numbers with dubious sources.
> We had Walkmans and crappy clones that drained the shitty rechargeable cells we had at the time in a few hours. OK those things drove mechanical beasties - cassettes but cells/batteries were not particularly good before Li-Ion turned up.
NiMH came out around the same time and it's fine. A good one has similar energy to a good alkaline. Not very far behind a small-cell lithium ion either.
