Size doesn’t matter, really
Our EIC Adel Gabot writes about the many changes our readers will expect when our next ish comes out next week. Ever since Steve Jobs announced products two quarters in advance, we thought it would be cool to do the same thing a week before our issue comes out. Here’s Adel.
I once owned a 10-megabyte external hard drive. 10MB—not a typo—megabytes. It was new and beautiful and advanced for its time, and I loved it.
It was as thick as the three volumes of the Lord of The Rings put together—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of The King—and even heavier. It was made of steel, and it made a horrible racket when it spun its big platters.
It held the equivalent of about 30 single-sided 5.25 floppies—a stupendous amount of data back then, when an operating system fit on a 360KB disk. It was an entire universe of storage space in those days. Having a newfangled 10MB drive, when some people were settling for the less expensive 5MB hard disks, was a cool thing. You could load up the OS, the app, and the data all at the same time! Before that, you needed two floppy drives: one for your operating system, another for your app and the data. Now it was all in there!
But that was in 1986. Twenty years later, it’s all different.
Last week, I was thinking of getting a 5400rpm 120GB 2.5″ Toshiba laptop hard drive; someone was selling me one for PhP 4, 700.00, and I wanted to get it. It was about the size of a raffle booklet. It held the equivalent of…well, a lot more floppies than I can count.
Things are certainly much smaller in the 21st Century.
In fact, most days I have a Lexar Firefly flash drive hanging off my Hinge ID lanyard from my neck. No larger than my pinky fingernail, it contains the equivalent of almost 30 of those heavy steel LOTR 10MB hard drives I had 20 years ago. The capacity is tiny by today’s standards, but I get by shuttling doc files and jpegs back and forth from editorial to creative most of the time.
Today, small is beautiful. What used to take up entire rooms of computing power in the 20th century now fits in the palm of your hand. The entire navigation equipment of Apollo 13 now fits in the innards of a Timex wristwatch. Thus, you have massive power taking up miniscule space—and we tend to take it for granted.
You probably noticed that Mobile Philippines shrunk this month, too:
We had to take the plunge, despite our love for the large format. It was just too damn big. People had trouble keeping it on the shelf with the other half-pint gear mags; it tended to droop on the stands after a week; readers refused to fold the magazine just so they can keep them in their bags; and advertisers were sometimes reluctant to resize an ad just for us.
On the plus side, Mobile was different. To use more than our share of clichés, this week, the mag was larger than life and in your face. It allowed us more creative expression, a bigger canvas and an unmistakable presence. We had humongous pictures and spectacular spreads. And if it rained, you had an instant umbrella.
But it was still big.
So we shrunk it to normal dimensions. Just like the early days. So there.
It’s still the same mag. More content, in fact. More manageable dimensions. Thicker. Easier to keep, read, lug around. It’s smaller, more concentrated, more feature-packed. Just like a newfangled 120GB laptop hard disk. We retrofitted some things, shoehorned others into a smaller space, redesigned other stuff completely. We worked hard on it.
We hope you like it. So tell us what you think.
w00t! resize ftw!