This has been a great week for attention grabbing headlines in market research reports. The BBC reports that a Toshiba-sponsored study characterized 60 percent of British gadget users as “digitally fat”. This means that they carry with them 5 to 10-Gigabytes of digital music files wherever they go. The study further suggests that within the next year many of these same Britons will become “digitally obese” by carrying with them 20-Gigabytes of gadget-stored data.
The study incorporates some of the findings of a study Cal Tech Professor Roy Williams did in the 1990s, associating digital storage with the estimated volume of paper needed to store that same information. How they made the transition between paper storage equivalents and virtual fatness or obesity is not clear in the BBC article.
If I understand the study, every full-sized iPod user in the world is a candidate for digital fatness. Maybe the iPod mini was an attempt by Apple to encourage moderation.