[crote]

For a lot of applications we have pretty much reached that point already. 2TB NVMe SSD are around the $100-$150 price point these days. Unless they are actively trying, the average desktop user is never going to fill that up. There are only so many holiday pictures you can take, after all.

I think the size of audio files is a great example of why storage needs won't infinitely grow. Although we have orders of magnitude more storage space these days, audio files haven't really gotten any bigger since the CD era. If anything, they have gotten smaller as better compression algorithms were invented.

The thing is, human hearing only has so much resolution. Sure, we could be sampling audio at 64-bits with a 1MHz sample rate these days if we wanted to, but there's just no reason to. Similarly with pictures: if you can't see any pixels standing a foot away from a poster-sized print, why bother increasing the resolution any more?

The big consumer-range data hogs are 1) video torrents, and 2) games. Both of them have a natural upper bound due to human perception. They might still grow by an order of magnitude or two, but it won't be much more before it just becomes pointless.

Enterprise is a bit of a different story, of course - especially now that AI is rapidly increasing the value of data.

[rowanG077]

I don't think holding human perception as a standard for video games holds up. For audio and video it makes sense, but we are a long way of for video.

For video games there is a huge "storage waste" factor. A factor that I think is more important than the human perception limit. If you look at modern games you can probably throw away double digit percentage signs of most games if a capable team would have the time to optimize for disk space. It's simply not done because it has little advantage. I think this wastage factor will scale with the complexity of video games regardless of graphical fidelity.

[antifa]

> 2TB NVMe SSD are around the $100-$150 price point these days. Unless they are actively trying, the average desktop user is never going to fill that up. There are only so many holiday pictures you can take, after all.

4k family videos would like to have a word with you.

[fbdab103]

Big brother potential aside, I could imagine a future in which everyone wears a body camera everywhere. A digital record of your entire life. Given increasingly good AI extraction, you can then have searchable transcripts of your conversations, query your life for the last time you saw movie X (interesting IP questions here), re-experience moments with grandma, whatever. There was a Black Mirror episode incorporating this concept.

4k video * lifetime is greater storage requirements than available to consumers today.

[bigkahuna1986]

If you find such a concept interesting, I would recommend the movie Final Cut (2004) with Robin Williams. Not a particularly good movie but it does have this as an interesting premise.

[rolph]

resolution beyond human perception is useful, for watermarking, data tracking, EXIF, DRM schemes, in/ex filtration in general.

[znpy]

> There are only so many holiday pictures you can take, after all.

You miss the point, sadly.

Yeah storage is getting larger and cheaper but modern cameras/phones/etc take photos that are way larger than they used to do.

My first digital camera in like 2001 or so could only take either 20 "large" (640x480) bitmap photos or 80 "small" pictures, taking a few tens of kilobytes each at most.

My 2022 iphone se takes high quality pictures that are easily in the 7-8MB range (i just checked).

So yeah, disks keep getting larger, but so does the media.

[wongarsu]

And image sizes aren't really bound by human perception in any real way. Yes, screens typically range from 2-8MP, and probably won't go much beyond 32MP. But more resolution, more dynamic range, more color fidelity are incredibly useful for editing pictures; and you can always add resolution to add digital zoom.

Photos are however constrained by physics. There are only so many photons captured in a certain area in a given time, so no matter whether we talk about the tiny lenses and sensors of smartphones or the much larger versions on dedicated cameras there's a very real limit (and phones are pretty close to the limits imposed by their sensor size)