Worth Less To Worthless
When I was a teenager I spent some obscene percentage of any money I made on CDs and later, DVDs. I’d estimate that I bought 300 CDs and maybe 150 DVDs. On average, let’s say those CDs were $15 a pop and the DVDs were $20.¹ That’s $4,500 on CDs and $3,000 on DVDs. $7,500 in total on discs. Discs that are now effectively worthless.
Okay, they’re not completely worthless. Plenty of homes still have CD and DVD players. My home has neither, but I know I’m weird — meaning, a bit ahead of the curve. Regardless, these discs are definitely worth less. Yes, you can still find places to trade both in, but you’ll literally be getting pennies on the dollar.
I certainly wouldn’t have been better lighting that $7,500 on fire. I did derive quite a bit of value from those discs in their time.² But it’s still weird to have these piles and piles of discs, that I spent so much money on, that are now worthless to me.
I think about what I “collect” these days that will go through the same degradation in value. Certainly apps are a prime target. While many are free, I’ve definitely spent thousands of dollars on apps over the past several years (either paid apps, or through in-app purchases). It’s impossible to know when these apps will lose their value. But I’d bet a lot of money that they — or, perhaps more importantly, the platforms on which they run — won’t be around forever.
Maybe iOS and Android endure for decades — maybe — but even still, at some point it won’t make sense to be fully backward compatible with older apps. In Apple’s case, I wouldn’t bet against this being sooner rather than later. That’s just the way Apple rolls. And, in many cases, trying to run apps build for the initial versions of iOS — before it was even called iOS — is already ridiculous.
Just for fun, I went through my App Store history and re-downloaded a few of the earliest apps I acquired. I tried to look for apps that hadn’t been updated since 2009 or 2010. A couple would crash on launch. But I was surprised that most of the ones I tried still worked! They’re absolutely ridiculous to look at on an iPhone 6s Plus — shrunken canvas, fat text, and skeuomorphism galore — but they run!
Worth less, but not yet worthless.
¹ I remember a time when CDs were around $20. Then big retail got in trouble for price-fixing, so they suddenly plunged to $9.99. So I’ll average it out to around $15.
² And, at least with the CDs, I was able to transfer many of them into digital formats. Of course, now with streaming, those mp3s are effectively worthless once again… Also, how annoying is it that we never got such “amnesty” with DVDs-to-Digital?
Continued: The Missing Art in the Art of Music
