It is exactly the right approach. Let me explain... I bought my first Macintosh Quadra 605 in 1993 with what was considered a large hard drive (160 MB). Today, I'm lucky to barely fit just iTunes + Quicktime on this very same drive. Why is this? Cause we are writing in higher-level languages with a lot more multimedia content embedded in the package.
Last time I checked, I can't get iTunes from Apple via CD/DVD. I couldn't even get Lion on physical media when it initially released. I have to get it from somewhere.
Guess I'll have to use the Internet.
As a responsible member of the Internet, I'm expected to keep my system and all software packages patched. Where will I download those patches (some released daily/weekly)?
Guess I'll have to use the Internet.
If you want to talk smartphones instead, we can do that too. iOS 5 will have over-the-air updates. If these updates are anywhere near what they currently are, you're talking roughly 250MB per update! Add in apps from the App Store (that are getting increasingly larger), e-mail attachments, web browsing, Internet multimedia services, and a whole other large reason to own a smartphone and 2GB looks pretty lame.
Do you even understand what "text-based" means? Files nowadays may still contain text, but they are far from being standard ASCII text a few Kb in size. Have you looked at the size of a Word document lately? Some large ones can be a couple of megs. How about PDFs with embedded images? Last one I downloaded for a work function was 4MB.
You can talk all day about how bandwidth-friendly Pandora is, but that is far from the truth. When AT&T started rolling out 2GB plans and starting to phase out unlimited, I took the time to look at my usage and determine if I could save $10 a month on two phones. My usage, rather moderate, tallied up to just under 1.5GB a month. My wife, who couldn't tell you how to use anything other than Safari, Mail and Pandora on her phone, managed to rack up 4GB in one month!
If you think home usage will plateau, you are insane. It will grow exponentially for years to come. You wanna talk about 1080p video when Intel is busy prepping chipsets for 4k-capable displays. Apple and Microsoft are hard at work adding higher-definition icons, wallpapers, etc to their software packages. What does this mean? Larger software package, larger updates, more bandwidth usage.
Bottom line is that Internet services are exploding and these carriers are too busy filling the pockets of their top brass instead of putting that cash into their infrastructures. Large infrastructure replacement/upgrades are extremely expensive (not to mention the employees to make it all happen), but they are too interested in paying a CEO 8 and 9 figure salaries with golden parachutes for when they screw up.
I don't really care about your computer, that's what a home internet connection is for. Also, although I am lazy and do app updates over 3G, users who are using more data and need to start saving it can do those over wifi, which doesn't count against their cap. Same for system updates and the like. I am a pretty heavy user of my Android phone, and I use 3G exclusively, and my usage has gone up to a whopping 300-700MB/mo, including app updates, Email, web, apps, syncing 8 bajillion things, syncing all my uploaded pictures, uploading more pictures, etc etc etc.
You can download a lot of 50KB documents, and even plenty of 4MB PDFs before that 2GB cap is anywhere in sight. There's also a practical limit to what you can do on 3G and on these mobile devices before it just gets too slow to do in the first place.
4GB is a LOT of data, must be a LOT of Pandora. She should try using wifi when available, and using the lower bitrate when on the cell network. Sounds just as good on earbuds, and it saves half the bandwidth and quite a bit of battery to boot.
Data will plateau at 1080p, possible even 720p, as people can't see the difference between that and anything higher. Some people today still watch SD, and while I can sort of see the difference between 720p and 1080p, it's hard. There is no point to going to 4k except for the extreme enthusiasts.
Software does get bigger over time, but there was also the push-back like on Windows 7, where Microsoft had to take some of the bloat out. It would be nice if they would keep the envelope size down to that of Win2K, but at least they did cut back from Vista, even though it's not as small as XP.
At a certain point, however, that will all plateau too.
----------
Oh, and the cheaper, effectively unlimited data helped to push me onto a smartphone. It was inevitable, but even $5/mo made it a little bit more palatable.
