Five technologies that Steve Jobs can kill for good!

Steve Jobs was the cause of the deaths of floppy drive, dial-up modem, the FireWire and mouse buttons and the company he founded is capable of killing a few more, including the hard drive, says Tarun Karuturi, a Get Ahead reader in response to our reader invite.

Tarun is a second year student of Electronics and Communication Engineering at Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi.

Steve Jobs apart from (formerly) being the CEO of the world's highest valued tech company has a secret profession. He has over the past few years become the Grim Reaper of the Tech World. Almost every piece of technology he has found redundant over the years has inevitably been pushed into an Infinite Loop (pun intended!) of death. Starting with the removal of the sweet old floppy drive from the iMac in 1998 Steve Jobs has had a strict policy of denying entry to any technology that he found clumsy or inefficient for use into his iDevices and not so surprisingly sooner or later all these technologies have faced the axe.

The list of his successful kills is quite large from the Floppy Drive through the Dial Up Modem, FireWire and to the Mouse buttons. But let's peek into crystal ball now and take some possible guesses of who's going to fill up the Apple Graveyard.

Click NEXT for more

Also Read: Get Ahead Gadgets and Gaming

Are you a gadget/gaming wizard/afficianado? Would you like to write on gadgets, gaming, the Internet, software technologies, OSs and the works for us? Send us a sample of your writing to gadgetsandgaming@rediffmail.com with the subject as 'I'm a tech wizard/afficianado' and we will get in touch with you.

The First occupant on the list would be............Flash!! (What a surprise!). Yes Steve Jobs has literally dug up the grave for Flash when he first didn't include support for Flash on the First Generation iPad. He described it as "Buggy" and a "CPU Hog" and even went to the extent of calling Adobe "Lazy". Now you may say so what? If Steve Jobs denies support for Flash on iPad how is it going to be the end of Flash? Well let me tell you why.

Adobe recently launched a new tool called Adobe Edge which allows web designers to design animated web content using HTML5, CSS, JavaScript. Although Adobe aims for it to "co-exist" with Flash anyone with a functioning brain can understand that Adobe itself is nailing the coffin on Flash. Although the transition may be a slow process it is bound to happen and Flash will be a thing of the past.

Click NEXT for more

Also Read: Get Ahead Gadgets and Gaming

Are you a gadget/gaming wizard/afficianado? Would you like to write on gadgets, gaming, the Internet, software technologies, OSs and the works for us? Send us a sample of your writing to gadgetsandgaming@rediffmail.com with the subject as 'I'm a tech wizard/afficianado' and we will get in touch with you.

The next contender on the list is the Optical Drive. Now I may have offended many of you at this point. But hey stick with me and I'll tell you why. With the removal of the optical drive from the Mac Mini Jobs had brought this crucial question onto many minds. Do we still need to spend time, money (and space) on a time consuming technology such as the CD when have the very convenient plug and play USB flash drives?

Well at least Steve Job thinks no and I agree with him. I mean when was the last time you used your CD-Drive. I fail to remember the last time I used mine. Now Apple is driving this move forward by removing DVD install disks from their packages and instead supplying USB drives with the OS loaded on it.

That's how the Mac OS X Lion was released and that's how they are going to do it in the future. This is a point of argument for many but I feel, like the Floppy drive the Optical Drive is going to be pushed off the cliff.

Click NEXT for more

Also Read: Get Ahead Gadgets and Gaming

Are you a gadget/gaming wizard/afficianado? Would you like to write on gadgets, gaming, the Internet, software technologies, OSs and the works for us? Send us a sample of your writing to gadgetsandgaming@rediffmail.com with the subject as 'I'm a tech wizard/afficianado' and we will get in touch with you.

Now who next you say?! Well Steve says the Hard Drive. By replacing the Hard Drive with the SSD (Solid State Drive) or "Flash Storage" as he calls it Jobs and Co. are trying to push forward the SSDs and push away the Hard Drives.

What may the advantages be one may ask. Well I say look at the MacBook Air and you will figure it out. The SSDs are twice as fast, more compact, lighter, and have a higher storage to size ratio when compared to Hard Drives. 

Although they are quite expensive right now and are out of reach for the large part of the consumer industry costs are going to fall and many companies are going to adapt to this. In fact many major players in the industry such as HP and Dell have already slowly started putting SSDs in their product lines.

Coming to the next one, I'm on the wall for this one and cannot say anything for sure but only time will decide. What I am talking about here is the Blu-Ray technology.

Click NEXT for more

Also Read: Get Ahead Gadgets and Gaming

Are you a gadget/gaming wizard/afficianado? Would you like to write on gadgets, gaming, the Internet, software technologies, OSs and the works for us? Send us a sample of your writing to gadgetsandgaming@rediffmail.com with the subject as 'I'm a tech wizard/afficianado' and we will get in touch with you.

This is what Jobs had to say on Blu-Ray: Blu-Ray is just a bag of hurt. It's great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we're waiting till things settle down and Blu-Ray takes off in the marketplace.

He also claims that Blu-Ray will be beaten by internet downloads where users can directly download movies to their TVs and store on them, with sufficient quality (at least 720p) to satisfy the audience. We'll just have to wait and watch on this one, it can go either way.

Click NEXT for more

Also Read: Get Ahead Gadgets and Gaming

Are you a gadget/gaming wizard/afficianado? Would you like to write on gadgets, gaming, the Internet, software technologies, OSs and the works for us? Send us a sample of your writing to gadgetsandgaming@rediffmail.com with the subject as 'I'm a tech wizard/afficianado' and we will get in touch with you.

The Final One.

This is the most hotly discussed and debated topic between tech geeks and ultimately one to which no one can have a concrete answer right now.

Yes I am talking about the possible death of the PC by none other than the tablet. Jobs ignited this fire with the iPad and has sparked off a possible revolution where the PC as we know of it today many no longer exist.

A bit far-fetched you may say. Maybe.

But ultimately Jobs feels that tablets will usher in the "Post –PC Era" and Apple is trying to do its best to do so with its line of iPads. As of now the table market is still trending. But once the market stabilises we will have our answer to the priceless question. Will the PC survive?

So as far as Jobs era is concerned he has created an impact like none (will continue to do so hopefully as the Chairman) and let us just hope that Tim Cook maintains this momentum and charges forward with Apple.

Also Read: Get Ahead Gadgets and Gaming

Are you a gadget/gaming wizard/afficianado? Would you like to write on gadgets, gaming, the Internet, software technologies, OSs and the works for us? Send us a sample of your writing to gadgetsandgaming@rediffmail.com with the subject as 'I'm a tech wizard/afficianado' and we will get in touch with you.