why digital natives don't care about hard drive sizes

My first computer was an Apple laptop, a powerbook 165c. However it was better known as a 4x80, that is it had four megabytes of ram and eighty megabytes of hard drive. Obviously those figures now seem ridiculous, a mobile phone is probably better specified. I am typing this on another Apple laptop (my third) with 8 gigabytes of ram and 250 gigabytes of hard drive.

Accordingly I belong the that generation that tends to classify a computer by the ram and the hard drive. The maxim being that you cannot have too much of either. However I suspect that for those who have grown up digital, used to a perpetual ever accessible wifi signal, constant internet, instant twitter, instagram etc etc, these old metrics are of little interest.

The tendency now is to have each device as a mere portal to your online identity, so you can access the same apps and data on whatever you are sitting at, or happen to have in your hand. In the Mac world apps will run on iOS and Mac OS, there might be some data on the device, but the parent data, the true data, that is all in the cloud, available for download.

The idea of taking a load of photos with a camera and storing them on your hard drive is just alien to such digital natives. The idea of having documents on your hard drive is likewise odd, by and large the digital natives barely understand where data is held, because it is all held for them in the cloud. Because if it is not there on the cloud, visible, shared, open to comment, then it does not really truly exist. The digital nomads have moved into a world where everything is online, any device just lets you plug into the online identity that you have created for yourself.

There are downsides to this, what happens when nostalgia hits and you want to see those old photos, what happens when you have invested all that time and effort in an online service that is no longer there, what happens when someone makes a botch and irreplaceable data is corrupted. But that is the world that we are in already, to some extent or another we are all dependent on the cloud and the ever accessible internet.

We have all thrown out the atlas and now just have to trust to googlemaps.

[the prompt for writing this was backing up my daughter’s laptop and finding that the thing is practically empty!]