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Apple iPod shuffle is really the best, the top of technology. phones are phones, they are not for the music. well-observed notice about throwing away cassettes, cds... what is next I wander?
personally, i didnt noticed tape reels been thrown-away - though I was a user myself, when I was a child. I even remember copying some of my fave music from TV onto these reels. I became a fan of compact cassettes very soon, and it lasted quite a long period. and I still keep all my cassetts (and wife is keeping hers!) in a box. not for we listen them or love them very much, its just... apart of our live, sort of museum? who knows what curve the life will turn next.
in the past, people already have regretted more than once (they really teared hair on the heads!) for performing irreversible actions - for example, during the CD-winning era, they digitized the archives and threw out the master matrix for the vinyl disks manufacturing... later it become visible that CD-mastering technologies are far from perfection yet...
you also forgot to mention the VHS epoch! they are not that compact ant take a sufficient rooms, so when people initiated VHS-throwaway... the heaps were quite spectacular! this time we utilised most of our supplies, I just left one box of the most memorable stuff. and we still keep our VHS player. the DVD-throwaway era also had place, and it wasnt a big surprise already. needless to say, that we keep all our DVDs and CDs intact. I have two boxes of CDr/DVDr, it is a hard backup of data, fotos and music. just in case of any emergency.
you dont went too far away in your predictions -- intresting what is the next step? it will be not HDs, I think... definitely. probably, out-dated PCs? not that it is a trend, but I really see some useless compies from time to time. the ones that nobody even feel urge to pick up!
recently i've even made some funny pics to illustrate the subject!
(the second one is a hand-made ad, its says "I will obtain your compact-casssettes"). isnt it nice?
PS. maybe, you can use my comment for the curie contest? :=)