Will a richer photo experience on the web drive bigger, faster storage?

This Tweet by @ryan has sparked some great discussion on Twitter. Buzz Feed first introduced me to this via their post.

Image c/o BuzzFeed

To me, whenever a webpage quadruples in size due large in part to images, in this case retina versions of images on Apple.com that take advantage of the new iPad display capabilities, I immediately jump to bigger, faster hard drives. Sure much more goes into delivering a richer web experience than storage, for instance bandwidth, but at the core, the content needs to reside somewhere, and more than likely it’s on servers with hard drives or solid state drives.

Add Facebook to this discussion as well. Their recent announcement c/o Venture Beat, “Facebook photos go high resolution and full screen” would seem to support the same argument. But, Facebook’s Ryan Mack goes into some rather detailed explanation as to how they are doing it without slowing page loads to a crawl. What I gathered from the Facebook post was that Facebook figured out a way to add more detail to each image without impacting the users photo viewing experience.

The same could not be said for retina images, at least from what I can gather. The main difference, Facebook designs for Facebook users and is fairly device agnostic. Apple’s design elements gracing the new iPad impact everyone that has a website and wants to take advantage of the new retina display capabilities of the iPad, but not at the expense of a slower web browsing experience.

Granted, faster storage is not the solution. It’s just a cog in the wheel, but no doubt as companies make their websites retina image rich, where they host their website will demand fatter drives. And that’s a beautiful picture for this storage guy.

Do you have a new iPad? Is the retina display all its cracked up to be?

The iPad means business for IT decision-makers

Apple needs hard drives more than ever…12 petabytes worth