Consumer Technology

Many consumer technologies have advanced in the last hundred or so years.
Virtual reality technologies have exploded, the Net is vast and fast, and cybernetics have become commonplace.
This document will outline some of the more striking changes.

Computers

Storage

Magnetic Storage

Spinning rust is dead, only some ancient legacy machines and collectors systems still use magnetic media. It's considered unreliable and painfully slow in a world driven by instant gratification (and load times).

Flash Storage/Solid State

Solid State media has reached it's theoretical limit, it's fast, really fast with little difference in access times between it and conventional RAM.
Portable devices will often use this as primary storage, and large machines will run software that has to be fast off of them.
They have been blown out the water for storage density, however, by the Crystal Data Diskette.

Crystal Data Diskette

The CDD is an example of one step back and a hundred steps forward.
As flash media reached it's theoretical storage limit one company decided to go back to the concept of a spinning platter in a metal casing. The platter itself is made out of an advanced crystaline polymer material. The data density on one of these disks is immense, however access times are slow compared to flash media.
Often used for archival, cold storage and anything that doesn't need the rapid access of flash media. These 50x50x2mm diskettes have replaced all non-flash media and have a theoretical shelf life of a thousand years.
They can only be inserted into a drive one way, however and are keyed. The small size of the disk and general symmetry of its design mean that users attempting to insert one blind will often get it wrong and have to flip the disk and try again.
Advanced cyborgs often have a CDD reader built into their implants, whilst those with lighter levels of augmentation will rely on an external drive connected to their neural interface.