November 2nd, 2007
Hard drive? Wii don't need no steenking hard drive!
By any measure the Nintendo Wii has been a tremendous success. Thanks to its low price and innovative design the Wii continues to outsell all other next generation consoles. It’s fast, quiet, and cool. So why mess with success?
That’s why I’m always puzzled when people request Nintendo put a hard drive on the Wii. ComputerAndVideoGames.com writes “Have you filled up your Wii’s internal memory yet? We have and it’s bloody annoying.” Well I haven’t and I’ve been playing it hard since buying one from a scalper ebayer last Christmas. CVG writer Mike Jackson takes Nintendo to task for the omission. But he fails to mention that the latest XBox 360 Arcade version doesn’t have a hard drive either. The PS2, probably the most popular game machine ever, doesn’t have a hard drive.
With “storage in the cloud” of the Internet, and with solid state options like flash memory, hard drives are completely unnecessary. Suppose the Wii did have a hard drive. You know what the next complaint would be: “The Wii hard drive isn’t big enough,” or maybe “It’s too noisy,” or “It’s too expensive”. There’s no pleasing some people.
Well Mike, if it makes you feel better just pretend the Wii has a hard drive on the other end of its network connection. It’s a really big one that will never run out of space. It will never crash, it doesn’t require a noisy fan, and will never get demagnetized if your 8 year old leaves the fish tank magnet cleaner on top of the console.
Nintendo got where they are by ignoring conventional wisdom and doing things that other people thought were crazy at the time. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but God bless ‘em, we need more people like that in the world. Wii would like to play, not defrag our disk drives.
What do you think? Does the Wii need a hard drive?
Does the Wii need a hard drive?
- No (67%)
- Yes (33%)
Total Votes: 798
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Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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| 11/27/07
