The orienteering club I am a member of has made the decision to purchase electronic punching equipment. Since I grew up with the classic punching equipment that has probably not changed in the last 40 years, this is pretty exciting.
I was kind of puzzled originally that an e-punch card could cost about $35, while being able to store information about you and up to 33 punches. Assuming a generous 100 bytes per punch, that can’t be more than 4k of storage. 1G USB keys can be bought for a bit over $10 (sometimes even less). I guess there is a lot of research and development invested in making the solution resilient to the elements (the control stations are waterproof and smart enough to save their batteries etc), and there is not a high demand in orienteering equipment either, but I still think there’s a pretty high margin in selling the e-punch cards at $30+.
People are already unhappy that the new cards only work in new control stations and that forces clubs to ditch their older equipment. There may well be valid reasons to force the incompatibility (after all, the newer e-punch cards are more than twice as fast as the old ones, and it may be that the old stations just can’t handle that).
Since I’m not traveling to A-meets, it doesn’t bother me that I will have a new e-punch card. But it does point out one fact: the good old stapler-like puncher lasted for the past half a century and is still a valid option – can you say the same thing about electronic equipment? I am worried we’ll see the same trend as with modern computers: update every 3 years or you won’t find software to run.