And you call this..."progress"?

Way back when, before I ventured to make translation my main source of income, I used to teach English as a foreign language, predominantly in language schools as well as in various firms around town, e.g. the Infineon, KPMG, the local branch of the Bundesbank, and PwC. Among others.

In those days, course books came with cassettes so that students could hear voices and accents other than those of their teacher. Language schools could supply you with the equipment to play cassettes, but going into companies, I took this little gadget with me: the Panasonic mini cassette recorder RQ-L31

You could speed up the recording, slow it down and even record stuff of your own (such as my grandmother going through her photo album and telling the stories behind the pictures).

Then came CDs and everyone (apart from me) looked down at the humble cassette and now, I had to buy a portable CD player, plus a separate loudspeaker and the various cables required, including extension cables as the socket in the wall wasn't always close enough to the desk I was sitting at to teach. Hence, instead of one small gadget, I now had schlepp with me this lot:

Something that looked like this:

This speaker: 

And this:

Plus the cables to connect the speaker to the CD. Just so I could do what the mini cassette player could do. Well, not quite. With a cassette, if the student didn't hear a word, you could just go back a few seconds. On a CD, if you missed something, you have to start the entire track from the beginning.

In this day and age, though, that's not good enough. You now need a laptop that can be used with a digital projector. 

That means one of these things:

To ensure that it works in my evening classes, I need that, plus audio cables, plus a cable that connects to the digital projector and the cable to connect to the power (in case the battery runs out). Plus a nice bag to ensure the thing is suitably protected from bumps etc.

HOWEVER, I recently bought a new laptop and, oh my, what a bad buy (or as the Germans say a "Fehlkauf"). The thing is so slim that it doesn't come with an inbuilt CD player or DVD drive so I needed to buy an external one, like this:

And the sound isn't very strong, so I bought something like this, too:

And, of course, all the relevant cables.

All instead of this one little gadget:

And you call this "progress"?