Search engines that work.
I don’t eat at QR code restaurants.
If you don’t have a menu, I don’t pay.
USB drives, dvd/blu ray.
URL shorteners, AMP? Micro USB?
Edit:
Thinking of things that weren’t made obsolete but just unprofitable…
Physical menus at restaurants, useful search results, human support staff, non-subscription software, open APIs, useful product reviews
I hate with a burning passion QR code scan menus.
I don’t have a smartphone, so QR code menus mean I don’t eat there.
I saw on Kitchen Nightmares one time where the QR code pointed to http://localhost/ haha
Haven’t watched such an episode yet, but the developer likely said “Works fine on my machine!”, LOL.
“Closed. Cannot reproduce”
Dedicated GPS unit in your car
My parents gave me a GPS unit for my car about 20 years ago and I used it for the longest time. It was great help when driving in cities and big towns or locations I had never gone to before. We used it all the time and I think I updated the maps … I think it was a Garmin device … I think I updated the maps 2 or 3 times over the years. Then it went unsupported but I kept using it for the longest time.
Then I started buying better smartphones and my phone just eventually replaced the GPS unit.
I still have it and it still works and the battery on it is still good … I just don’t need it any more and the maps are about 10-15 years out of date.
I can say the same about my ipod. I used it everyday for the longest time until I realized I can put a 126gb micro sd card in my phone which is more than double what my ipod had. Now it’s sitting in a box somewhere in my closet. Probably still works too.
It’s a shame modern phones have been losing both micro SD card slots and headphone jacks and often don’t have a substantial amount of storage. Still better than carrying multiple devices, however.
True yeah… Garmin devices were so revolutionary for driving when they came out. Then phones with Google maps came along and that was easier
Maybe 1/100 people I see using headphones have wired headphones, certainly wasn’t the case 10 years ago. Bluetooth technology and quality has come a long way.
Bluetooth isn’t the technology that’s come a long way, it’s still the same shit it was decades ago. It’s batteries.
I’d still have wires IF MY PHONE HAD A PLACE TO PLUG THEM IN.
You guys are only $5 away from the good ole days…
I refuse to buy a phone without a headphone jack. I’m not sure if I even have a choice anymore tbh… Really I only use my phone for music and text/call. A dandy map if I need one, but not usually.
I compared a tonne of flagship smart phones not that long ago. The Sony Xperia series was the only one to still have an audio jack. They’re quite expensive tho, so ended up with a phone sans the jack. I miss it dearly.
Buy a USB-C to headphone jack dongle. They’re about $5 and work on any phone.
See how they massacred my boy…
I do like my AirPods, but I’m still pissed off that the duopoly killed the headphone jack. Give me back my headphone jack!!
I could NOT be bothered with charging headphones daily.
A decent set of headphones will have an effectively all-day battery, and most people probably aren’t listening to their headphones for 8+ hours a day.
I’ve had my headphones for about 7 years now and they still last for several hours on a single charge, and they support fast charging. If they’re at 0%, I can plug them in for 10 minutes and they’ll have about 2 hours worth of charge. I charge them maybe once a week with casual use.
They usually charge themselves in their case (small pods) or have big batteries (over ear). I use my pods probably 8 hours a day, and just need to charge the case once or twice a week.
Optical disks. It was almost a necessity on laptop to have an optical drive, now there’s maybe one or two models out there that comes with one.
10 years ago was 2015. I went to buy a laptop from Dell in 2014, and they didn’t have any models with a disc drive. I looked.
Even 10 years ago, disc drives seemed to be out of fashion. But if you laptop was 5 years old, it likely have one anyways.
I used a MacBook for 10 years that was one of the first models to come without a disc drive, it was a 2013 model.
I recall it being a bit ahead of the curve at the time, but it was a pretty fast curve before you really couldn’t find a laptop with a disc drive anymore.
Headphone jacks. They certainly still exist but every device I owned that made sounds had one in 2015, no longer the case
For PC gaming and any sort of production/studio environment they’re still ubiquitous. Although yeah, not a daily driver for the public nowadays.
We class this as breakage and an indication of products to avoid until the product line is fixed.
Independent portable media players. Most of those functions have been susumed by phones.
The functions of this player have not been subsumed into a phone.
That’s pretty nifty! I’ve been looking at a personal AMFM radio/MP3 player recently, but I really like the CD ripping function of that one.
Which makes me frustrated that all the manufacturers have gotten too cheap to toss a miniscule DAC and headphone jack in phones anymore.
Headphone jack and micro SD cards and the biggest losses for me.
I don’t think it’s about them being cheap, it’s that they want to sell you the matching wireless headset
and it’s much easier to DRM
Well there are excellent DACs that you can use with USB-C and Lightning straight from your phone…
Office phones.
I had to fill out the number for my HR department on some paperwork. Tried to look it up. My large employer doesn’t have a phone number at all for any department - even HQ.
Sysadmin at my last gig, ushered in VOIP phones as I was starting in 2019. Only tech support used them, rest of us used our cell phones or Zoom.
When COVID hit and we all went WFH, almost no one took their phone home. :) I thought about it, but why?
Sounds about right. Last time I had an office phone at my desk was 2021.
I have an office phone, which is at least 10 years old at this point. One call every couple of months and it is spam.
Hell - I question if home phones are really hanging in there.
Our home phone is an extra line on the cell plan. That phone sits at home most of the time, and is a games phone for when kids come over with parents.
Plasma TVs, DVRs, DVD players
Plasma TV
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time…
Adding onto this: 3D TVs
Speaking of things that went nowhere, but the manufacturers thought they were the next big thing…
The one technology was obsolete before I could buy it, though when I first bought an Oculus Quest I tried ripping 3D Blu-rays and realized ~12 fps per eye is pretty shit quality anyway.
You bought the wrong tv silly head
Ubiquitous might be a stretch for 2015, but DVI cables come to mind.
while a straight dvi-d to dvi-d cable is quite uncommon to need today, i have used a bunch of hdmi to dvi-d adapter cables the last couple months to hook up new desktops to older displays that had vga and dvi-d inputs.
You’re giving me flashbacks to all the different DVI standards, and whatever you were plugging in never matched the type you had.
I have a number of older monitors hooked up to two GPUs and use just about every modern interface and adapter to make it all work. VGA, HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort. Technically it may not be the best and some monitors may refresh slower or something, but it works for me.
disk players
I miss when laptop computers usually had disk players
USB external optical-disc players are available to plug into any computer.
Tablets? Those seem to have really fallen out of fashion and have been replaced with regular smartphones becoming quite a lot bigger.
I recently got a tablet so I could take handwritten notes during meetings. I thought I’d use it for a bunch of other stuff but I do not.
Not to mention, the
OCR handwriting recognitionmy handwriting is really bad.I like my tablet for ancestry research and not much else. But I think maybe still good for artists?
I see them often used in universities, maybe not as much elsewhere as ten years ago but still a regular occurrence
They weren’t quite ubiquitous anymore, but looking for a payphone wasn’t a sign of someone being a time traveler. The last one near me hung on until a couple years ago.
There’s a payphone by one of the elementary schools here. I wonder if it’s more likely that a kid without a cellphone is more likely to use it?
Here in Australia, they are all free now. I presume the phone company realised nobody was using them and preferred to keep them as free billboard spaces.
They tend to have free wifi too so are somewhat useful.
I think I tried that once and you needed to download a Telstra app or something so I noped out. Ive seen the signs though.
