I’ll take the opposite view… what technologies are ubiquitous today that will be irrelevant in a few years?
Smartwatches. Nobody needs this shit, they’re mostly just toys for fat people who want to “monitor their health”, and for gadget-goofs that need everything shiny, new and overpriced, regardless of the actual utility in their lives.
Pay phones, Public water fountains, Coffee grinders in grocery stores, all the hundreds of gadgets that our smart phones replaced, Tons of random accessories for everything were all over stores and eBay but sadly all gone now.
all the hundreds of gadgets that our smart phones replaced
In 2015, at least in Canada, smart phones were already ubiquitous.
Interesting point about the grinders, I’m just realising I haven’t seen any in forever.
Portable handhelds, I mean form factors like the PSP and Nintendo DS. The downside of the console/handheld convergence is that the handhelds need pretty big screens.
CD’s & Mp3 players
Search engines that work.
Even when you get or the actual website results you now have to wade through the AI slop sites
I don’t eat at QR code restaurants.
If you don’t have a menu, I don’t pay.
I much prefer some of the QR code restaurants we have in my city. I don’t want a waiter hassling me throughout my meal.
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
Ive been on a restaurant where that happened
Haven’t watched such an episode yet, but the developer likely said “Works fine on my machine!”, LOL.
“Closed. Cannot reproduce”
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.
That’s just not true, Bluetooth codecs have improved sound quality DRAMATICALLY.
And I say this as someone who’s not a big fan of wireless.
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.
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 have an old garmin gps in my car. Use it all the time combined with a phone. The garmin doesn’t need cell signal so it works everywhere. Funny when going places where the street didn’t exist back then, but it’s kind of cool to see how the city grows. We mainly use it as a backup. It’s also louder than the phone talking and easier to understand.
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
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.
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.
Independent portable media players. Most of those functions have been susumed by phones.
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…
The functions of this player have not been subsumed into a phone.
It has nubs
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.
I haven’t tried the CD ripping, but my jaw was on the floor the first time I saw the feature list. Decent build and battery too.
I’ll watch the whole video later and check out the other features, I just watched the first 30 seconds or so. It’s something I could see myself picking up, but I’m not sure I’d use it as a portable very much since it’s kind of larger. Maybe keeping it in my purse or book bag would work.
This is the one I’ve been looking at, but I need to look into reviews first. I love that both of these have a slot for a card.
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.
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.
