I’d say audio CDs, but those have been back on the upward trend since streaming and download services started getting hostile and people started wising up to that hostility, in other words, people want to own their music again and so started buying CDs again recently vs. having a streaming or download service randomly yank content they paid for from their libraries.
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.
Love my smart watch
I go jogging and leave my big bulky phone behind. I can still track my jog, listen to music, and check my heart rate, but at 1/20th the weight.
I loved having a smartwatch, for the brief period of time I had one. They fell to (IMO) the pitfalls of being annoying to charge and being tied to massive smartphone walled gardens. After a few years my smartwatch couldn’t even hold a charge through a single day, and had lost support from the manufacturer anyway, and was hard to keep synced with my phone, and eventually the hassle became too much for it to be worth it.
But if we had a standard API for wearables that smartphone companies adhered to, and I didn’t have to charge it every night, I would love to have another smartwatch. They’re so convenient.
Yeah nah.
People (normal people) like having their messages, facebook comments, whatever else coming up somewhere even more accessible than their phone in their pocket.
The transition from pocket watches to wrist watches was for similar reasons, although it took a (first) world war for the convenience to be fully appreciated.
Ubiquitous might be a stretch for 2015, but DVI cables come to mind.
I’m stilling rocking my GTX 1080 I bought in 2017, and when I had to switch the DVI cable for my smaller monitor, I had some fun looking for the thing. Partly because of how uncommon they’ve become… partly because there’s a lot of them DVI types and I think I bought the wrong one the first time.
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.
Plasma TVs, DVRs, DVD players
Adding onto this: 3D TVs
You bought the wrong tv silly head
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.
Plasma TV
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time…
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.
Oh yeah, coffee grinders in grocery stores. I rarely see those anymore, but they used to be everywhere.
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.
The grinder thing is because Keurig K-Cups came out, and the entire industry shifted towards selling those instead.
TIL.
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’ve encountered a ton older folks using them around here, for example reading books or even just using them for bank stuff instead of a computer or a phone. The bigger screen makes them a lot easier to use, especially if your eyesight isn’t as good. I guess that tracks with “fallen out of fashion” though
I see them often used in universities, maybe not as much elsewhere as ten years ago but still a regular occurrence
CD’s & Mp3 players
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.
4G cellphones.
I would rather say 3G cellphones.
LTE is still widely in use today, while being mainly common in higher-end devices in 2015.
3G/UMTS on the other hand still was the mainly used one in 2015, also because of pricing, while 3G networks are completely switched off by now.My phone supports 5G, but I never got to try it yet because I’d have to pay extra to my provider (Austria, Magenta (T-Mobile)). Fuck that, 4G is fine by me. Besides, I could still use 3G and aven 2G, although that’d be a bit insane.
But 5G phones still comes with 4G antennas and 4G cell towers are still being used to cover areas 5G cant reach (since 5G hass less range). I don’t even have a steady 5G connection where I live lol (its not even that rural, I live in a US City ffs).
Headphone jacks and Micro SD Card Readers.
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.
I could NOT be bothered with charging headphones daily.
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.
The battery will wear our within a few years and become unusable. My Bluetooth headphones now last about 30 minutes.
I got my headphones over 6 years ago, the battery last as long as it always has. And I use them a few hours every day.
I’m sure that’s true, but I’ve never managed to keep a pair of earpods for more than a couple of years. I always end up losing them, generally while travelling.
Got the AirPods Pro 1st Gen in 2019, still going strong. Usually have to recharge every 1,5-2 days and I use them pretty every day for commute from home to work and back (in total about 1,5H).
My Marshall on-ears have a battery life of like 80 hours or so…
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.
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 would love that if it wasn’t another cord that I would absolutely lose.
You can buy headphones with a USB-C connector too. That way you’ll lose the headphones too, so you don’t need an adapter anyway!
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.
See how they massacred my boy…
People really will copy anything Apple does.
Buy a USB-C to headphone jack dongle. They’re about $5 and work on any phone.
Did that. Still annoying. Have to bring it everywhere. Will wear out the Usb C jack faster (pretty hard to wear out an audio jack tho). Can’t charge and listen to audio.
USB-C puts the springy bits that can wear out in the connector end, not the jack. The jack is just a piece of circuit board with bare traces on it, it’s very sturdy.
You don’t have to bring it everywhere, you attach it to your headphones and then it’s part of the headphones that you want to wear.
Fair point about the sprongs. But. Coz phones are so big, when phone+dongle is in my pocket it often puts a lot of pressure on the USB. Which A, doesnt seem good and B, can easily cause the jack to very slightly disconnect and pause the song. Also, when the sprongs fail on the dongle it starts doing crazy shit like play/pausing song or adjusting volume.
I’d need to buy like 3 more dongles in that case…
I’d much rather just have an audio jack on my phone.
I do like my AirPods, but I’m still pissed off that the duopoly killed the headphone jack. Give me back my headphone jack!!
Bluetooth isn’t the technology that’s come a long way, it’s still the same shit it was decades ago. It’s batteries.
it’s still the same shit it was decades ago.
The engineers at Bluetooth SIG busting their ass to give us Bluetooth 6.1: “am I a joke to you?”
Kinda, yeah.
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.
ITT: People not realizing 10 years ago was nearly the end of 2015 and listing technologies that were popular 20+ years ago.
2015 still feels like a date from the future to me
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.
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.
It has nubs
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…
disk players
I miss when laptop computers usually had disk players
USB external optical-disc players are available to plug into any computer.
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?
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.
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.
